Warzone Poem by Mason Maestro

On dusty back roads
With crossing toads
A journalist's shutter froze
On a naked running girl
In the Orient Pearl

She was the child of middle-class peasant
They run a noodle dive in the Mekong delta
She had long black hair
She was the daughter of the war-torn south
Won't you dropp your mouth
For the naked girl
In her burning skin
And her dirt-poor kin
She had dark brown eyes
She had burning thighs
She was a victim - of a misplaced bomb

Won't you grieve with me
For the widespread fear
Shed a tear
For a bloody year
Saigon had its pistols
It had its stones
It took its knives
To the crippled warzone
They are the lackeys
Of the killing machine
They built the evil-financed mills
That manufacture hell on earth

Her father fought old Ho Chi Minh
That no-good, northern commie kingpin
Who used his guerrillas to fire
On the women and children
And in the spring of '72
Nixon got quite hostile too
And he dropped that napalm bomb
On that village, of Trang Bang
The Viet Cong retreated across the border
And they armed the Khmer of Cambodia
And the shells were flying across South Vietnam
And they turned Saigon into a textile factory
Called the City of Ho Chi Minh

And we grieve for its daughter