Arab Spring Post-Mortem Poem by Danny Draper

Youthful sprinters bolted hard
By city, town and village
Over rock and dune and mountain,
Momentum built pace to flight
Dreams like contagions spread over borders
And budded in the sun
Hearts pounded with adrenalin
Anticipation, plans for victory raged
More races yet to come
Grand running torrent and wadies over run
With youth as nutrients to invigorate
Crops of expectation.

Too soon the old guard stood,
And decisively tripped fleet feet
Runners faltered full flight
Heads broken on perilous rocks
Lay writhing in squares and lanes
Crawled and srceamed out to the world
On television and social media
With the freedom to die for change,
Isolated in clawed clenched anger
Alone but united in global dispair,
Bled out as desolate naive carcasses,
Carrion along the status quo highway.

Corpses broken wracked with loss
Of failed aspirations prosecuted,
Bombed into oblivion or
Pursued by sectarian and ethnic divisions,
A new race but old rivalries of hatred
Revenge and a chance to suppress,
Remains wired to dead olive branches
Blown from groves with withered fruit
Propped up, tried as foetid skeletons
Safe in guilt, convictions assured,
military content, assumed control,
Change was dissent and the
Old guards, faceless, shuffled in
From shadows vaguely dim
Kicking skin and bones, grinding them in,
Rounding up supporters and suspected runners
Trials on mass for crimes against ideology,
Death the only verdict.

Those that dared dream were cowed
by violence and unfoundered incarceration
But whispered to the world in resolute voices
We will race and race to win and again
Risk and pay the currency of life,
Those left, run from sight in darkness
From underground they plan different races
Awaiting a warm season to grow and run,
While the world resumes relations
And the news cycles on,
Potential trading partners assist victors with
Their Pharaoh's new clothes.

Danny Draper 29-30/4/2014