Login
|
Join PoetrySoup
Home
Submit Poems
Login
Sign Up
Member Home
My Poems
My Quotes
My Profile & Settings
My Inboxes
My Outboxes
Soup Mail
Contest Results/Status
Contests
Poems
Poets
Famous Poems
Famous Poets
Dictionary
Types of Poems
Videos
Resources
Syllable Counter
Articles
Forum
Blogs
Poem of the Day
New Poems
Anthology
Grammar Check
Greeting Card Maker
Classifieds
Quotes
Short Stories
Member Area
Member Home
My Profile and Settings
My Poems
My Quotes
My Short Stories
My Articles
My Comments Inboxes
My Comments Outboxes
Soup Mail
Poetry Contests
Contest Results/Status
Followers
Poems of Poets I Follow
Friend Builder
Soup Social
Poetry Forum
New/Upcoming Features
The Wall
Soup Facebook Page
Who is Online
Link to Us
Member Poems
Poems - Top 100 New
Poems - Top 100 All-Time
Poems - Best
Poems - by Topic
Poems - New (All)
Poems - New (PM)
Poems - New by Poet
Poems - Random
Poems - Read
Poems - Unread
Member Poets
Poets - Best New
Poets - New
Poets - Top 100 Most Poems
Poets - Top 100 Most Poems Recent
Poets - Top 100 Community
Poets - Top 100 Contest
Famous Poems
Famous Poems - African American
Famous Poems - Best
Famous Poems - Classical
Famous Poems - English
Famous Poems - Haiku
Famous Poems - Love
Famous Poems - Short
Famous Poems - Top 100
Famous Poets
Famous Poets - Living
Famous Poets - Most Popular
Famous Poets - Top 100
Famous Poets - Best
Famous Poets - Women
Famous Poets - African American
Famous Poets - Beat
Famous Poets - Cinquain
Famous Poets - Classical
Famous Poets - English
Famous Poets - Haiku
Famous Poets - Hindi
Famous Poets - Jewish
Famous Poets - Love
Famous Poets - Metaphysical
Famous Poets - Modern
Famous Poets - Punjabi
Famous Poets - Romantic
Famous Poets - Spanish
Famous Poets - Suicidal
Famous Poets - Urdu
Famous Poets - War
Poetry Resources
Anagrams
Bible
Book Store
Character Counter
Cliché Finder
Poetry Clichés
Common Words
Copyright Information
Grammar
Grammar Checker
Homonym
Homophones
How to Write a Poem
Lyrics
Love Poem Generator
New Poetic Forms
Plagiarism Checker
Poetics
Poetry Art
Publishing
Random Word Generator
Spell Checker
Store
What is Good Poetry?
Word Counter
Email Poem
Your IP Address: 216.73.216.81
Your Email Address:
Required
Email Address Not Valid.
To Email Address:
Email Address Not Valid.
Required
Subject
Required
Personal Note:
Poem Title:
Poem
We came not for conquest, but for containment— though conquest is what happens when containment itches beneath the skin like sulfur spores in a sealed lung. They had the secret. Not gold, not weapons, not prophecy— but language that healed. Real language— not poetry, not prayer, but syntax of cells. Their infants spoke in codons. Their trees rustled in protein sequences. Their dead decomposed into algorithms that rewrote the soil's neural net. We saw them— laughing in magnetic dialects drawing isotopic spirals with iodine-stained fingers. Their cows gave antimatter milk and their shadows shrank from Newton’s mechanics. I remember the vote. Marek raised his snarled hand said, "If they’ve coded compassion they’ve cracked deterrence." And that was it. We became the knife. We baptized our pitchforks in lithium. Recited von Neumann’s last confession before the march: “With computing, comes consequence.” I led the advance. Through flax and rain and cholesterol haze. I held my daughter’s micro-spliced braid in my breast pocket like a war amulet. We killed the first girl because she healed a fracture without speaking. The bone curled like a fern. Marek called it devil-deep sorcery. They tried to gift us something— a box of glass vials inscribed with Gödel numbers, each one a dream folded into matter. We thought it was a curse. We torched their orchard where the pomegranates bled quarks where Newton’s third law hung from the branches like seditious fruit. I dragged a child from the Archive. He screamed in Sanskrit-accented Haskell. He begged us— not for mercy but for verification. "You can audit the code" he cried. "It's open-source empathy." We closed his throat with copper dust. After the slaughter we tore the sanctuary doors and found it. Not a weapon. Not a doctrine. Not a god. Just a machine— built from tendon and manganese driven by grief fed by memory spitting out recipes for joy. Real joy. Not pleasure. Not luck. Joy, distilled into molecules we had names for— dopamine serotonin oxytocin— but never earned. It didn’t enslave. It gave. Their secret? They learned to manufacture forgiveness. To administer it intravenously. To pass it through skin. To encode it in bread. They had learned to weaponize love and refused to weaponize it. What do we do with a truth that cannot be monetized? We crush it. We grind it into folklore and feed it to our myths. We buried the machine beneath our census ledgers. We wrote laws against the geometry of their alphabet. We recast their genome as a curse in our catechisms. Now our fields bloom with obedient hunger. Our sons do not dream. Our daughters do not sing. We rule in peace because peace is not permitted to choose. Sometimes, when the wind comes off the burnt hill I taste the old secret— the one we took the one we killed the one we called evil because it needed no chains. And I ask the wind, Why did we harvest them? And the wind retorts, Because they offered you grace, and grace cannot be owned — only eradicated.
CAPTCHA Preview
Type the characters you see in the picture
Required