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| Phosphorus bombs over Gaza. January 2009 |
It poetically addresses the atomic slayings of the inhabitants of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, the selective annihilation of Iraq by George Bush Sr. in January and February 1991 and the more complete destruction of Iraqi society launched by his son George W. Bush in 2003. It also reflects on the nature of the assaults upon Lebanon conducted by the Israeli military in 2006 and 2008, and on the inhabitants of Gaza in January 2009 and November 2012.
The music that accompanies We Do It Differently These Days was composed and performed by Nico Di Stefano.
We Do It Differently These Days can be streamed using the media player above. A CD quality mp3 file is available for download here.
The Poem
We Do It Differently these Days
We do it differently these days
Faultless execution by clever machines
All done at a safe distance
But fault lines form
And lines of logic now fail
The surgical strike has become a woeful massacre
Neither breath nor bone remained
When the fire of those two suns
Atomised all in the furious core
And at the margins
We beheld the new flaying
It hung in strips from wailing women and burning men
We do it differently these days
We break the roads and burst the mains
We foul the water and choke the air
We seed the earth with deadly fire
We burn the future of young mothers
