Revolution

You insisted on using the vernacular,
though you’d only seen it tiny in the distance, a grievance or a celebration,
telescopically enumerated and illuminated in mud,
as the crack of dead leaves and backs black with earth and sweat and sun,
and children ill or crying, hands peeling in the fields while we watch –
but only through a telescope, and that, you said, was wrong.

You first changed it with words.
I did not point out to you that those sunburned daily soldiers could not read them.
Perhaps I should have, but even if I had you’d have gone on.
You had a way of making heat burn off the page and children’s tears dry underneath,
of making it all our fault, the cold, the sun, the mud, the lines dividing us and them.
Things changed, with blood and cannonfire.
The children turned into symbols, and your words said, “Not enough.”

You did not forget your words,
but now infused with power they burned brighter and you made them fight
for freedom, and more power.
If you streaked the children’s eyes with blood you could be forgiven for exaggeration:
the conclusion is that it was true from time to time, or close enough.
You turned us into a universe all yours, and pulled our strings to make us talk.
I could have spoken then, I could have pointed out the fact
that white scars may burn the eyes but, though softer,
blood against blue sky could melt instead of burning
and we might still die.

But I didn’t. I said nothing,
still believing that we’d eventually find something,
and that everything happens for a reason,
and that treason and reaction warrant retribution,
and if we’re not right, what have we done?

So I survived to watch the colours mesh and fade and seethe and burn away the cloth
and watched you growing older and more tired still finding time to insist “NOT ENOUGH”
The percussion and fission and repercussion all cramming year by year into my eyes,
until I caved and shouted that we had to wash the bloodstains from the flags,
pull out the bodies from the cracks and crags where they’d been hidden and heal the
earth so that it might finally be worth the endless stream of annihilation we’d created
and so much more but halfway through I noticed a dead silence,
and freefell into their defences accepting that to protect their lines mine had to go
and that they didn’t know what they were doing –
their flesh washed out with blood and their eyelids caving in – they didn’t know
and wouldn’t know till later when looking back they’d say how could we?
And then to make amends they’d burn the perpetrators and perpetuate another line
of people waiting for the smash of silver in their blood,
then emptiness, and then, again, mud.