Combat Zone Poem by Charl JF Cilliers

On the screen there is a distant trace:
punched-in co-ordinates indicate time and place:

somewhere a drone moves through the starry night
picking out details in green eerie light:

the trigger is the prophetic letter E
for ENTER on a keyboard: twenty-three

thousand kilometres away the drone releases
its load: for a few hundred thousand all life ceases.

On the inscrutable face of the computer screen
death is a mere smudge of emerald green.