Dark Oracles
By Peter John
Electric jungles, black and white,
With bullets broadcast every night,
And body counts from Walter Cronkite.
That’s the way it was …
When screams from someone else’s war
Entranced me on the parlor floor
And Daddy said, “We’re killing for the right
Our country does.”
Now Technicolor airwaves beam the battles from abroad.
The heavy decades of regret and still we’re playing God,
But I have shed the biases my father taught his son,
And recognize the wrong our country’s done …
Now I scream –
This is the wave of tomorrow, it’s breaking,
No soldiers to train.
No sons for the motherland.
No daughters to chain.
No fathers can force us to follow
The trails their lies have worn
No beatings can bring us to follow
The empty oathes they’ve sworn.
Dark Oracles blind us from knowing
The destiny we earn.
They tell us tomorrow must burn,
But the tables still can turn.
Today we are contemplating
Destroying Earth and sky.
No armies will need to be marshaled
If we should ever let the missiles fly.
Our navies will drift unattended
On seas of glowing blood.
Our bones will be washed with extinction
On shores of steaming mud.
A thousand millennia linger
Till dawns another age.
We’re smudges of ink on a finger
That helps to turn the page –
That’s all we are …
Dark Oracles echo our questions
With riddles of their own.
The answers that slice to the bone
We interpret alone.
Our planet is plagued with a species
A tumor in her head
Infesting her face with a growing
Malignant urban spread.
We poison her provident waters.
We scrape away her skin.
We synthesize sunspots in kettles
And melt her flesh to tin.
The hands of the stopwatch are frozen
A second to the bell.
One moment will show if we’ve chosen
To make the Earth a paradise or hell.
Dark Oracles’ blinding ambitions
Are fostered by our fear.
They say a catastrophe’s near,
We create what we hear,
And then we say Dark Oracles are right –
Dark Oracles calling in the night –
Dark Oracles swallowing the light.
The future offers these footsteps,
Oh, Mothers! Your sons refuse to kill.
Your daughters’ desperate oppression is over
Protected by the pill.
No promise of life without aching,
But one more day to live.
No glorious prize for the taking,
But one more chance to give.
Dark Oracles promise tomorrow
Humanity must die,
And then leave us wondering why
Without a clear reply.
It’s time for Dark Oracles to die!
Electric jungles, colorized,
While bullets go unrecognized,
With freedom blindly jeopardized,
Just like the way it was.
——-
“Dark Oracles” – Words and Music © 1991 by Peter John Stone. Video © 2010 by Peter John Stone; Brief tune in video, from “Dark Oracles, © 1991 by Peter John Stone. Please contact author for permissions on any use, but the atuhor offers reasonable terms.
Mirrors in a Prism 
Comments on: "Dark Oracles" (1)
I began writing “Dark Oracles” during the U.S. invasion of Panama, and finished it when the U.S. deployed troops for Operation Desert Shield. I actually thought I was working on two different pieces. It was my first published poem as an adult, and my second publication.
Many of my views have changed since I its writing. “Dark Oracles” represents a secular perspective, not an esoteric spiritual perspective. I still believe its vision, the alternative in the last verse, offers the best outcome for humanity we can expect relying on human intellect alone.