I Cannot Stand the Guns
All night the guns
Like barking dogs would not go to sleep
All night the mothers heart
Roamed weeping the sinister streets
And still the air explodes
Like fourth of July
Or even Christmas
When the heart is silent most of all
The fireworks like stars explode
As if some longing
Some macabre need
Leaving trenches where soldiers bleed
Where mines maim the promise of tomorrow
And children become fragments of humanity
Limbless and listless
Against the merchants of ammunition
Guns shipped in cradles of greed
Like unwanted medication
Or some foul chemical for unwanted weed
In the Third World ghetto
A child can have no dream
Until the city sleeps
Until the manufacturers
Of wars and the instruments of death
Have crumbled in a heap
To weep
On the still form of a personal loss
A child dead its own blood
A bitter cost
For power that death still turn to dross
All the guns
Angrier than our butchered sleep
Through glottoral cordite weep.
I cannot stand the guns
My soul for silence yearns
Will someone blot out that noise, please
The innocent weeping without conscience
Stop them where they make them
Collect them where they ship them
Ban them where they use them
Destroy them
I cannot stand the guns
All night barking like mad dogs
Against the peace of sleep.
Copyright © David Smalling | Year Posted 2010
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