The State Within The State Poem by Gert Strydom

Black cars with flashing blue lights
come screaming down the highway
filling three lanes at a time,
as if any road in the country
belongs to them.

Sometimes I see their occupants
on the street,
hiding behind sunglasses,
with short cropped hair,
dressed in neat suits
with left armpits bulging
from the guns
that they wear.

They invade uninvited
in the early hours of the morning
and burst into dwellings unexpectedly
with drawn guns
as the method of persuasion.

Some people are arrested,
taken away to interrogation
and face charges in court,

others are abducted, cuffed,
transported to a military airfield
to board a foreign aircraft
with stars and stripes on its tail,

to be deported and disappear
from the face of the earth,
without a trace and without a trial
and never to be free again.