The Generals

The Generals You have seen them nodding benevolently like plump German butchers in small shoppes, carelessly stripping pink flesh from the bones of sheep. They smile, a polite bow, courteous generals in a civilized war of rules, displaying their purple hearts, adorned with the parsley slogans of God and country. Have you noticed that they keep the faces of the butchered ones covered up with star spangled sheets, while mad bands play their songs of brave innocence? Perhaps so we will not see their eyes staring back at us, or hear their cries in the chill dawn, or worse still, that we know whose children they are.