White Ashes Poem by Rod M.Peters

So you finally made good
On all your promises to uproot
The children of the tiller man.
You're done dancing
Your little war dances
In fits of obscene ecstasy.
Done haranguing mobs
Of cheering merrymakers
Urging them into forbidden gardens
To trample like wild beasts
On rosebushes and verdant crops.

Well-trimmed hedges
Were a sore in your eye
Well-kept flowerbeds
A blight in the landscape
Till you exacted revenge on
The fellowship of the afternoon tea,
Conspirators of the Georgian pavilions
Nestled amongst rhododendrons,
Perpetrators of imaginary crimes
And growers of yellow tulips.

You covered the land
With a pall of white ashes
But you did not think for a moment
You'd have to reap the whirlwind
After the ploughs were left to rust
And the mobs encouraged to sprawl idly
On big broken-down harvesters.
Holy monsters left to die a slow
Agonizing death under the sun,
Mechanical casualties in a war
Against the virtue of labour
And the heresy of the Calvinist.

The ragged army's laid down the guns
To drown their tedium in crude liquors
While your children look in awe
And grow scrawnier each day
Wondering why the dead go heedless
Refusing to break a stride
As they plod along the silent road
Leading to a country in the sky.
They will not turn back
To start the machinery again
However feverishly you now dance
Your little dance of contrition.

Your nights will be plagued
By unrelenting whispering
Carried by a strange cold wind
Muttering on and on and on
That your necromancers shed in vain
The blood of a thousand scapegoats.