The Plain Becomes Disorderly Poem by Gert Strydom

The plain becomes disorderly, is turned upside down
when the canons of Ratel armoured cars thunder,
when rocket-launching trucks fire off their charges,
when for days everything is aflame

and then the river rushes down in that drenched summer,
soldiers are cut to the bone
by the unending barrage fire

and where villages had been
broken sacks hang and flutter
on rusted thorny wire

and all that is left is forsakenness,
the pieces of broken humanity of a shattered people
in the inaccessible pillage that war brings.