Feud’s Fruit Poem by Terence George Craddock (Spectral Images and Images Of Light)

Seeds of hatred are grown in fertile soil.

Seeds planting sowing hatred are
ethnically religiously politically
grown in fever festering fertile soil.

Stand against mine
I’ll burn thee.
If I can break spine.
I’ll take thine.

Down cinder sown strewn path.
Burn down ash acid rains.
Corpse covering thrown quick lime

coat ribs struck reef beef
broken battered bones.
Upon rent spent uprooted life.

Wasting mortal potential plundered.
Fruitful future essence erased.
Better to turn anger never unleashed
an unstruck cheek...

Isolationist policies unsullied safeguard
wash supposed lily white white-house hands.
Escalate erroneous pacifist indifferent.

Condemnation contagious
concentration camps
seal abnegated intervention undertaken.
Justice is never retaliatory.

Blind animosity swordsmanship.

State organized well organized
vicious killing machines flavour savour.
Maniac midsummer’s nightmare.

With staunch sweet sickly sway
stomach spewing smell. Putrid tortured
decaying, broken body parted parts.

Recurrent shameful mosaic; imitates millenniums of slaughter
continues to plague; scattered provinces peoples
countries ideologies demon; spurned across time unabated.

Emotions are animated feelings; experienced victim first hand
horror is state institutionalized; barbaric bred blood letting.
Each fermented act premeditated; calculated brutally enacted

is murder. Is fresh hatred; violently viciously sown. Sacrifice
claimed supposedly enacted; reprisal justice
intermix in agitated. Blood washed hands. Vigilante red hands.

Words festering crazed demonic hatred; are
carved tortured burned; disseminated typically
into living powerless; innocent civilian flesh.

Humane virtuous
doctrines demand enacted
retributive justice?

Yet countless atrocities
over millenniums
reenacted receive none?

Individual blame administered inadequately resolves
national policies, hunting hatred humanity prey.
Justice does not postmortem decrease intensity
felt pain nor prolonged fear tormenting dying victims.

Silent slaughtered ruins attest ripe war crimes waist deep,
corpse sown strewn rubble. Booby-trapped ruins blast,
out metaphorical twentieth century, defunct death knell.

Sentences nefarious, indifference's scapegoat, enacted evil.


Copyright © Terence George Craddock
Written August 1st 1991, in response to ethnic cleansing in several wars which solicited no meaningful intervention from the international community.