Part 2: War Cries
Songs of Grief
mother and child
16. CRY TO MEN
Men of Peaceful Power in the World :
Protect and Save Your Sisters and Brothers
under attack from Brothers
all over the Earth.
*
Kosovo 1999 – the massacre, eyes gouged, ears and throats slit, brains bashed in, the children the women the old men.
East Timor end 1999 – the running gunning down of nuns, the teenage boy tied to a tree and chopped up, the beheadings, heads speared onto stakes.
Algeria, Nigeria, the machete amputations hands feet kids’ arms.
Our Massacres are coming home to us. Television flashes reports reviews, rwanda and kosovo and algeria and east timor, and many more upcoming, afghanistan yemen syria iraq sudan somalia mali myanmar west papua christchurch ukraine gaza ….
And I watched a while ago, the secret revelation footage of just another mass-murder, the beirut massacre of palestinian refugees, near turn of this century. A fenced ghetto of refugee families, hiding out in their shell-shattered stone dwellings, behind the barricade of barbed wire and israeli military.
The charge of lebanese christian phalangist militia through the gates, opened wide by the israeli guards ; and the systematic butchery that ensued, the rampant murder of three thousand children and babies and mothers and unarmed men and old people ; watched through binoculars by the guardian soldiers above.
And this very day, in late 2023 : the civilian thousands murdered, starved, and forcibly exiled en masse, during rampages around gaza – mutual machine-gunnings and remote-fired rockets exploding whole suburbs to flaming ruins.
Modern war-machines deployed on their staggering, awful, and exponential scale, these vast instant bomb-incinerators and curtains of bullets, soldiers on all sides maddened with their own fear, firepower and potent retaliations.
Yes, they know who will really be massacred by their firepowers – not the hard, fit militias in hideout or whatever – but the targeted mass-maiming and killing of defenceless citizens.
They all know this, as they hit their machineguns and missile-fire triggers, from their steel and concrete bunkers.
As they and their commandants choose to fire into the capitive and defenceless,
again and again and again and again and….
In every incendiary war these days, Far More Civilians Than Soldiers Are Killed,
their lives lying in rubble.
*
(So warfare’s really moved along, hasn’t it, since the bad old days of battering rams, axes, pikestaffs, and heads impaled on spikes.
And to think that many of us actually dared to Dream ahead, towards Reckoning, Peace-Making and Disarmament ….)
*
The english language has any number of responsive expressions in the face of these Atrocities of humankind across the face of the Earth : to convey our shock, our disbelief :
Words cannot tell. Silenced. Shattered. Beyond words. There is no way to say it. Words fail me. Beyond description. I don’t know what to say. Paralysed. Language is not equal to it.
Language must be Equal To It.
Language must rise in passion to meet it,
this outrage of Murdered Silenced People.
Language is all we have, we the Still-Living :
with which to Accuse.
The beirut Massacre. Just another Mass-Murder ~ as in kigali, and dachau, and cambodia, and east timor, and tienanmen square, more recently south sudan, cairo, sinjar iraq, paris, pakistan, mali, ukraine, gaza ; and literally thousands and thousands of historic others. Just another turn of century massacre of imprisoned children, and grandmothers, and tottering old men, and young men lined up against a wall and shot in the back. Thousands of unarmed people. In a few systematic hours.
The women, in desperate hiding ~ fallen back on their stone floors, their skirts dragged up over their heads, legs split wide for rape before they were shot. A little boy toddler literally torn living limb from limb, by sheer crazed brute muscle : by somebody’s good-looking sons.
The bloated bodies, in the heat. The little blackened body of somebody’s darling baby, so small it was rotted within twenty-four hours. The fungus of flies clinging to the stink.
Language is all we have :
to explode our outrage, our contempt, our recoil,
our horror for the Men and Machines
and Authorities and Codes of Law
who are Responsible for these
routine, institutionalised Atrocities.
For these atrocities are committed by Men alone.
