Do not tell me,

“Tears are liars,”

Or,

“The end has become our tale,”

 We are an ancient country why must we die?

My face changes,

The walls become the only thing to look at,

The end seems like a rhyme that tells the great joke to spite everything I object to,

You say that my belief that the end will not be served to us is getting me nowhere,

That there is no rhyme or reason to me,

So the bombs outside explode,

And it feels like the entire world is pounding us from the sky,

Where we were being bombed brutally,

The sound of the bombs,

The sounds of the dying,

The sounds of people in agony,

I did lose the plot,

I did become plotless,

My clothes felt like they were set on fire,

I threw off every piece of clothing,

I ran through the streets nude,

Yes the streets of Basra, Iraq,

It was like the plague got hold of my body,

And I was driven blindly mad,

Guns fired furiously,

My blood boiled with the heat,

I could not see clearly,

With the dust rising from the ground,

Is it right to die for nothing as a civilian must?

All day I see people morbidly cut to pieces,

The cuts of the soul and the body,

Cuts made by imperialist power,

Cut like a butchers cut of the day,

I run through this city that I know at the back of my hand,

And I know that when and if they sedate me that all this will exist in me,

Just at the tip of my head,

And as days go by,

As if there was never a second of goodbye said in these last days,

All we remember will be our sorrows,

But all the microseconds fill me like flowers,

We are made to burn to dust on desert,

Beating with heartbeats of guns that go firing through the night,

Do not let the earth cover me,

It is like this aerial attack of the guardians of liberty is designed to bring us death from the free world,

Which sounds utterly insane,

When bullets hit the skin,

You can not stay for ever,

As the citizens of the soldiers will tell you,

Their countries work is being done to protect the free worlds citizens freedom,

That Basra is my home,

And I care for it insanely,

We lost our little middle eastern empire,

Where the garden of Eden grew,

And without my soul freezes,

And the earth seems like the only place to bury myself into,

Nothing comes here as a constant,

Only death and dying,

Falling to the earth,

Missing you Basra for ever,

Before it got dragged through the bombs, mortar and the imperialists bullets,

This war helped me to breathe in possibilities of a tomorrow,

That would hop over the nights sky,

Like a kangaroo that could jump over the fence for freedom,

We, as a nation, are lost to the tripped out dog of destiny,

With only memories of peace to overshadow the new American night sky,

You say the night will not cry,

As bombs smash to the ground from the sky,

Our lives roll down the drain,

The end creates end,

A poisonous thing that weaves and chokes,

It is as if imperialist necessity wills it so.

                                                                          ~Michael Mulvihill

                                                                        Ireland