A Hundred Years

By: Gus Victoria

The voices call out to me…

Soft on the hill they call,

Where they bled once

Now grow flowers,

The homes they knew,

Some stand still,

More were rubble long ago,

Their shades are the shadows cast

From that Great War

That ended naught,

The promise of youth

By Empire scythed,

The brotherhood of mankind

By generals silenced,

There was Hope in ‘14,

Only the Reaper

Four long years later.

There was innocence in ‘14,

Only cynicism

One century later.

The world poured in idyllic times

Was tempered at the forge of hell

Before, in blood bathed, it emerged,

Changed,

Unknown,

Broken.

Storms

By Gus Victoria

Storms of inequity

Rage across the weary land,

Raising crops of scorn

Reaped by ghosts,

Dreams sustain

Frail hope,

The scythe of justice

Rusts unused,

Fear rains down

Upon unsheltered heads,

Decree and doctrine drive

The fools fit for slaughter

That cry for death,

Sowing salt where they fall,

Armies grown corpulent

On rotted ideas

Of perverted ideals

Spread the glorious chaos

Of a nation in flames,

Scorching all it sees

That it cannot sell.

The Centurion's Rebuke

By: Gus Victoria

I see your righteous spirit

Empty and destitute

Suckling at the golden teat,

Content prostitute

Vileness you spit

Like poison

And call it virtue,

Flickering images you idolize

Murderers you lionize,

Pimps and whores,

Hand and in hand,

On Freedom’s shores.

Drink deep from the rivers of inequity,

Take your ship,

Spread your filth,

The ocean is vast,

Cannot contain the disease,

Not the noble past,

Death comes fast

Empires rise,

Empires fall,

Wisdom fails,

Greed sends us all to hell.

To hell.