Beating the Drums

In rooms of heavy mahogany where the air stands still, safe from winter frost, sit men with unmarred fingers. They lean over maps to partition the oil, speaking of flags and the abstract state while signing the ledgers. And the drums of war are being beaten loud by manicured hands. The safe, the proud, men who will never know the leaden sting or the heavy weight the gallows bring. They will never bleed. They draft speeches with practised grace to preach to the slums, to the kitchen table where hunger sits, and the youth is a currency, suddenly strong and able. They whisper of glory to the children born of the dust, coating their vast ambition in ribbons of trust. "Go cross the oceans," the posters declare. "Defend the homeland." But the land they speak of is gilded and rare, and the glory they offer is a shallow grave. So the children of factories and mills are marched from their porches to foreign hills. They trade their denim for helmets of green, becoming gears in a corporate machine. They don't know the boardrooms' names or the frantic stock market games; they only know the shivering, biting cold, and the terror that makes a young face look old, as they sink down into the dark of foreign mud, paying the tax of the empire in blood. Why do they die? To feed the black threat of an endless corporate desire. Beneath the trenches where young boys lie, are the blueprints of pipelines rising to the sky. Just another transaction to secure a resource for a financier. While mothers are weeping over caskets of pine, the billionaires toast to the new baseline. The stock prices climb as the casualty falls, and the shadow-men smile in their high-ceilinged halls. The conflict ends when the ledger is clear, when the oil flows. The generals retire to corporate boards, dividing the wealth of conquered hordes. And back in the valleys, the broken return with ghosts in their eyes and a sorrow that burns, while the men who beat the drums never traded a breath, never tasted the mud and the blood, never flirted with death. They just wait for the next generation to grow, to send them where the black rivers flow.