Ploughshares to Swords

•

"Still someone must be calling the shots"—from
Our Leader is Dreaming-in Your Name Here-John Ashbery

It's not the "bang, bang, you're dead"
of little boys who point fingers.
It's masks of men and women
who send bursts and staccatos
into silenced windows and skeletal homes;
flat-line hospitals and sheltered archives.

They peer around a corner and look,
perhaps point blank, at a shoulder launched
mortar, still-born, cradled in dead arms.
Alarm fades slowly from aging faces.

Dust and grit are meals' table mates.
Transient communal tents yield modest reprieve
from the clay-footed gods of war.
Mars strolls the charnel fields;
takes quick frames of scattered limbs,
to place stark images among the stars.