not just the harsh winter
nor the soldats that must be dodged,
not even the icy streets crowded
with frozen, empty faces,

not just the hunger or the quest
for a crust of moldy bread,
more than thud of blade on some
exquisite architecture turned firewood,

there was no tweet or twitter,
no facebook to spin the web of plot…
it was no digital war,  that Revolution
where poets were put against a wall

and shot as enemies of the state,
promiscuous, those times of need,
when squalor fed the flames
of lust and one made choices

based on fear with little hope
and less trust, when lettered men
chose to tie their own noose
rather than face life in the gulag

and literature lost the innocence
of simplicity in those darkened rooms
where poets gathered, speaking carefully,
knowing someone among them might be a Judas

I wonder if the Boston bombing would have happened
without the benefit of the Internet and the convenience
of facebook and the like, and  if the ‘digital terrorists’  exist
because of an ideology or because we have  a sub-culture
of computer geniuses who have grown  bored with killing
characters in a computer game.