Sentiment

Feathers burn so easily, the cat is blinded in the garden, last vision the lark is flame./ The cattle shed gives off the smell of sunday kitchen, the gentle eye, the dispensable perfection./ Before the flash take two weeks’ food, pile the sacks of earth and hide./ All of us here know it, we grew with it, we grew it./ Fighting amongst ourselves, leaving bits of flesh on barbed wire, a little blood on the floor./ Locks and bars across the door, well versed in violation, our children beat each other in the garden./ Our failure to accept the earth, we talk of love but push it to the edge./ This is no natural aggression composing death, I am afraid for beauty when I see the fist, the perfect hand that turns against itself, the perfect hand that holds a gun or wields a butcher's blade, or leads to death the used-up bull or incarcerates the hopeless fool or takes the forest with a single flame and leaves the nest an empty shell./ Human kind condemns the hunting beast yet his own choice leaves behind such ragged meat./ The military dream of blood, their sweet wine flowing in the veins of men who work towards our bloody end./They fly Enola gaily, give birth to this waiting...waiting, give us thereality of our hatred, give the earth nothing./ Melting, goats dead on the green, dying lambs bleating by the wire...three last days on earth, I lay down to die in the grass.