A prose poem of no rhyme or meter or anything.

A scrawny child staggered out,
Shaggy with dust, arms raised,
Crying cries.

Unwashed Godless creature, I fumed.
Terrorist with jerry can.
Back off!

It would approach, it did, wanting
What? Food? Water?
What? 

No orphans here, I screeched.
To your rancid hovel. 
Languish there.

Heedless as sin, deafened, too,
The stinking wretch would advance,
And did.

Desecration of human flesh too foul
For dignity in death, I
Cursed it.

It closed in still, and so I,
As must be, took aim 
To kill.

This one, too, burst to bits, deservedly,
As the others, of its own extinction
Guilty.

Witness stand I to its guilt. Though the last, no less
A necessary life taken as holy self-
Defense decrees.¹ 

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1. The sacred duty of self-defense runs deep. “Self-love, my liege, is not so vile a sin/As self-neglecting” the Dauphin advises his father, King of France, in Shakespeare’s Henry V, Act 2, scene iv. ↩︎