Those who are forced to leave their homes in a jiffy don't laugh - Airlift
-It's an easy death when you are on the attack but it's always hard to carry the survivor's guilt- Wolf Warrior
-All the gods, all the heavens, all the hells are within you- Tyrone "Rone" Woods (13 hours)
-You can't put a price on being able to live with yourself- Jack Silva (13 hours)
Only the dead have seen the end of war- Plato
What difference does it make to the dead, the orphans and the homeless, whether the mad destruction is wrought under the name of totalitarianism or in the holy name of liberty or democracy?- Mahatma Gandhi
THE COST OF WAR
In the dead of the night, arose the living,
deaf to the call of prayer, the preacher's bell chime or the cockcrow
Hearkening to the snarls of the coyotes, the growl of doom and the roar of the evil that looms
Creeping through Amalgedon, the rapturous end of life(s)
Scuttling in troops as lambs lost from the fold
Through alleys as bowling pins; Thud, Thud, Fall, drop! as bullets lodge and cannons fall
On the heels of the hare we count our losses
The shrieks and heaves of final breaths deafening as souls of compatriots flutter away,! into the dark matter; abyss
...
When the waves ebb for the minions of death to regroup and reload
The coin master took a tally of gold lost and palace burnt
Of cities desecrated and markets made desolate
Of bulls, of horses and camels and of all of man's treasures
Of what was paradise lost in the fires of war
Which to the merchants of war is the cost of war
Whose nourishment is in chaos, who profits in destruction
Whose farm is the backyard of hell, where the seeds of disorder is sown
For a harvest of bulbs of bombs and grains of bullets to the rain of blood
...
But for the boy plagued by the fortune of survival,
grief is quicksand, that it drowns the soul, the mind;
A tribute to the goriness of war
That he drinks wine and tastes blood and chows meat and chews flesh
And Halleluyah is as the sound of pandemonium
That he lives yet he dies, shot in shreds in the city of his mind
...
For the girl fed to quench the thirsty wolves
Whose soul fled for the flesh to endure sacrilege
Whose petals were snatched and pitcher bashed,
life is a curse, a remembrance of the peace in death
That it haunts till it breathes her last
That she lives outside her body, part her shadows, bereft of soul
Lost forever to the blackness of hell in the palace of her mind
...
For the wife widowed and mother made childless
Whose robes became sackclothes and vestures of black
Whose bosom aches of her weaned cubs
Gloom is a brick laden shackle bound to the soul
For what us a queen save the King, the princes and princesses
That the cry of a baby is mockery and cheers on the horizon is torture
Whose light was cut to live darkness in heart forever,
exiled; an outcast to the sanity in her mind
...
For the husband and father whose gems were snatched from his clutches by the talons of war
Whose world stopped revolving, whose life is as the desert
Torment is as an encampment of iron and cast
For what good is the head dismembered from it's body,
that his legacy be as writings on sea sand washed away as the tides swept ashore
He is as a comet lost in the millennium
Wandering on the edge of a life he sees in his mind
...
For the dead do not repay debts
And in war, death is fortune smiling on the shoulders of horror
Destruction is a mere prop in the set of a scary movie
War is a bargain between hell and evils' warlocks for the souls of man
And he who dies knows not pain, his soul made harvest
But he who lives through the corridors of hell pays the price
His soul atones his life and is lost to a yieldless world
©Taiwo Oladele
