elegy for a withered harvest

the trail of torture
traced through the sleek,

redacted shadows

from its beta testing emissaries

and coup-installed thugs

back to the blood-soaked and belligerent

lawless land of its devising

has had quite a run

and found its way

into every sadistic nook.

just ask the whistleblowers,

the hapless innocents

rotting in Guantanamo,

the ailing black panthers

in their isolating cages,

the fallen emancipators in Egypt,

or the doctors locked up

for healing the heroes of Bahrain.

it continues to pay out its

twisted dividends,

much like the land mines

still maiming the future of Southeast Asia.

or the harvest of our terror

coming home to roost:

in the huddled masses scouring in their tides

for some unfenced remnant of humane humanity.

in the falling-like-flies,

riddled and repentant veterans

and afraid-of-the-sky children.

and in the tanks and dazzling ray guns

brandished in the fists

of terrorists, drug lords,

and small town cops.

the amnesia that curiously afflicts

America's entitled establishment,

all its predators, peddlers, and purveyors

of mind-numbing pablum

fails to blot out the shell-shocked reality,

its weeping roots,

or its cancerous ramifications.

the toll of our relentless

Middle East aggression

is perhaps a million dead.

another half million

longed-for children

were slowly sacrificed

to our sanctified, sanitized sanctions.

only a fraction

of what we managed

to achieve in Southeast Asia.

but the mongers are not idle

and more targets tantalize

on the yawning horizon.

anyway, they stopped counting

their corporeal crops

when they embedded our journalists,

yanking the covers over shying eyes

as they authorized the sleep of souls.

such soothing slumber eludes me

as i listen to the crowding voices

wailing in the wretched wind,

seeping through the sound bites

telling silenced, severed stories

of inessential, foreign lives.

thus lonely-eyed and weary

i await the awakening;

a bitter dawning of lamentation,

when the depth of our

incalculable loss

is finally understood.

and i wonder at the lavish strains

of righteous indignation

spilling into streets and tv screens,

marching in step with its

convenient consciousless denial

and privileged self-focus;

parading in simulcast

sanctimonious solidarity

to affirm the untrammeled right

of the one true religion

to profit from plunder

and express its exceptional disdain.

how can the home of the brave

house such a surfeit of uninformed fear,

plunging collective cowardly heads

in smug layers of self-inflicted

silken sediment

hiding from the knowledge

of its own pitiless, unprovoked crimes?

and how can a land of the free

tolerate such a self-destructive tethering,

the callous erecting

of blinders and barbed wire

on its utterly defenseless

self-impaling borders?

- Evan Hawthorn, the 17^th of October, 2015