GAME OF DEATH
Racketeers play games of death
That keeps the human race at war,
Happily watching millions dying
Just to see that their profits soar.
While profiteers start a new Hell
To send the young all off to die,
The UN idly twiddles its thumbs
Watching myriad corpses go by.
Never-ending war games
Keep the public silent,
Unaware of how their taxes
Have been badly misspent.
While people live outside
Existing in crates or cars,
The endless wars continue
Leaving cancerous scars.
People sleep on benches
Bitter and put upon,
While our tax dollars help
Keep the 20-year war going.
Newspapers for blankets
Paupers are sleeping outside,
The unscrupulous make fortunes
Laughing as innocents die.
Exploitive creatures leach dollars
From out of the public purse,
Murderers or evil hitmen
Or something very much worse.
These vipers destroy whole nations
Selling their latest death machines,
All in the name of making profits
Through actions truly obscene.
THE END
© Copyright 2022 Philip Roberts
Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
About this poem
I remember the saddest day of my life, when I was nine or ten. When I learnt the most obscene thing I've ever heard. That private companies are allowed to make weapons of war for profit. Despite being unemotional as a rule, I cried out loud when I heard this. I still believe that if the UN passed a worldwide law that only governments could own factories making weapons of war, that war would virtually end. History is resplendent with examples of private companies giving millions of dollars worth of weapons to small nations, then grossly overcharging the big nations, to keep what should have been a short war going for years or even decades, so that they could grow fat on the profits of death!
Written on May 10, 2022
Submitted by philip0157 on May 14, 2022
Modified on March 05, 2023
- 56 sec read
- 1 View
Quick analysis:
Scheme | XABA XCXC XXXX DEFE XXXB XDGC XHFH GXXX XXX |
---|---|
Closest metre | Iambic tetrameter |
Characters | 1,018 |
Words | 187 |
Stanzas | 9 |
Stanza Lengths | 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 4, 3 |
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"GAME OF DEATH" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 26 May 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem/127563/game-of-death>.
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