Briefcase

I walked this morning with my briefcase

And all I heard were voices

Reverberating like song

As the day began to emerge.

I walked this morning with my briefcase

For I was going to work

Then the peace was ended

Political action

Evil

Knee-jerk.

The rockets descended

Flash-like

For no human can see the force

Behind such mass destruction

Behind cloaked, ignorant laws.

They pounded the ground around me

I stood, briefcase in hand,

Craters threw out corpses

Children bled

Once the ground again

They found.

Alarms rang out in chaos

The echo of every bomb

For they know not the intruder

The invisible coward

Detached

Numb.

Hoards began to usher

The wounded

The dead

To other places

But their plight once arriving

Piles of people

Piles of faces.

The blood ran beneath my feet

My grip consuming my briefcase

Concrete showered the streets

Fire screened the waste.

But above the military crescendos

Above fire and smoke and blood

Were the screams, the ailing voices

The screams, the screams a flood.

Into the vacuum they bellowed

Into the vacuum, consumed

For who hears the scream of the innocent?

Not even those who planned, who loomed

Above the night, the dawn

Above the baby and nurse

Above the Chief of Police

Above the stranded pawn

For this is not a time for consideration

Of peace, of justice nor love

This is the war of man

And all that he does covet.

My briefcase was of course empty

I walk each day only to pretend

That my life has any function

In this walled hovel, this existential dead-end.

Clinging to it now, as I stand unable to move

I cannot even believe in the children

As my means to what could improve,

Taken in the name of justice

Yet they took justice to the grave

For where the just are slain in innocence

They take the glory with which to save,

deprave.

Tom Scott, Irish
Kilcoole, Ireland