Towards Better Democracy

Why?
Overweening pride
The slide into war
Not inevitable
Only in the mind
Resignation.

More men lost on a single
Day than during the entire
Course of the next war, a
Continuation of the first.

A civil war between nations
The dictatorship of the elected
Versus the insecurity
Of the non elected
All playing piper
To the tune of duty.

A promissory note
Extracting reparations
From the humiliated
Signed at gun point.
A piece of paper
A non agreement
Torn up
Twenty years later
Made inevitable.

Intellectuals on all sides
Safe in their studies
Fighting with paper
To justify
The unjustifiable
Why?

Malcolm D B Munro
Saturday 19 March, 2016

Filed under: poetry

There is a cry in the world,
As if God had died,
And the leaden shadow, plummeting down,
Weighs heavily on the tomb.

Come, let us withdraw into ourselves
Life is entombed within our hearts
As in coffins.

You dearest! let us kiss passionately
A longing throbs throughout the world,
By that we must die.

Else Lasker-Schüler

Worked from the German Weltende 1905
Malcolm D B Munro
Thursday 21 April, 2016

Copyright of the original is retained by the Copyright owner. The Copyright of this Translation is vested with the Author. The original, from which this translation is made, is used under the provisions of Section 107 of the US Copyright Act 1976, which allows for fair use of the original for translation purposes such as criticism, comment, news reporting, teaching, scholarship and research.

Filed under: poetry