Wrap the children in white.

Join the Army, see the world, meet interesting people - and kill them. ~Pacifist Badge, 1978.

Send all your children out in white underwear
into the street before the carpet bombing.
Bring your babies out swaddled in white linen
in a procession of white prams.
Grandmothers and Mothers spread the white
family bed sheets flapping in canopy through the streets.

Men, pour the paint spill it over the wall,
roof and pavement in brilliant white.
Call the mechanics of the community;
Fathers and Sons, respray your cars:
Bone white, vanilla white, ice white,
then drag race in your thousands through the city.

Families unscrew the milk, leave hundreds of glasses
on hundreds of white on hundreds of tables in parks of green.
Rally the florists, line every gutter, decorate every tree
with white Roses, Gardenias, Orchids, Hydrangeas,
Wisteria, let the garlands hang empty and white.

Boys and girls, let hundreds of white footballs
pin pong through the streets, let fire extinguishers run
through with their white breath. Bakers let your sacks of flour
smoke through the air.

When the enemies of sleep come to put us to bed permanently
they will see clouds of white citizens in robes of Jesus,
in a City, for once, the colour of an ideal.

This is the day. The approaching bombers
will be blinded by the nuclear white landscape
by us all coming together in Universal whiteness.