Carousel Of The Tour Of Duty Poem by MARINA GIPPS

A petty carousel full of little tin soldiers,
the quiet distance of a rising sun,
shrouded by a bleak prison of radioactive ions.

The revolving gains centrifugal force drawing them closer
to the iron ore of the earth. One more blessed nuclear device
gray-locked orators decree sacred to the unruly, little ones
who speak in tongues- as those strange, green Americans.

The disenfranchised, wrapped in headdress,
our dictator dismisses as swaddling clothes.
Where is your devout manger?
Have tin soldiers burned it down, stranger?
And where does your mother lie?
Burrowed in America’s Lake of Fire?

Faces of ash within America’s invisible enemies,
bearing burdens in the children of families:
a dance with Armageddon and self-fulfilling prophesies.

Dictators tried near shallow graves,
rising to the occasion with daft wings-
How the world moves on its carousel axis:

Relics looted by the enslaved masses,
pieces of History dispatched to the highest bidder:
dismantled, revisioned; through the chains of winding.

Tin soldiers comb this leveled parking-lot of appendages,
And broken stories: Baghdad, housed in the rubble,
fetal-positioned humans aborted with each firing.
This is the place where children play with automatic weaponry.

Recollecting the day green men arrived with a message of peace
as we vowed to defend her: Our America, maiming fathers in a forlorn dusk,
the broken song of a return, pillaged torn-winged sisters of pastoral lands,
the terrain of the dizzying carousel, a lone traveler’s demise.

Troops attune to the commands of endless winding,
the cross-circuitry of Baghdad radio.
All tin soldiers born a mule: a chess piece, hesitantly slow.

Corporal plights, suspended as fireflies:
a stagnant drifting of the steel hummingbird,
oblivious to its flight as if oil were honey.

Discovering immortality in fragments of shrapnel
as if a love, unrequited, finally found…Unearthed
as bone dust, the sweet soul of limbs.

The persecuted in haste have leavened their spirit,
condemning the forever nostalgia of return,
numbering each day as if another carousel…

We embalm a down-trodden soldier’s marrow,
divided asunder of orphaned limbs,
with the reflection of porphyry held in our eyes.