Decoration by Bombs is an Art


There is a comfort here, a Winter sea breeze,
A quiet time to mould from present possibilities
Future patterns
While each will creates by being  just a will
Each possibility of Thought:

There is no being that is real
No authentic Way
While the act that might have linked
All presents to their past
Becomes enfeebled
Like waves breaking on a beach
 

Decoration by bombing is an Art
And for each thought
That is a connection between our present
And our past
Ten thousand fruitful dead

Each tree rots, in the ambience of Time:
For each forest a silence
For each tree its allotted span;
What forest furnished your fuel
What soil your wheat?

There is good in all
The Buddhist says:
But, hell, that those bastards burn,
They started it

For decoration by bombing is an Art
 

All heroes die
That others might forget
And, while blood spurts,
A financier crawls across a perfumed lawn:
Berlin, Paris, Rome - it makes no difference, let others die!  -
The same smile
The same golden god

Once, each people knew their gods
But now are too bored for gods
Or too relieved

Dear lady, how elegant
You look: so many jewels.
Give them a spectacle, some sports,
A passion to bleed their brains to death
 
For each dross, each pitcher of dross
A thousand helping hands
Keen smelling rats the lot
While the words that might have
Unpossessed those possessed
Are lost
Buried by blast and blood:
        Decoration by bombing is an Art

There is a comfort here
That only war itself will break
As there is a passion among those possessed
By ideas that are not their ideas
As gutless financiers are possessed by their god.

But who will break the Seal
That delivers us to ourselves?
 

Little Esther's plight made millions
And made even more men sick:
Ten thousand years, for this?
 
There is a comfort here
As Destiny seems doomed by The Lie.

But even seas change
Given time
 
 

 

DW Myatt
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