Burning Horizons. Dirge for a Savaged Earth

This original piece offers a poetic reflection on the moral obscenity of aerial warfare as it has been exercised from the attack on Dresden in February 1945 to the sacking of Baghdad in March 2003.

Production Notes
Music: Nico Di Stefano
Voice:  Vincent Di Stefano



Burning Horizons can be streamed using the media player above. A CD quality mp3 file is available for download here.

 What was it like when Dresden was sleeping
And the sky shrieked metal then crashed all around
And the town was a furnace a fiery hell-world
For mothers and children now under the ground

And what was it like that big-sky morning
When Little Boy cried then howled down the day
The crashing of atoms the tempest of terror
The unknowing mothers all blown away

First in Kabul and then on the Tigris
Silicon soldiers tore open the night
And wounded yet further a people near broken
And brought further darkness in fulminant light

The hatred now stored in the cones of the missiles
That rage and release in ruin and woe
And the heart of the night pierced again with fierce metal
The blood and the water continue to flow

I wait for the turn of a cheek that was promised
I wait for the love of a world now in woe
I wait for the call of a sorrowing mother
For terror on terror can nowhere go

Vincent Di Stefano
July 2011