Off the Beaten Track

By Lynn Ockersz

The jumbo, cornered and fuming,

Stamps on a lonesome hamlet,

In a ‘No-go Zone’ for Visitors,

Scattering bricks and rafters,

Of what once were homesteads,

Thrusting on the village folk,

The sad task of burying their dead,

And of picking up the pieces,

Of their so ‘brutally short’ lives,

But return they must,

To their run-down watch huts,

And listen to the midnight wail,

Of suddenly orphaned children,

Now part of the collective chorus,

Of benighted lives on the margins.