March 20, 2022

It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery.

"The word "children" was spelled out on two sides of the theater before it was bombed, according to satellite images."

"The bodies of the children all lie here, dumped into this narrow trench hastily dug into the frozen earth of Mariupol to the constant drumbeat of shelling."

Attribution:

This is the dark time, my love,
All round the land brown beetles crawl about.
The shining sun is hidden in the sky
Red flowers bend their heads in awful sorrow.

This is the dark time, my love,
It is the season of oppression, dark metal, and tears.
It is the festival of guns, the carnival of misery.
Everywhere the faces of men are strained and anxious.

Who comes walking in the dark night time?
Whose boot of steel tramps down the slender grass?
It is the man of death, my love, the strange invader
Watching you sleep and aiming at your dream.
— This is the dark time, my love by Martin Carter in Poems of Resistance from British Guiana (London 1954)