On the 21st day of September,
On the International Day of Peace,
Conflicts rage across the planet,
People die from twenty-cent Czech bullets,
Five-yuan Chinese machetes,
Two-hundred-rouble Belarusian boots,
Six-hundred-dollar vigilante assault rifles,
And one-hundred-and-seventy-thousand-dollar bombs,
A response to headlines screaming terror,
Yet poverty culls far more,
But that cannot fuel the industry,
So demagogues and warmongers,
Make bellicose speeches to packed halls of expensive suits,
Mostly delivered to people who don’t live,
Forty-five seconds of an artillery strike away.
by RuairĂ de Barra
First published in Live Encounters Special 11th Anniversary Edition, Volume II, December 2020. You can read the four poems in this special volume on the Live Encounters website, or download a free PDF copy by clicking here.
Live Encounters is a wonderful publication, and all of its issues, as well as special editions, may be found on its website at https://liveencounters.net/.
I would like to thank Mark Ulyseas for seeing fit to include my work again in the same pages as some truly talented people.
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