by Steve Osborn

Depleted Uranium, the new panacea
The Arms Maker's choice with a half-life of only 4.5 billion years.
Workers in DU must wear exposure suits and respirators
Just a creative use of atomic leftovers.

Dense, hard, it punches through armor like tissue,
Vaporizes and fragments into dust and tiny chunks.
Dust to be breathed and chunks to be imbedded
As shrapnel or become buried in earth.

Battle tested in Desert Storm and Kosovo,
Now everyone is making them, and selling them,
To armies around the globe, eager for the latest thing.
Meanwhile, the Iraqi desert and Kosovo are laden with tons.

Pay no attention to the sick and the dying.
The Government says it is anything but DU.
Agent Orange was all in the mind, too.
Birth defects and cancer are coincidence in Govspeak.

A hundred or a thousand years from now,
When Hussein and Imperial America are long forgotten,
Or are but spooky tales told around the campfire,
As a new civilization tries to grow.

Peasants, trying to coax food from the ground will stir up clouds of dust.
They, their children and their animals will slowly sicken and die,
And they will know not why.
Just collateral damage from a weapon long ago.

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