Wednesday, April 28, 2010

Wrap the children in white.


Join the Army, see the world, meet interesting people - and kill them. ~Pacifist Badge, 1978.


Send all your children out in white underwear
into the street before the carpet bombing.
Bring your babies out swaddled in white linen
in a procession of white prams.
Grandmothers and Mothers spread the white
family bed sheets flapping in canopy through the streets.

Men, pour the paint spill it over the wall,
roof and pavement in brilliant white.
Call the mechanics of the community;
Fathers and Sons, respray your cars:
Bone white, vanilla white, ice white,
then drag race in your thousands through the city.

Families unscrew the milk, leave hundreds of glasses
on hundreds of white on hundreds of tables in parks of green.
Rally the florists, line every gutter, decorate every tree
with white Roses, Gardenias, Orchids, Hydrangeas,
Wisteria, let the garlands hang empty and white.

Boys and girls, let hundreds of white footballs
pin pong through the streets, let fire extinguishers run
through with their white breath. Bakers let your sacks of flour
smoke through the air.

When the enemies of sleep come to put us to bed permanently
they will see clouds of white citizens in robes of Jesus,
in a City, for once, the colour of an ideal.

This is the day. The approaching bombers
will be blinded by the nuclear white landscape
by us all coming together in Universal whiteness.

5 comments:

Jim Murdoch said...

A very powerful and evocative central image to this one. Needs work so don't stick it in a drawer and forget about it. This is a good one.

And that is one scary photo too.

Anonymous said...

Seconded - really liked this one. Anthemic.

Cowpoke Troy said...

Do you have any information on the photo? What is the title? Who photographed it? When was it taken?

The photo stands hair up on the back of my neck. Very powerful.

Thanks for posting it.

McGuire said...

Not sure about the photo. It is a belter. If I find out I will let you know!

Anonymous said...

I don't write a great deal of responses, however i did some searching and wound up here "Wrap the children in white.".
And I actually do have a couple of questions for you if you do not mind.
Is it just me or does it give the impression like some of these comments look like they are coming from brain dead individuals?
:-P And, if you are writing on additional social sites, I would like to keep up with
anything new you have to post. Could you list of all of your communal pages like your Facebook page, twitter feed,
or linkedin profile?

My page criminal defense lawyer phoenix