Saturday, June 09, 2007

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The Hungry Ghost

 

The president is on TV just now waving the flag,

explaining how we must be brave and send our young boys

to die

in order to protect this flag, and he

points to it, there on the wall

a big red white and blue flag.

He’s got a tiny one pinned to his lapel

 

and in the audience hundreds of people cheer

and wave little cloth flags back at him.

Oh my, after 10,000 years of this, after

generation upon generation upon generation

of young boys marching to their deaths, how

can we not know that the flags are always changing

with the arbitrary lines they draw on a map?

 

After 10,000 years of bloody death,

after 100 million dead in the twentieth century,

the bloodiest century in the history of mankind,

how can we not yet see that standing behind every flag

is the Hungry Ghost

starving for our juicy emotions, our fear and hatred,

mouth watering for the next course of young boys and

 

we wave the flag, we

cheer and scream and weep and pull our hair and

we send them rank and file by the millions

marching straight into the oven to be roasted

while the Hungry Ghost stands by exhorting us,

in one hand a sharpened boning knife,

in the other

 

a flag.

 

                        redhawk  

 
Stephen Wilder
Mary McDowell Center for Learning
20 Bergen St.
Brooklyn, NY 11201
718 625-3939
 

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