Uniformed, government-endorsed, massed, Homicidal Men.
Ragged, renegade, rampant, outlaw, Homicidal Men.
Against babies, and women, and unarmed men, and old people,
and sick people, and passing animals.
MEN, YOU STAND ACCUSED IN AN OCEAN OF
THE BLOOD OF YOUR CHILDREN.
Men, your numbers and history contain not just a few,
but Millions and Millions of blood-crazed Killers.
Men, there are four billion of you on this planet Earth. Of whom most are decent and loving providers.
And of whom most, across the cultures of the world, have a Hundredfold the political Power, Position and Confidence of your Women, the Mothers who bear your Doomed Children.
Your Vanity and Ignorant Contempt for your Women across the Earth, have crushed most to resentful stand-off, or to futile distress ; and most have little prospect of any immediate political effect. What words and cries they utter are cast aside as emotional wailing, a hindrance to the proper conduct of tough Business.
It Is You who at this millennial point in human history, have the real, collective and immediate Power and Office to wrest the machetes and machineguns from your murderous compatriots and brothers-in-arms, and stop the massacres that are taking place in the streets and shattered homes of the world,
Right Now.
For it is, grievously, Men who still Command the populations of this bitter Earth.
And it is Men Alone who have Power of Containment upon their Rampant Brothers.
And thus every Decent Man who stands Silent, must stand Accused, too :
of inaction, in the face of the depraved excesses of your own kind.
*
To those Men of Silent Peace,
and Overwhelmingly in Power on Earth ~
Shame On You.
And We the Democratic Voters
of whom these men are so afraid,
~ for fear of our Self-Obsessed electoral backlash ~
We Voter Men and Women.
Shame on our craven fear of our Brothers’ Outrages ~
these ceaseless Massacres of the Innocents.
Shame on our foot-shuffling diplomacy amongst nations,
our averted faces, our cautious muttering meetings,
slow crawl of peacekeepers (sometimes)
long after the Earth falls scorched,
their cattle burning.
We who fail the moral courage of immediate action,
we who will not make a single sacrifice of GNP
to stand up high on Human Rights.
Shame on Us that we stand watching gun-militia
mow down their neighbours,
persecute and murder their own unarmed people :
landmines and machetes
drones and smart-bombs
secret-police-tortures and concentration-camps
phosphorus-white-inferno.
Our homicidal Business Partners.
Our Own Countries’ secret business often.
( Like peering to watch domestic slaughter next door,
return indoors for the tv sitcom,
report it by phone (maybe) tomorrow :
~ or make a deal to swop Silence
for a bigger share in his Business.)
SHAME ON ALL OF US
for our cowardly refuge in the Lie
that No Nation of People has the Right to Judge
the outrageous practices of another :
ASK THE DEAD AND TORTURED WOMEN AND BOYS
THE COST OF THEIR AGONY.
SHAME on Our Hypocrisy and Our Double Standards :
that We Voters Choose to promote as national leaders,
those who choose to present Our Own Proud Nation
as a Shuffling Audience at a Public Execution :
– while ordinary decent Men at home will show us daily how to behave :
Men who slam down their beers in the corner pub
when a man king-hits another ~
or falls to strike a woman ~
~ Men who support and raise up the Victim;
demand of their crazed brother
that he contain his manic outbreak,
Deliver His Account ~
~ Commit to his Restitution ~
*
Men of Peaceful Power in the World :
You can make real your fantasies
of fame and influence and commemoration.
Bring to life your howling visions
of victory on the world circuit.
Raise up your knowledge of true Mateship:
and bring your Good Brotherhood Forward :
~ this your ancestral Power and Calling :
Refuse the cycles of Assault and Vendetta :
Take Honourable stand of Defence :
You whose ancestral Men’s power and calling is
to Defend and Protect those whose present lives and loves
depend upon your provision and strength –
Speak out, to Protect Your Sisters and Brothers, your Young and your Elders
under attack from your mad Machismo Brothers
all over the Earth.
