Playworld
Children play and shout
"Bang Bang you're dead!"
Behind the fence
"O God," his mother said.
Adults play and shout
Their TV blood is red
Its drama news tonight,
"O God," a mother said.
Generals play and shout.
Move missiles up ahead.
Bomb what? Those towns below.
"O God," five million said.
Devils play and shout
Their dice has rolled ahead
and blows apart.
"O world," God said.
Star Wars Star Peace
At the last moment the missiles
Saw the trees in the field
And the wild things that run
In the woods and the streams,
From the ricks and the barns,
The town roofs and the weather vanes,
Faces on people in the streets,
And history that had lain
Six thousand years.
They were poised, hung above this
It was a theatre, a war theatre.
The scenario of the sky
was black around it.
Within the sky shone, white,
Those stars already dead.
Hobbes Leviathan
See the dragon clanking towards the abyss.
The children cheer,
For their nursery stories
Are full of dragons.
Its scales are of gold, of bronze,
And of plutonium.
Its eyes are blind. It has breath that kills.
Each joint is articulated to move with
And to move its whole social carcase.
It has a belly like a sex-shop,
It has a voice like a howling mob.
In its stomach
Are three million undigested unemployed.
Scattered behind like memorials
Lie its stone eggs.
Britannia holds her Trident and laughs.
A horrified voice calls,
"St. George of Merrie England!"
For a dead demonstrator - Nance Walsh
Save Our Sons
protest marcher in the Vietnam war
She walked among the good and bad
in tidy coat and shoes
a placard in her tired hand
which never made the news.
She asked the cause and not the use
to join the patient queues.
There was not any scarlet splash
although heart's blood is red,
No barricades, no headline clash,
No body-count of dead,
No photos framed, life-stories sold,
No panegyric said.
When liberty still has a price
to all this may be said,
some pay it with a traitor's flags,
some with their blood's red.
A housewife paid a quiet way;
She walked, and is dead.
Envoi
Friends, you will break your hearts to build.
Its easier to smash,
to kill the evil with the good,
bring all down in the crash.
Sodom you may condemn,
without its ten just men.
This land, with its good and bad,
made Nan.
Peace Will
The bird is in the egg,
while the bomb is in the shell,
the child is in the womb,
the souls are in hell.
Fresh blows the breeze over new ruins.
Flowers with the weeds
are in the seeds in the cracks
that brought down these empires.
Take away the syringe from the brain,
gun from the head,
horror from the eye of the children,
soot without the fire,
pitch without the road,
offer no god's flesh
when the communion is dead.
Tell the young children
the bomb is in the egg,
the bird is explosive,
that the infant is monstrous,
the man born raging.
that cities lie vacant,
winds carry the plague.
In the cracks waits a hope,
waiting for a movement of will.
Turning from that screen,
from the images, from the wall,
let your small hands, as the tendrils,
reach for the sun.
Listen within you,
there's silence, there's music,
Look now. Life's done. and again begun.
