Nightmare in Pink

Glacial eddies of mist, bands
Of platinum, of serous pink
Encasing their lands
In a gauze of wounded light.
They can’t stop the bleeding,
The cuts too many,
The damage too vast,
Their souls on fire in this nightmare’s dawn.

Every war, every Rabbit-Proof Fence.
Every Iwo Jima, Mekong, or Wounded Knee.
Every Falusia, Belfast, or Darfur.
Every Sharpeville on the tongue of Mandela’s dreams.
Every Auschwitz or Treblinka on Hitler’s bingo card.
Every Antietam,
Every Rwanda, every genocide…
And on and on and on and on and on.

Nightmares in pink,
Sunday, bloody Sundays
Marinating the common concrete,
Percolating through the soil,
To the billions dead and gone.
Their blood in the rises
Their blood in the sets,
Raw slits on the land
Of our rage and savagery.