Written for All Times and All Places

[cenacle]

(Rocket ships to the moon. Mapping the very DNA of life. Still this blood. Still leaders cry out for it, and the people respond with lusty yes & yes & yes. Til we no longer divide ourselves into tribes and deem the earth no more than a human battlefield, the war goes on. One year, one place. Another year, another. The following my response to today's news, and how it echoes and echoes and echoes, from antiquity to now to centuries unimaginable hence. Unless . . .)

The day's news headlines told of one nation invading another, & a general's boast of how many targets awaited, we will crush you, crush you, the firepower we bear is goodly, Godly, each explosion speaks our blood vengeance for ever dark memory, every wife & child we've lost to you, every home & marketplace, we will crush you & more, you will never harm us again, our God-possessed weapons will annihilate your bodies & your very souls, your way of life, plots & plans, what you believe, what you love, what you hold waits beyond this world, feel this anger that our countless generations have cumed, the cries of our rent mothers & fallen kings, & baby-faced soldiers with their limbs & guts gone, feel it, feel *us*, each of us, as we crush you, destroy your crops & your roads & your bridges as you have destroyed ours, but you did so with a false god, thus a false premise to your idea of who would vanquish whom, for you see you are the evil we speak of in our sacred stories, you are the other, the terror beyond hills & woods & dunes, what we train our children to loathe, to fear, to cry out in full-throated triumph as it is destroyed. Your soldiers, your women, your old men & women. Your kings & presidents. Your artwork & sacred books. Your calm scenery & Sunday outings. You cannot live that we may. We may, we *must*. *We will.* You are whom we vanquish, & how our God will praise us & bless us with eternal prosperity, with fruitful lands & newly married wombs. Our preachers gesture us toward these hoped-for days, a month & a year & a century after we have destroyed you, & others like you in this world about us, & others to come in other times. Peace will come fully & finally when you are each & every & all dead & we the blessed, we the people of the true God have no more fears to worry about when we walk our children in the park, pray in our houses of worship, gather for trade in our marketplaces. Ever & ever. All of you must die. Our true God allows us no other option even as your false god says the same. Blood speaks one truth. Our God speaks one truth. Paradise builds from your graveyard.

[exman]

1. Get a life. n/t