A poem from my collection, 'The Parrot in the Mango Tree' (Poems on work and death).

All those Ukraines

Here we go again

nailing the present on to the unlearned lessons

of history, not with nails this time, oh Jesus,

but bullets, missiles, tanks, rocket launchers

fired by the dogma of ideals and ideas

of racial purity, empire expansion,

political perfectionism,

religious supremacy,

the greed for territory

and economic resources, the pursuit

of privilege and above-all power

from autocratic, totalitarian megalomaniacs –

Genghis Khan, Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Idi Amin,

Francisco Franco, Joseph Stalin, Robert Mugabe,

Saddam Hussein, Vladimir Putin –

and all who rise and rise and rise,

their resistible rise to abusive power

and then cry havoc and let slip the dogs of WAR,

so that old women and old men,

fearful mothers and children

abandon homes and flee down roads and rail tracks

and those who refuse to leave go underground,

as their apartment blocks are shelled;

the husbands, the sons, the brothers of refugees

are butchered, bombed and blown apart,

the death of young children is collateral damage,

all is severed, ripped, burned, wasted

under the blue sky, over the yellow corn

and, as they crush out life,

the wheels of the war machine turn,

turn, turn

and turn yet again...

© David Urwin March 2022