Night of the Charring Flames

By Lynn Ockersz

They craved not the cover of darkness,

For, they had the state’s ready collusion,

And being held accountable for their deeds,

Was not within the realms of the possible,

It’s just that news of battlefield losses,

Came at eve, giving them the cue for action,

During that fateful July forty years ago,

And they went about it with an ease,

That only befits professional annihilators;

Their screaming prey bundled out of bed,

And torched on highways to wild approval,

While homes that were the nurseries of love,

Businesses built by the ‘Sweat of the brow’,

Were all reduced to ashes ere long,

And belongings in a trice spirited away,

Reducing to haplessness once stable people,

But all these years ought to have made it plain,

That the flames of 1983 are here to stay.