The Carousel Of The Tour Of Duty Poem by MARINA GIPPS

As a lullaby, it circumvents
the madman and his machinations…

A petty carousel full of little tin soldiers,
No elegance of cavalry, no trotting off
into the quiet self-assured distance of a rising sun.
We are grounded in this bleak prison of radioactive ions.

Where a revolving door gains sterile momentum,
that centrifugal force drawing them closer
without further adieu to the iron ore.

One more blessed nuclear device gray-locked orators
decree sacred to quiet the unruly, little ones who speak
in tongues- as those strange, green Americans.

The disenfranchised, wrapped in headdress,
our dictator dismisses as swaddling clothes.
Where is your devout manger?
Have tin soldiers burned it down, stranger?
And where does your mother lie?
Burrowed in America’s Lake of Fire?

Our faces of ash within America’s invisible enemies,
bearing burdens in the faces of families:
a dance with Armageddon and self-fulfilling prophesies.

The tight-wire of an open rope hanging.
Dictators tried near shallow graves,
rising to the occasion with daft wings-
How the world moves on its carousel axis:

Relics looted by the enslaved masses,
pieces of History dispatched to the highest bidder:
dismantled, revisioned; through the chains of winding, ,
immersed in this endless revolving.

Tin soldiers comb this leveled parking-lot of appendages, broken stories:
What we call Baghdad, housed in the rubble of ashes, stealth bombers,
time delay fuses of fetal-positioned humans aborted with each firing.
This is the place where children play with automatic weaponry.

Recollecting the day green men arrived with a message of peace
as we vowed to defend her, Our America, maiming deaf fathers
in this forlorn dusk with the broken song of a return
burning brightly over Allah’s horizon in a quest for Truth.

We pillage their torn-winged sisters of pastoral lands,
the terrain of a revolving door which never weakens its force,
the dizzying carousel of a lone traveler’s demise.

Troops attune to the commands of endless winding,
the cross-circuitry, static airwaves of Baghdad radio.
All tin soldiers born a mule: a chess piece, hesitantly slow.

Corporal plights suspend themselves as fireflies:
a stagnant drifting for the steel hummingbird,
oblivious to its flight as if oil were honey.

Discovering immortality in fragments of shrapnel
as if a love, unrequited, finally found…Unearthed
as bone dust, the sweet soul of limbs.

The persecuted in haste have leavened their spirit,
condemning the forever nostalgia of return,
numbering each day as if another carousel…

We embalm a down-trodden soldier’s marrow,
divided asunder of orphaned limbs,
with the reflection of porphyry held in our eyes.