There is no denying the state of our age:
The astute and the cultured have left the main stage.
No longer doctrinaire, nor gentle, nor wise,
A world full of hazards now meets modern eyes.
Unconstrained evils run wild through the street,
Where sleaze and dark violence so commonly meet.
From the burden of dowries to gridlocked highways,
Pollution and crowding darken our days.
Yet history whispers of peace we once knew,
Before lethal weapons and malice just grew.
Now atoms are split not for progress or light,
But impishly harnessed for terror and might.
The anchors of safety are drifting away,
As wars and modern terrors hold global sway.
We watched as the towers in America fell,
A mammoth invasion that turned life to hell.
And even the powers—Great Britain and France,
The US and Russia—stood stunned by the stance.
We look back to history, to shadows and pain,
When bombs fell like fire and black, toxic rain.
On Hiroshima’s soil and Nagasaki’s bright shore,
The Rising Sun bled in the Second Great War.
The venomous fallout still echoes today,
In Vietnam’s ghosts and the lives swept away.
Now Iraq is a stage of destruction and shame,
Where the high and the lowly are killed in the game.
The peacekeepers struggle to hold back the flood,
As alliance and rebel soak landscapes in blood.
For the rebels believe in the chaos and crime,
They fight the invaders who stole their own time.
