photo credit: commons.wikimedia.org

when they put us to the sword,
they clapped their hands and
raised a joyous shout:

our lord, they cried, is king
over all the earth;
let us sing to the most high,
the one who subjects peoples to our will
and lays nations down at our feet.

oh yes, we know this song,
we sang it once ourselves, though
at the time we thought
it was a victory cry or a
psalm of deliverance, or maybe
a kind of crazy, passionate
love poem.

let them sing their songs –
when their new lover moves on
and their cities have been
laid to waste,
they’ll realize all too soon
that their hymn of praise
to the most high
was really a cry of terror, or
a song of fealty to
the neighborhood bully,
or maybe it was just the terms
of their surrender.