The air horns wailed but I paid no head
Mystified by planes of stealth and speed
Suddenly unaware of our dangerous plight

Bombs illuminate the black slate of night
Suddenly gone like a candle guttering out
Accompanied by a nation of screams and shouts

Grace to those taken unto the sky
D***** be those who didn’t wither and die
Left to a land scared and dead
Forever marked by those who tread
Visions of bloodshed into our heads

Onto our eyelids permanently seared
A mountain of bodies
A river of tears

A war has no end
To those who witnessed upon us descend
A burden to bear
Our own war we declare
Spawned by the bombs in the night and the fights that illuminated the light

All we could do was wait for the break of dawn
When we could fully comprehend
The extent of the murderous pawns

No sleep
Waiting for the rays of sun
To stare upon our crumbled city
Gone

Deceived are we unto our city’s great demise
As billows of black smoke waft into the sky
Filling in for the buildings that used to reach so high


No one can fully comprehend
The amount of time it takes to mend
Not the walls and bodies strewn
But to be able to mentally end
The impact of war upon our heads

As I stand gazing at the barren field
People struggling to understand all that was revealed
Over those they loved and lost they kneel
Believing that the damage will never heal

Now those same people think those same somber thoughts
Still reeling over all that they lost
The world remembers and tries to empathize
Trying to dry their watering eyes

But they will never fully understand
What we saw with our own eyes
The pictures only tell half the story
They show the scenes but not the noise

The faces twisted in disbelief
But not the sobs and anguished screams
The air polluted with smoke and blood
Unless you were there you could never know
What we experienced so long ago

And even now when I return to the place
Where forever I learned to doubt the human race
Where my mind was altered for all time
To never to trust
To never believe
That home is the place where you’re safe, where you’re free

Children run down the streets
Laughing in sweet ignorance
The buildings rebuilt to twice their height
The land reborn as if to smite
The soldiers charging through the night

Even though I see these beautiful sights
I close my eyes and the scenery changes
To when I was young and covered in ashes

And now I pray every day
For those kids that run down the streets
That their smiles will stay and their worries be small
That they will never have to comprehend
The meaning of war and the meaning of death

I pray that they will never have to stand in the streets
The bodies of the people they love strewn at their feet
That they will never wake in the dead of night to see a bomb dropped outside
That their world will stay fully intact
That they will never know the smell of blood
Their minds will never be branded with visions of war

For here I stand, almost dead
Still fighting a war with myself
To rid my mind of the images of bombs dropped by the moon
For if one sees a war than one will never be rid
Of the screams of pain and piles of men seared behind our eyes

To be one of the d***** I will always be
Until too, I die
My life, I lived
A shadowed soul
The visions of war taken their toll