The Lie Comes Home

There comes a time when sins come home to roost.

It seemed the settled land had seen enough

Of deaths. With remnant natives few and far,

We saw the instincts and the actions rough

Projected out to distant fields of war.

Alas! The evil that refused to die

Now seeks its prey not just across the Earth,

But boldly strides, protected by the lie,

In towns and cities in its land of birth.

When men in masks and jackboots swarm the land,

As threats and missiles fly across the sea,

Then all of us should start to understand

The sort of hell in which we all will be.

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There comes a time when sins come home to roost

And so the horrors of the past are seen

In forms the devils now compete to boost

Within the homeland, cast in forms obscene,

And in the circle of proximity,

As charges are Trumped up to justify

Yet more of murderous atrocity

With lawless acts projected through the lie.

The greed for more of land remains, as does

The greed for wealth—and power over all.

And so the lethal evil grows, as does

The crowing hubris that precedes the fall.

2025 November 25, 2025, Tuesday.

Berkeley, California

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Abstract

This poem (The Lie Comes Home) is about how the drive to sustain and extend the extraction of power and wealth leads to the atrocities committed by empires in distant lands, being justified through mostly false propaganda, and how in time the lies, the suppression of truth, and the violence and atrocities all tend to return to the homeland, as well as to other countries in its region, to further divide, plague, and oppress the populations there.

Specifically, this poem was sparked by:

-          the suppression of protests, in the USA and elsewhere, against two years of intensified Israeli atrocities in Palestine and adjacent areas;

-          the deployment of ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) agents across the US homeland, targeting ‘coloured’ immigrants;

-          the dispatch of federalized National Guard troops to Democratic cities in the USA;

-          and the murderous violence and repeated threats against Venezuela initiated by the Trump administration.

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Arjun Janah is a retired New York City public school science teacher who grew up in Kolkata and studied in Delhi. He went to the USA in 1975 to do his doctorate in physics, and has remained there for family reasons. He had been active in his teacher's union in New York. He has been stuck for almost three years in Berkeley, California, but his permanent residence is in Brooklyn, New York. Arjun has been following the events in Palestine for a long time and many of his writings over the past two years have had to do with those. More of his poems can be found at: https://thedailypoet.blogspot.com