In Time For Christmas

Besuited power-men

are strutting

their stuff

getting ready

to deliver 

for Christmas.

Santa comes early 

to some in the tents

washed up and washed out

in the cold and the wet.

He’s playing toy soldiers 

with real missiles and bombs.

His bombs made a carpet

of what once were homes.

There’s nowhere to go,

nowhere to hide

for the starved 

and the maimed

they’ll remember this Christmas

where genocide grows.

Echoes

There’s always a prequel 

to any drama

in the theatre of war,

a rehearsal

like Guernica

for what is to come.

History’s theatre was always misty

but now the fog is so dense

that we can see nothing,

Hear nothing,

understand nothing

of the power play unfolding.

It’s impossible to know

as we sit here watching

which will be

the first step

the harbinger

of things to take us back 

where they began, 

Time’s echoes

of the end.