Korea

Fifty years ago today we stood in rubble
The sun rose each morning through the smoke
Your planes flew above us looking for something left to bomb
Our factories, our schools lied ravaged and broke
And now you wonder why there is this anger
As we remember all too clearly a time that we once knew
When every home and every dam and so many, many people
Were flattened to the ground by the things you had to do

When Korea was just another name
For bombs falling from the sky
And home was just another word
For this place where people die

Fifty years ago today you killed my mother
I’ve lived my whole life and I never knew
The love she might have given, the joy she might have felt
To sit in the garden where her grandchildren grew
And now you wonder why we might feel attacked
You wonder at the stand our leaders take
But it was you, I remember, who gave us this lesson
Of the sound of a city when it breaks

Chorus

Fifty years ago today you killed my father
He was shooting at your planes when he died
Just one of how many million dead soldiers
Fighting and falling side by side
And now you wonder at what you call an evil axis
You throw words that someday will explode
We remember the last time you said these things
When crater was another word for road

Chorus

“Korea” appears on the 2004 solo acoustic CD, Songs for Mahmud.

When the western media is going on about the crazed paranoia of the DPRK/North Korean leadership, they would do well to reflect on the possible sources of that attitude, such as the genocidal US war against the people of northern Korea in the early 1950’s.  The whole of northern Korea was demolished from the air by the US military.  Millions of Koreans were killed, along with hundreds of thousands of Chinese soldiers.