Alan S. Austin
Arizona Playwright • Writer • Poet
  

Must blood be spilled again?

Was it not enough to have the sea in
Normandy turn red?
not enough to see
the towers fall and hear the cries
that now we are ready
to kill again
our young primed
and armed and anxious to prove their strength
blood must be spilled and
corpses like dried cordwood
Stacked in piles outside
the wooden huts are not enough
We must have blood until the lesson's
learned again
A body's shadow on the stone
Vaporized
Means nothing any more
We must feel the hotness of spilled blood
Smell a rotting corpse
Before we understand
We should have shown
more mercy to ourselves
and hated less
by loving more