‘You must believe enough to kill, or else
it’s not a faith with content you profess.’
He praised his gods and roasted flesh and bones
of passers-by the odds had sent his way.
‘Pass-over bread’ he called the grim meal ground
from pilgrims shriven, freed of soul and baked
to slake the hunger of his tribe. They lived
among us not so long ago, his tribe;
in fact, their ways instruct us still: we kill
for oil, and other reasons we invent
to justify existence, on the wayside, in our tent.

‘I differ. I refuse to live that way,’
my Esther tells me, angry-eyed in Ghent
abhorring all the gore that’s eulogised
in this cathedral’s stained glass panes. Yes, ‘stained,’
a word that’s perfect to explain the tales
these windows glorify, these escapades
of lopping limbs for Lords that favour blood
to irrigate paths to the Holy Grail.
We call them High Crusades on Holy Days
and glorify their crimes in history books. ‘That’s wrong,’
my Esther tells me fiercely, ‘we’re not like that anymore.’

We cared enough to kill still in Kuwait,
with rockets, rifles, flames: bulldozers shoved
hot sand and buried boys stashed far from home
in ditches they hand-dug to stop our tanks.
I’m sure somewhere some parson offered thanks
to Mammon—or gods with modern names
whom we invent to take our garbage out.
‘You said we should!’ My troops are sick with rage.
‘You said Hussein must fall—whatever cost,
or else, like Hitler, he would kill us all.’

‘Of course I did,’ I answer, from the wayside, in my tent.