Korea - David Rovics

Fifty years ago today we stood in rubble

The sun rose each morning through the smoke

Your planes flew above us looking for something left to bomb

Our factories, our schools lied ravaged and broke

And now you wonder why there is this anger

As we remember all too clearly a time that we once knew

When every home and every dam and so many, many people

Were flattened to the ground by the things you had to do

When Korea was just another name

For bombs falling from the sky

And home was just another word

For this place where people die

Fifty years ago today you killed my mother

I’ve lived my whole life and I never knew

The love she might have given, the joy she might have felt

To sit in the garden where her grandchildren grew

And now you wonder why we might feel attacked

You wonder at the stand our leaders take

But it was you, I remember, who gave us this lesson

Of the sound of a city when it breaks

Fifty years ago today you killed my father

He was shooting at your planes when he died

Just one of how many million dead soldiers

Fighting and falling side by side

And now you wonder at what you call an evil axis

You throw words that someday will explode

We remember the last time you said these things

When crater was another word for road