In our living rooms a January evening twelve years ago
We sat in darkness watching a pale night sky
Pierced by a multitude of splinters
Blazing burning stars falling through doors and windows
In a ballet leaving nothing human in its wake
They wanted us to believe that the equivalent of Hiroshima
Of more than all the bombs dropped in the Second World War
Would destroy only empty buildings leaving life intact

Like father like son deception continues

Baghdad waits endlessly and knows what it is waiting for
Women men and children like us
Eyes never closing wait up surrounded by their loved ones
Imagining an iron and steel rain even more deadly than before
Tens of thousands of deaths from the first hours
The mothers’ screams the children snatched from the breast in a flash
A genocide cynically planned by the profit fundamentalists

Like father like son deception continues

Soldiers will enter the city plunging shrapnels
Into women’s bellies and poets’ memories
Crushing hope and the antique turquoise minarets
They will char the future on the walls so that nobody forgets
Leaving a downpour of birds and cries in the flaming sky
Endless ruins in the streets the fields and the eyes

Like father like son deception continues

Their backs stiffened by ignorance and blind submission
The warriors of capital will enter a desert of blood and ashes
In closed ranks like the bombs dropping from the sky
They will carry out their summary executions as if they were mere transactions
With the servility of conditioned pawns broken to obey orders

Like father like son deception continues

Will we again sit immobile in front of our televisions
When a handful of power thirsty vultures
Spreads death in our name in the four corners of the earth
As if life was simply a merchandise at their disposal ?

Today NO rhymes with liberty

 In French : Poème pour la paix.

On Sisyphe, March 4th 2003

Élaine Audet

Élaine Audet a publié, au Québec et en Europe, des recueils de poésie et des essais, et elle a collaboré à plusieurs ouvrages collectifs. Depuis 2002, elle est l’une des deux éditrices de Sisyphe.
Ses plus récentes publications sont :
 Prostitution - perspectives féministes, (éditions Sisyphe, 2005).
 La plénitude et la limite, poésie, (éditions Sisyphe, 2006).
 Prostitution, Feminist Perspectives, (éditions Sisyphe, 2009).
 Sel et sang de la mémoire, Polytechnique, 6 décembre 1989, poésie, (éditions Sisyphe, 2009).