Wars & World Leaders: What I Want From You

When you want to kill

other human beings

I want you to look

sad and not angry

When you want to send

our children a world away

to kill and fight and die

I want you to look

remorseful not presidential

When you make and make

possible guns and nukes

and bombs and such

I want you to look

chagrined – recognizing

the already failure of your

acts that it is instead of

gleeful at anticipated success

When the children – anyone’s

children – die, I want you to

confess instead of count

as if it were a basketball score

And speaking of the children –

when you decide it’s killing time

I want – no, I demand –

that you not do it on the backs

of dead children – they are 

beyond your saving and your

anger will not bring them back

and I care about them and all

the others and I do not need

pictures of bloody corpses

of the too-young to decide

whether the living children

can be saved by this course

and I resent and tremble in

my own anger that you would

use them to make you sleep

better at night for the children

still breathing you would risk

to avenge they who need no

vengeance for they are far

past caring about such things

I want you not to stand on

their corpses – that’s what 

I want

When the temptation to the 

killing fields comes, I want

you to eschew the language

of heroes and wonder if you

would go or send your own

beloved where you would

so easily dispatch mine

Who am I to want so much

from you?  I am citizen.