Howard Firkin
The mothers ask their simple question: why
did I give birth? Why did the life I formed
and cherished, taught, protected, nourished, warmed,
why did I make life just to see it die?
Their fruitless questions asked of a barren God.
Destruction is the moron's only talent.
To bomb, to sack, tear down, to make life cease,
to take a razor to a masterpiece
requires mere submission to intent—
the free will granted any arthropod.

Men are the agents of their own decay,
an infestation, plague, disease of state.
We are our own inevitable fate,
the something rotten, eaten, mouldering away.