Amanda Whitby's Art Glass Shop

Gone Wind

The warm wind sweet with blossoms blows

The stink of death from broken spires,

Where sunlight spilled by dawn her light alike bestows

On poppies in their rows and corpses on the wire.

 

Birdsong lilts where shellfire screamed the night before,

Where the earth was torn still grows life's hardy germ;

By rising sun and turning world our woe ignored,

By gods too busy with their own concerns.

 

Light the city's shell-shocked shadows now dissolves

And glints with mimicry of life on sightless eyes

In the dead who for a second seem of death absolved

But bathing in the sun forever, do not rise.

 

Neighbours, friends and children still lying in the streets

In some eternal mockery of peace abide,

Who on their final morning wake not from cooling sleep,

Their end by shattered limbs and burning flesh contrived.

 

For them the pain is over, their flesh no longer hurts

But for we, the cursed survivors, life goes on,

A living hell of fire and shell and worse,

Wondering who by dusk will next be gone.

 

But now we watch the dawn with dazed surprise,

For it seemed the End of Days came in the night

And all the world convulsed and shut its eyes,

This town a graveyard made, a sepulchre shut tight.

 

Yet nature missed no beat, nor spared a second glance;

The day unseemly comes on cue hell-bent to mock

Lost hope by sweeping through our wake with dance,

With banners bright, with joy that falters not.

 

Thus we must rise with aches, our hunger and our fear,

For life goes on remorseless even yet,

Compelled to watch the day make nothing of despair,

Whose smile by contrast sharpens our regret.

 

Regret so it appears has coalesced

Into the huddled shapes of human form:

A knot of us as if by time's reverse regressed

To primal fears, to dirt and rags thin-worn.

 

Gathered in a basement 'neath a mound of splintered stone

Of a home caved inward like a failing heart,

Our sorry band assembled as if commanded to atone

For sins not ours by gods whose altars crumbled in the dark.

 

Christian, Moslem, Unbelievers all, we twelve

Apostles of a brotherhood drawn by common pain

Foreswore the hate whose reasons unrecalled did melt

In new resolve that Man made well shall never fail again.

 

In the end are all men in truth defined

By their contracts made, by that to which they will agree;

And if Man revived will from his woe emerge more fine

Then 'tis new and wiser contracts made shall set him free.

 

For war to thrive good men must mis-identify

Each the other good men as their foe

And false-believe them evil, by subterfuge and lie;

Such seeds take root, by Satan's agents sown.

 

Good to wrongly target good is thus seduced

And good devours good, while Satan ever so amused

Enjoys the spectacle of blood he so cleverly produced,

Where deflected fall the arrows and the barbs his rightful due.

 

But in the end could none of us recall how came we there,

Nor name the wrong that earned the other man our hate.

When the shell explodes, the reasons for its flight laid bare

Reveal their speciousness too late

 

To retract or to regret our folly or turn it back

Unexploded to its spiteful breach,

Or reverse the tanks that crushed beneath their tracks

Hopes that now uncrushed, once more reach

 

The shrivelled kernels of broken hearts

With breath of life that doth revive the dead.

Yet where the world ended a new world did start,

That flouts the logic of our hate and embraces love instead.

 

We swore our oath, we twelve and pledges made

To Man and Over Nation, this country we call Earth,

That what was shattered shall be made whole again

And the death of yesterday shall become tomorrow's birth.

 

The Over Nation then was in Sarajevo's rubble born,

We twelve knights by flex of will a new flame sparked:

One world, one nation, one race to this full sworn,

To Man, the fire of stars, to the foes of Man, the dark.

Gone with the wind (trailer)