The god of carnage has grown
a balding man’s stringy ponytail.
Red, he says, means danger.
He shrugs his cruelly thin shoulders.
A tractor stands abandoned
in a field of what looks from here
like black puddles of blood.
The future will burn a full 40 days.
We will walk beside our coffins.
Starvelings will stare out
from behind barbed wire.
Mothers will shriek. There will be
nice grass in the cemetery.