Analysis of Collateral Damage
Collateral Damage
The men moved silently through the dark morning air
March, ninety-seven in Albania, one had to take care.
Slowly and quietly, moving from wall to wall
Total radio silence, it was the commanders call.
No warnings, no help, no armored escort
Just men in the darkness, penetrating a fort.
The building in front of them, headquartered a boss,
Albanian gang leaders who caused all this chaos.
The trespassers were Americans, but no uniforms did they wear
hired guns from their government, which was not supposed to be there.
The sentry half sleeping, half drunk on his wine,
caught the first suppressed bullet, and he was the first in the line
of a day that would send many a man straight to hell,
and the rest of the survivors left mentally unwell.
It wasn’t much after, the position was breeched,
Intel was mistaken, not a couple of bodyguards,
But two squads of mobsters, twenty men each.
The men withdrew quickly, to save their own skin,
behind the brick wall, I quickly radioed in.
Send backup, we need it, was our desperate call,
but the radio was silent, no sound from it at all.
Shooting into darkness, they continued their fight,
Two of my men wounded, this was our plight.
“Marines won’t engage”, was what the radio said
I then looked over, and my friends were now dead.
We kept fighting and stalling, as we lay in the sod
In desperation I aimed my rifle, still praying to God.
A God who had promised that he would guide my path
I looked for his love often, but saw only his wrath,
upon innocents and children, which to me was so sad
that so many children died in this land that had gone mad.
But that night God was silent, refusing to engage,
And the gangsters would have killed us in all of their rage.
My hands shook violently as I held onto the mic,
and gave them the coordinates for the airstrike
In seconds it was over, the buildings were gone.
The bad guys succumbed, bleeding, and burning on the lawn.
But horrors in the ruble was what my men found.
Remains of women and children half buried in the mound.
Their neighbors came running, screaming, crying, cursing our names.
Their loved ones were gone, their lives never the same.
Not your fault, collateral damage, that’s what they all say
but I was now a killer of children, no better than McVay.
The bad dreams sometimes haunt me, late in the night
but because we killed a mob boss, all was put right.
Aboard our transport, we ended our twenty-night stay
To attend the double funeral of Michael and Ray.
“It’s all God’s plan”, said the chaplain, “We follow God’s route”
That moment I refused it, and from God I walked out.
But God hadn’t finished, with the consequences from that land
Over the next twenty years, two more friends died
but by their own hand.
A God who didn’t help me when I needed him most,
And left me forever broken, haunted by ghosts.
Back home a Navajo shaman looked into the fire and cried,
as he saw that along with his grandson, my soul had also died.
Scheme | XAA BB CC DD AA EE XB CXX FF BB GG HH II JJ KK LL XX MM NN XX OO GG OO XX PQP XX QQ |
---|---|
Poetic Form | |
Metre | 010010 011100101101 110100010011111 100100101111 1010101100101 1101111001 11001010001 01001111001 0100110111110 01001001110111 1011110011101111 01011011111 101011001101001 1011111001111 0011001011001 11110001011 110101010110 1111101011 01011011111 01011110100 11111110101 1010110111111 100110101011 11111011101 01101110101 11110011011 1110010111001 00101111011011 011110111111 1111110111011 01100010111111 11101010111111 1111110010101 0010111101111 11110001111001 01100100101 010111001001 0110110010101 110001011111 01110010110001 110110101010101 11101111001 11101001011111 1111010110110101 01101111001 101110111111 011001110101011 10101010011001 1111101011011 1101011011111 1111010100111 10011011111 11111 011111111011 011010101011 110101010101001 111101111111101 |
Closest metre | Iambic hexameter |
Characters | 3,050 |
Words | 606 |
Sentences | 28 |
Stanzas | 27 |
Stanza Lengths | 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 2, 3, 2, 2 |
Lines Amount | 57 |
Letters per line (avg) | 41 |
Words per line (avg) | 9 |
Letters per stanza (avg) | 86 |
Words per stanza (avg) | 20 |
About this poem
About the Albanian Revolution of 1997
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"Collateral Damage" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2024. Web. 23 Apr. 2024. <https://www.poetry.com/poem-analysis/113907/collateral-damage>.
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