Civilised. Buried Daily
The first casualty of war is truth.
—Aeschylus
One word leaves every mouth in wartime:
Eliminate. They speak it
to shadow what it is.
A man prepares a substance,
calls them missiles, atomic,
gas and pilotless air,
tests it on villages he’ll never walk.
We watch these things happen.
We watch on TVs, our phones, between meals—
then go back to our prayers,
while the priest blesses both sides.
Is this what we built?
Towers and bombs, and nothing underneath?
Because my god and his god agree:
kill for the kingdom,
die for the belief.
Because your god and my god
are busy counting dead bodies.
And humanity—we—are buried
Daily in Gaza,
Daily in Palestine,
Daily in Ukraine,
Daily in Nigeria,
Daily in South Sudan,
Daily in Congo,
Daily in Mali,
Daily in Iran.
Still, we say there is good in us.
While we wander:
Who is next?
Who should we show our power?
One Time At A Time
After listening to John Denver’s, ‘I want to live’.
The earth yields enough grain, fat with cattle—
why do we still name countries
by their hunger and their hunger?
We call ourselves family around conference tables
while men in rooms draw lines on maps
that become famines, that become flags.
They carve the world into yes and no,
into deserves to live and deserves to go.
From Somalia’s dust to Syria’s rubble,
from Myanmar’s forests to Gaza’s streets—
the pattern repeats:
in Ukraine, in Iran, in South Sudan, in Nigeria,
in Palestine, in Mali.
And the wound spreads—
map bleeding into map.
What are we reaching for
if not small things?
A morning without sirens.
Markets where the only shouts
are merchants calling prices.
A grandmother dying in her bed
and not in a ditch
on the road to somewhere else.
A city that remembers its name
for reasons other than rubble.
A child walking to school
and walking home again.
Let them keep their gods and borders.
Let them argue scriptures in halls of stone,
polish their ideologies behind closed doors.
But when their creeds knock on my door
with a sword in one hand and a flag in the other—
I have no faith left for that.
Show me the flag that flies
over full bellies and closed graves.
Not the one that rises
on smoke from the next town over.
Not the one that needs orphans
to prove it is strong.
They call it peace when the guns point outward.
They call it goodness when the dying
happens far enough away
not to stain their shoes.
not to wake their children,
not to ask their names.
We could have built tables long enough
for everyone to sit.
Instead, we built walls
and called it architecture.
We could have made a world
where human was enough.
Instead, we asked for papers,
for proof of birth,
for the right god,
for anything but each other.
When you next wrap your child in blankets,
think of the children running
through streets that used to be homes,
with nothing but smoke in their lungs.
Remember the mothers who count their children
not by who sleeps beside them
but by who made it to sunset.
They are not headlines.
They are not statistics.
They are your mirror.
And the families left in starvation’s slow
hands to die—
one time at a time.