Crimson embers
Colored the evening sky
Below the falling sliver of sunlight
Where roving death plots and conspires

Structures spewed flame
At the arriving gusts of war
When the shells carved their jagged paths
And young men
Swarmed with fiendish elation

The ambient glow
Larked for miles
In the sparse, distant rattling
As the salvo’s mourned
To their final, and deafening blast

Civil onlookers
Tremored just the same
Above the soft flickering hell
Far from the wrath of its searing glow

For nights on end
The city blazed
Raptured by a spell of chaos
For masculinity, for chief, kin and country
For a chance at glory
No matter how obscene