They came on a screaming metal tank,
A beast of steel that roared and clanked.
It crushed the doorway,
Crushed the gate,
Crushed the Neem trees,
Crushed the Zeer
The scent of torn leaves and diesel fumes,
Our shade, our shelter,
Splintered to ruins.
They yelled, their voices a cracking peal:
"We are here!
We have come to rescue you!
From the sickness, the godless, the untrue!
We are here to save you from you."
But to save the village, they burned the door,
And to save the peace, they brought the war.
"A mercy,"
they called it, a surgical knife,
Cutting the throat to save the life.
To spare the doctor the patient's groan,
To free the judge from the criminal's throne.
"For the Public Good,"
the stamps came down:
Execute the scholars,
Crown the clowns.
You dare to reject?
To whisper a doubt?
A white, unmarked car will call you out.
They drag you to the place with no name,
The Ghost House, to play a welcoming game.
First, the greeting—
A nail to the head,
Or the jolt of a wire to prove you're not dead.
Then the baptism, to wash out the rot,
A barrel of gasoline, pungent and hot.
And when you are clean, and your spirit has fled,
They tuck you in nightly in a freezer bed.
Or, if mercy strikes,
A river bed.
You got dollars? Stitched in a mattress seam?
Evidence of your sin, your Western dream.
They hang you at dawn for your "currency sins,"
While the real hoarding, the real rot, begins.
The leader's vault is a swelling tide,
Cash from the oil, the gold, and the hide.
A nation's whole future, bled on the floor,
To buy another tank for another war.
They came to save us with a tank and a track,
And left us with crushed Neem trees in the back.