Warfare by Remote Control
Babies are screaming from the night time sky,
preventing sleep amidst the blasted homes;
twenty-four seven, there’s a buzz on high,
dipping and diving when a person roams.
Leaflets, like litter from an autumn tree,
fluttering groundward, strewing pockmarked roads,
tell dispossessed folk, “Again, you must flee,
abandoning once more your pulverised abodes.”
Drones firing missiles and disgorging bombs,
quadcopters gunning—who knows for whom?
For children? The elderly? Dads and moms?
This war-torn land’s an unquenchable tomb.
What manner of person can take such delight,
unleashing on others implacable spite?
Paul A. Freeman is the author of Rumours of Ophir, a crime novel which was taught in Zimbabwean high schools and has been translated into German. In addition to having two novels, a children’s book and an 18,000-word narrative poem (Robin Hood and Friar Tuck: Zombie Killers!) commercially published, Paul is the author of hundreds of published short stories, poems and articles.
WHEN CYCLOPES TOOK OVER ITHACA
Nessun maggior dolore che ricordarsi del tempo felice ne la miseria.
Dante. Inferno.
With ripped-out roots you’ll weep pain, yearn for long,
now the Cyclopes have soiled Ithaca’s soil
and cast you and yours from coasts once all bliss ;
you’ll write homesick poems as an alien song,
your pen bleeding from the trauma and toil
of both Scylla’s and Charybdis’ hiss
you rafted adrift on the restless sea,
roaming desperate for a civilised life,
your childhood joy buried in dreamt-of times
when everyone prospered in homeland harmony;
friends, family, landscape lost to one-eyed strife.
Let woeful rhapsodes wail the lyre’s rhymes :
You’ll miss blest Ithaca forevermore
distant, acrid smoke from a vanished shore.