by Peter Clive

The experiment

We created it in the desert, from human debris

that survived the chaos of our last war:

scattered body parts assembled, stitched together

and brought to life with the accumulated trauma

of a million dumbstruck orphans.

It stumbled at first, a stranger to its own limbs.

We propped it up. Our allies bound its wounds.

We indulged its simple appetite for atrocity,

buying its plunder, plying it with more bullets.

Priests well-versed in hate taught it to speak. 

We directed its primitive sectarian urges

against dictators who did not yet toe our line.

We tell the world we are blending new poisons

to make a final cure for an old disease,

as if that makes any sense at all.

When the medicine we concoct boils over

and briefly spills and sizzles on the hob,

we sprinkle more bombs into our alchemy,

and distill more profits from the blood. 

War aims narrow to a cycle of retaliation.

Friends and enemies are rendered interchangeable

by every outrage. Ghostly children

emerge from ruins, pale with dust,

to find out whose side they are on now,

and another generation of human wreckage

is strewn across the sand, ready

for the next time we need to make a monster.

Peter Clive lives on the southside of Glasgow, Scotland with his wife and three children. He is a scientist in the renewable energy sector. As well as poetry, he enjoys composing music for piano and spending time in the Isle of Lewis.