The bombs fall over Kiev.
Silence! Snow ashes.
Uncomfortable muzzle as it
Settles on Moscow.
The bombs fall over Kiev.
Clanking, chewing the fat.
Bumbling Boris huffs and puffs
As he fingers his ear and fumbles
His pants out of his mouth crack.
The bombs fall over Kiev.
Babies cry, smothered by fear.
Old Joe struggles to forsake his afternoon nap,
While old “Mac” Donald continues to quack and be a quack.
Fittingly synonymous with a sharp burst of wind.
The bombs fall over Kiev.
And yet the skies are silent.
The West whip out their dic-Boom-Boom-tionaries
And stumble and grumble over the worth of human life.
They danced this dance quite recently,
But there’s always room for cha-cha-cha
And grinding out a lower price.
The clock ticks louder – BOOM, BOOM BOOM,
But only for the powerless.
And the bombs fall over Kiev.
Pow! Bang! Bang! That small, old man
In his big red house plays with his toy soldiers,
And his toy towns,
And doesn’t half throw it all out of the pram.
Butlers and maids scramble
To make sense of the nonsense
And the egg on their faces just for you.
Incoherent ramblings of a paltry rich fool.
And yet that’s the sound of the world flying by,
The sound of the world’s greatest tool:
The grasping hands of paltry rich fools.
And the bombs fall over Kiev.
And Palestine. And Yemen.
And the dinosaurs still make a mean cocktail.
And it’s all so bloody predictable.
Exasperated gasps…
The rest of us just look goggle-eyed,
And hashtag flags, and thoughts and prayers,
And throw our paltry money wondering when
It all became so helpless, and why
We still pay for the merry-go-round
When it’s so completely broken.
We scramble to put back our fallen teeth
And kick our brothers to the curb for shelter
Under a wet, cardboard box –
(If you fold it over it provides more cover from the rain,
But the benefit of boxes, of course,
Is that they can completely fit over your head.
The noise is easier to drown out in the dark.)
And the bombs still fall over Kiev.
In broken hospitals and apartment blocks
And schools and churches
Hearts thunder,
And brave Ukrainians hear the noise
And the silence.