To the Artist's Page                    To our home page

To Jonathan Penton's previous piece     To Jonathan Penton's next piece

A war
     is not a great catastrophe.
                             It is not a tragedy on a global scale.

Rather, it is
somewhere between
                             a thousand and a million
families ripped to shreds
                             children eviscerated
mothers blown to pieces
                             grandmothers dying slowly
                             from the infection of their shrapnel wounds.


The Iraqi sanctions
and the Cuban embargo
are not

war crimes
              or contests of will
                                      or socioeconomic conflicts

they are
the empty bellies of children
     night
          after night
               after night
until those children lie down
     for the last time
          and their parents
               must face life
               without them
               for the rest of time

To the top of this page