Urban Gunfire

‘Civilians’ are not really, truly, people. 
As regimes fall, they’re only ‘caught in crossfire’.
Expendablest of the expendable, they
crawl, or if they’re lucky someone drags them,
to doorways where they slump and shake till nightfall.
How great it must be not to be civilian
or anything but gun in hand, young, mobile,
slogan-fuelled better than machines are,
you cannot even hear the shattered housewife,
far less see her blood and bags and bread, it’s
bullet time between you and your sniper,
hot streaks go shopping, nothing else goes shopping,
no one is out there in the open, we are,
we are it and it is where they vanish
like a clapped piece of tawdry human magic,
too feeble to be seen by psyched-up fighters.
Their cries are in another world. The trigger
is steady as they roll about the tarmac.
And it goes on as if it could not finish.

(c) Edwin Morgan. Poems appear with kind permission of Carcanet Press and Mariscat Press. Images by kind permission of EdwinMorgan.com. With thanks to Edwin and the Scottish Poetry Library.