An Eagle Flies

An Eagle Flies a Distant Sky
Crystal eyes, aetheric nerves

From distant skies look down.

Robot claws release their grip.

Fires of hell begin their fall.

Beneath, an edenic plain.

Two children, sisters play

With a doll blue eyed and blonde


Passing between small dark hands.

 

Bright smiles, laughter break under


Dark eyes. Joy and leaping

Steps as a new game begins.

The doll's pulled two ways at once,

Breaks and its wound bring silence,

Small recriminations.

But huddl’d beneath the sun

They splint and bandage its arm.

 

Becoming nurse and doctor

Another game is born.

The shade of the courtyard wall

is now a hospital ward.  

Faster yet hell’s fire bores down

From wings they never see.

Bursting through the courtyard wall

A pyre engulfs brick and stone.

 

Smoke and dust carry the flame

That melts the broken doll
,

lighting the sisters afire,

Burning flesh to char the bones.

Dead splattered meat draws the flies.

Games, dreams, and hopes are gone

Still above the eagle soars,

Crystal eyes never weeping.

 

Aether hides the assassins.

It’s us they claim to serve.

But where lies the loyalty

To life, to joy and laughter?
Where lays the true loyalty?
Is it to human life?
Have we forgotten what once
we lov'd and held so dearly?

Life, liberty and freedom
are not divisible.
True liberty and freedom
can not be bought with murder.

 

For all the victims of assassination, the killed, the wounded and their families, friends and neighbours:

 

This nation once opposed assassination on principle. It is our to our enduring shame that fear and indifference permits those we elect to continue in this morally reprehensible calculus of murder. 

Executive Order 11905 signed in 1976, by Gerald R. Ford formally banned political assassination while "improving" oversight on American Intelligence agencies, stating No employee of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.
This order was strengthened by Jimmy Carter's Executive Order 12036 in 1978 which states No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, assassination.
Executive order 12333 signed by Ronald Reagan reverted to a language closer to Ford's order; No person employed by or acting on behalf of the United States Government shall engage in, or conspire to engage in, political assassination.

Today, assassinations have become a routine instrument of national policy. So long as the proposed target is named as a terrorist, the American president can, on his signature alone, authorise a drone strike anywhere in the world except American territory. The level of acceptable "collateral  damage," other people killed or injured in the strike is likewise set according to standards set by the president alone.

Recently border security forces have been authorised to use drones. Though it is claimed they are unarmed, they are reputedly of the same type used to carry weapons overseas.

Total civilians killed are estimated at between between 380 to 801.  The moral damage done to our nation and to democracy has been incalculably high. 57 drone strikes are known to have occurred under the authority of George W. Bush in Pakistan, Somalia and Yemen alone.

During Obama’s two terms, 563 known drone strikes are know to have occurred in the same countries.
In Afghanistan during the Obama administration, more than a thousand strikes took place in 2016 alone. Those documented above do not include the far larger number of declared military drone strikes in that benighted nation, nor in Iraq, or Syria, the Sudan or Libya.
Constitutionally, the only way to effectively end this world wide campaign of terror is for the American Congress to ban political assassination in its entirety, and to provide for effective oversight armed drones, banning their use either entirely or at the minimum in declared wars. Armed drones, if they must exist, should be operated only by the military, not by so-called intelligence agencies, which have time and again proven unreliable when granted unsupervised power.
Here's the source for drone use data.