In the barren battlefield
Of bloodied corpses
Lying unidentified
Amid the raging of hundred guns
A blind boy was playing his mandolin.
By the barbed wire
That divided them
The blind boy was resting.
Grenades exploded
Machine guns roared
With every strum of his mandolin.
But like Jimi’s guitar
The blind boy played on still.
Unaware
Unheeded
He was escaping big bullets
But he played on still.
Where the sandstorm was raging
And the shuddering cries of death
Turned the desert into an ocean of
blood,
Shell shocks could be felt in the blind
boy’s strings.
Tunes of erstwhile glory
And heroic deeds
And Mozart and Bach
With napalm
Vibrated through the air:
When the blind boy’s strings snapped
And he fell to the ground
Collapsing into a mound of dust,
The battlefield sounded no more
And all the soldiers died.
He was blind and couldn’t see.
All that he had heard
He had played.
He had no dreams.
He was a child like you or me
He was a child like you or me...
The mandolin was sinking
In warm blood......
