Dominion

Suited, the powers that be enter the rooms
where they decide who lives, who dies, who gets
the spoils from orchestrated war. Each one assumes
the pipers’ bill won’t be paid. Each one forgets

that hell’s available on easy credit
until bombs go off in buses, underground
subways, markets, crowds of shoppers clowned
with masks of blood. Complicit media edit

out anything our eyes couldn’t bear to see—
what’s tragic here is “war pornography”
when it’s somewhere else. The guilty hide
in plain sight. Millions, shouting, are flicked aside

like moths in flames by gloating, evil wizards.
We watch their golden eggs hatch into lizards.

©2005 F.J. Bergmann

"Dminion" won an Honorable Mention in the SFPA sonnet contest and appeared in the 2007 anthology from Spec House of Poetry.

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