To the Victors: Yeats Challenge, Day 8

This is for Jane Dougherty’s A Month with Yeats Challenge, Day 8. The quotation called for blood and violence, though I much prefer singing stars.

‘The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned;’

 

They marched and fought

sought gold and wrought

a hellish place from what was paradise.

Sliced bodies through and through

because god was on their side, they knew,

so stopping their ravage only to ravish,

to stake their claims and to establish

there as blood fell upon the land

their claims, as it flowed red upon the sand

in an extensive eternal tide–thus dispensed,

forever drowning innocence