LeHah
212 Squadron - "The Old Man's Eyes And Ears"
Delance said:
Grim was the barter, red the trade,
With dripping swords for coins,
And your women screamed in the trampled sand
With bruised and bleeding loins
Blood smeared your satin and silk and lace.
You heard your children moan,
And your elders howled in the market place
Where we striped them skin from bone.
We have doffed our wolfskin clouts for silks,
We wear them clumsily,
Our eyes are bleak, our beards unshorn,
Our matted locks stream free.
But our sons will trim their beards and hair,
Don cloaks of crimson hue;
They will take your daughters to their beds,
Till they grow soft as you.
They will trade their freedoms for harps and lutes,
Discard the bow and dart;
They will build a prison of satin and gold,
And call it Culture and Art.
They will lie in the lap of a smiling land,
Till its rusts unman and rot them,
And they scorn their blood, and the calloused hand,
And the fathers that begot them.
But our brothers still dwell in the sun-seared waste
And their sons are hard and lank;
They will hunt the wolf-pack that we chased,
And drink the water we drank.
The hungers we knew they too will know,
The scars of fangs and briars;
In the rocks where they crouch when the sandstorm blows
They will find the marks of our fires.
They will know the hungers that once we had,
While the stream of centuries runs,
Till they burst from the desert, hunger-mad,
To slaughter our slothful sons.
