21st Day of September.

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 Ruble Belorussian boots,
six hundred Dollar vigilante assault rifles,
as well as one hundred and seventy thousand dollar bombs,
a response to headlines screaming terror,
yet still poverty culls far more,
but that cannot fuel the industry,
so demagogues and war mongers,
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 Ruairí de Barra

Kindly published in Live Encounters Magazine in their 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 just 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 of some truly talented people