Warfighter

Dog faced and dead eyed the warfighters sit
behind their winking terminals, guiding
the gyre of the gold clad satellites,
aligning and repositioning their eyes,
and their ever open ears to the ground,
listening to the coded babel streaming
from a billion mobile phones, and to the
signals from the hunting predator drones.

Medalled and beribboned officers
from WestPoint orient toward the East,
guarding the homeland's vultures gathered for
their never ending feast, pointing the spear
dripping with poisoned intelligence, honed
and sharpened by daily propaganda,
at the long imagined beast that shambles
in the shadows of their patriotic hearts.

The green-eyed girl pulls the flimsy cloth across
the crying baby's eyes to hide its strange
deformity, cursed by Allah and the
deadly chemicals that swim within her womb.
She does not know about the socialites
whose glittering charity affairs fund
both the bag of grain spilled at her feet
and the rain of death a joystick click away.

The bearded taliban warrior squints
into the dusty haze at the tiny dot,
and spits, his brain a maze of daily prayers
and faint hopes for the rain that will nourish
the poppies that will eventually become
the people's bread, after the crop of western
junkies bloom like fungi in the bin lined
alleys of the enemy's decaying streets.

The dust blows in the children's eyes stirred up
by the churning wheels and tracks of tanks
and Humvees, drawing lines across the sand,
soon to be can-opened by an IED
or blown apart by a well-aimed RPG.
Neither warrior nor girl will live to see
the foreign blood upon their soil, because
the slit mouthed sergeant guides his missile true.