They dug their tunnels straight down 
through the floor of the cancer ward.
That’s why we were forced to enter.
That’s why we had to administer
our precise and effective anaesthetic.

We found the WMDs beside the MRIs-
the ones Saddam kept hiding for so long.
That’s why we called upon our chemotherapy guns
to neutralise all traces of malignancy.

And in that smoky room, beneath the dialysis machines,
were cowering the last three escapees out of Alcatraz.
We hooked them up. We drained every toxin.

And trust us when we say that through there,
on the maternity ward, where the light’s not quite yet right
for you to film, we found the lost city of Atlantis.

It was crawling with terrorists:  Hamas, Al Qaeda, Sinn Fein, Mandela-
you name it. They were chatting back and forth in broken Arabic.
We caught it all on tape and will replay it for you later.

And, in amongst the records of the dead, we found two
origami planes some Islamists had fashioned to launch back at us.
They had folded up The Geneva Convention 
and The Treaty on the Prevention of the Crime of Genocide.
We destroyed them both in a controlled explosion. 

No civilians were harmed. 

And the week-old baby boy, born premature,
who was not born back before the bombs began,
must have been radicalised.

He did not condemn Hamas

and we found the makeshift imitation
of a drone-strike rocket, dusty in the rubble
of his incubator cell.

John Newsham was born in Bradford in 1989. In 2012 a selection of his poetry won a Dorothy Rosenberg Memorial Prize from the University of California, Berkeley, and the Grist prize from Huddersfield University. His debut novel, Killing The Horses (2021) is published by Wrecking Ball Press.
Poetry submissions to thursdaypoems@gmail.com