By the rivers of Babylon,
there we sat down,
yea, we wept,
when we remembered Zion.*

See them, a file,
a line stretching
dusty and torn
rearwards to
that distant time
when first men
invented war.

Run they do not,
but plod like cattle
praying to leave
behind torture,
interrogation
genocide and death.

This line has never
been severed.

It is a living beast
that bleats for
place and peace
finding welcome rare,
finding arms folded
and bolted gates
that sneer coldly.

So easy to look away
and pretend there
will never come a time
when we join that line,
when the gods
of war and fortune
turn their backs
to us and home
becomes only a
forlorn memory
and we too are left
scattered scraps
in a tattered file
extended eternally
backwards across
the sullen heaps
of history.

  ~mce