The Peace Deal

Shell

You’ve made holy hostile,
displayed what's sacred in a cage of bones.
Hard shell rain masks your fragility,
but our bits of grit grow inside you,
lodgers in our homeland.

Small wonder we make defensive fists,
flare up into our own oblivion
as you bark bullets at brothers and babies
deny us all a future.

We’ve forgotten where the boundaries used to be,
crossed into indecency too many times,
processes ceased, war's volcano erupts
over all our lives,
encases us in cold, hard selves
makes us refugees from love.

Our grievances hang
like raindrops on a washing line
waiting for their turn to fall.
For a moment in the dark
it's still as premonition
is one lifetime of land
worth so much death?
Would our children want this?

Could we just end it now?
Not with a deal like Versailles
when anger rose again like nausea,
but with something that simply says
break the shells open,
come, there’s room beside me still,
say it in all the languages
in all the nations across all time
so we really understand.

Make it the war humanity won.