Anti-war essays, poems, short stories and literary excerpts
Jack Lindsay
Who Will Dare Look This Child in the Eyes? (1950)
This leprosy of death, this delicate
device of pain as vast as a star gone rotten
with some shrewd virus of decay:
This intricate defilement of deepest springs,
this pus of death that blotches and blots the sun
across the pitted face of day:
This Thing was made by man, his brain, his hands.
You are a man, accomplice of this Thing.
Redeem your birthright while you may.
Hell has another name now, Hiroshima,
darker than all the rings of burning darkness
where Dante clambered his accusing way.
Can you escape the ghosted night, the eyes
of children scraped to ragged bone?
You are a man. What word have you to say?
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