To fight, decide or democide?

In darkness, draped in shades of grey,

The wheel of war spins on its way,

A loom of lies, a sordid tale,

Where virtue's ghost gives one last wail.

Beneath the banner, blood-stained, torn,

A dance of death, the death march forlorn,

Children, orphaned, cling to dreams,

Of once sweet lullabies, now screams.

A symphony of screams, resounds,

A requiem for battlegrounds,

Where souls, like pawns, are bought and sold,

And truth lies buried, cold and old.

This Democide, the cruel jest,

That haunts the heart, denies it rest,

The murderous hand that masks its face,

In bureaucratic, cold embrace.

The bitter fruit of avarice,

A banquet laid for nemesis,

Where moral compass, lost, forsaken,

Leads to paths, dark and mistaken.

In twisted tongues, the lies are spun,

By silver-tongued, they come undone,

As puppet-masters pull the strings,

Of kings and queens and lesser things.

In shadowed halls, deals are made,

As innocence is sold, and betrayed,

In the darkness, out of sight,

The seeds of war are sown, alight.

In the abyss, where demons dwell,

the tales of sorrow, there to tell,

Of violence, destruction, and woe,

The fruits of war, that ever grow.

Written July 2000. Sam Wilks