This is too bizarre for mere mortals
Cracking up between the portals
A fracture clinic lost in time
And space enough to feed the rhyme
I wondered lonely, as a shroud
Which veils its gaze beneath a crowd
Of empty vessels quick to bleed
A mentor in our hour of need
The eyeless in Gaza train their guns
At children hiding ‘neath the ruins
“Thou shalt not kill”, I thought they’d said
Now Rosh Hashanah’s the day of the dead
Listen hard, you may hear yet
Chinese whispers in Tibet
With force to occupy the minds
And slowly tighten saffron binds
Khing But’s curse is wrought on high
Across the Hindu Kush he’ll fly
So death now hunts the Taliban
For exploding truth in Bamiyan
Giotto’s portrait of one so fair
This knowing look seems so aware
The word pours forth from lips so dumb
A testament to kingdom come
This haunted mire through which I wade
To loose a mighty cavalcade
To cast the demons in my soul
Down super-massive jet black hole
© Chris Bond — 23 April 2001
I don't really know where this one came from. Throughout 2000 and 2001 masses of troublesome or inexplicable material would bubble up from my subconscious, much of it messianic. Not all was poetry, and on a few occasions I had visions of things which would later become reality; things way beyond my control. The basis of this poem was, I think, inspired by the destruction of the buddha statues in Bamiyan by the Taliban, shortly before the words came to me. It developed into a tirade against all religions and their inherent hypocrisies. None have the answer and none are the one. Misguided, mistaken and counter-productive; we cannot say that the world is a better place because of any of them. The temples of the world and their ministers are but pomp and theatre; self-aggrandisement; distractions; testaments not to the power of any god, but to the vanity of man. If there is a God, omniscient, omnipresent and omnipotent, then there is no need for any temples, and no need for any middle-men. The name Torino is hidden within verse 2, although I cannot now remember whether or not this was deliberate.
