Less from the ghosts than from a kiss you lost on me,
the cemetery comes to life. It’s warm with cluster bombs.
It thaws the blue of lips and melts our open chests
It burns with gasoline. Napalm: your kisses clinging,
blister skin. You’re soft from razor-blades. your palms
are warm, you rest your wounded head between my legs.
We shot the sparrows and we killed the hawk, singing
love-songs for a better cause; we planted daffodils
and burned to fertilize their bones. I cup your breast
with hands still warm from death. We are Kalashnikovs,
the butterflies that pick both scab and poppy-petals.
Cause we make love on meadows and on the battlefields.
Amor Victorious by Caravaggio
Linked to toads, where Shay want’s us to explore incongruity… Don’t know if I succeeded, but setting love is set against death on battlefield seemed like one way to do it.
March 16, 2017
We shot the sparrows and we killed the hawk, singing
love-songs for a better cause.. I love this!
Love and Death…what companions you paint here.
Really strikingly sensual images and metaphors in this Bjorn. I especially appreciate the opening line, and “..We shot the sparrows and we killed the hawk, singing/ love-songs for a better cause….” Idealism dies the most incongruous death of all.
Magnificent! A tour de force. I am stunned almost to speechlessness.. Easily a new favourite.. such a poem deserves a wider platform.
I best loved the lines Joy quoted too, Bjorn. Wow! A powerful write!
These lines are awesome:
You’re soft from razor-blades. [Y]our palms
are warm[;] you rest your wounded head between my legs.”
“… with hands still warm from death.
We are Kalashnikovs,
the butterflies that pick both scab and poppy-petals.”
This is just what it’s like I bet! Sometimes I wonder how many times I’ve made love outside in a spot that somebody could have died on. (You brought this out, Bjorn.) Lol!
You packed it full of amazing incongruities!
I think you worked well with incongruity. The beauty of your writing makes the juxtaposition of love and war suitably unsettling.
“We are Kalashnikovs,
the butterflies that pick both scab and poppy-petals.
Cause we make love on meadows and on the battlefields.”
magnificent!!!
much love…
Somebody posted a thing on the internet about people taking selfies at a Holocaust Museum. So this guy photoshopped the selfies so that people appeared to be taking them and clowning around among the corpses, both living and dead. It was powerful, and this reminds me of it.