It is how it starts,

the weapon of choice,

the painted slur, the smear

of government, of a Prime Minister

justifying his own peculiar judgment

by saying those who don’t agree

with the rhetoric of war,

those who argue with passion

the side for pacifist solution,

are nothing more than

Terrorist Sympathisers.

 

It is how it starts,

the verbal stain and before you know it

white feathers are being handed

out to those who oppose war,

before you know it,

internment camps

for those who would argue

that dropping hundreds of bombs

does nothing but stir

up further hatred,

before you know it, the war

comes to our shore

and death becomes many-fold.

 

It is not unpatriotic to not want war,

it is not sympathy for terrorism

that asks you

to not kill one innocent child,

to take one breath away

from another Human Being, it is not

sympathy for the Devil, rightly so the

enemy may be, but that we do descend

to the point where we are seen

as more humane, to not reach for the bullet

to solve a problem,

because that works so well

on the American streets every day.

 

So I am left with the words

ringing in my ears that I am unpatriotic,

(though I’d rather a democratic monarchy)

ran the country than a

zealot Prime Minister at this point

in time), that I

and many others

are Terrorist sympathisers,

well bang goes my chance of an O.B.E.

for if that’s how it goes,

then I sympathise with the Irish

you gunned down on Bloody Sunday,

then I sympathise with the indigenous

Native American slaughtered to the point of extinction,

I sympathise with the Roundheads,

I sympathise with the revolutionaries of

France, Russia, America…Ghandi,

The Dalai Lama and I sympathise with

those to whom the Government pushes to

the fringes, for the slight and the sight

of blood pouring from the innocents

is on their conscious…

for you have none.

 

Ian D. Hall 2015