DRAMATIC Monologue Poem: The Gun is Good, by Robert René Galván

The gun is good…Go forth and kill!

From Zardoz, a dystopic film by John Boorman

(The reader is surrounded by a chorus of masked youths dressed in black.)

They tell me the gun is good,
That it has never harmed anyone
Through its cold, mindless steel,
Its potent powder and ruthless point.

It is the beast that kills,
The beast whose myriad carpals
Evolved into a fist, a means to grasp
Stone, fashion deadly shafts,
And from these beginnings, an endless
Armory until even the ether is harnessed
For Armageddon,

The same hand that fixed with breath
And mineral spray vast murals
In the darkness, visions of migrating herds,
Of equine flight and creatures long since vanished,

The hand that now builds sprawling arcades
To house dreams etched in stone,
On framed canvases, or in projected light,
The embodiment of our better selves,

A hand that creates and destroys.

Chorus: We embrace the flower of youth,
Open our petals to the sun:
A dream of things to come.

I hear the distant lamentation of mothers
Made immediate by wonders unimagined
By the old ones.

Our chosen elders, still robed like priests,
Pour over an icon, barely three centuries old,
Somehow archaic against our frantic pace.

Surely the wisest among us
Can break the impasse,
Quell the waste;

They will hear great argument
Through the furrowed brow of sincerity,
Fingers crossed behind the back,
As fear masquerades as preparedness
Fetish, disguised as freedom.

Do they hear the lamentation
Of the mothers?

Chorus: We embrace the flower of youth,
Open our petals to the sun:
A dream of things to come.

The world is in a stupor,
Stunned by a poison apple,
A plethora of diversions –

My flesh, fragile against these forces,
The delicate conduits easily rent,
Can only unleash this threnody
For the mothers and fathers,
Sing like an anguished bird
In a fathomless mine
That enough will heed the warning
And survive.

Chorus: We embrace the flower of youth,
Open our petals to the sun:
A dream of things to come.

How many lost lives are acceptable?
Humanity is a constellation;
An extinguished star changes its complexion.
What might have come of its light?
Chorus: We embrace the flower of youth,
Open our petals to the sun:

A dream of things to come.

(The members of the chorus remove their masks, one by one, and say what they might have become in life.)

A healer
A mother
A chef
A poet
An engineer
An artist

(or each may speak a profession of his/her own choosing)

Our vestigial fangs react to blood in the air:

We kill for avarice,
In anger,
In jealousy,
For territory,
For ideology,
For sport.

If we cannot control the impulse,
Then we must limit the means before

It
Is
Too
Late!

[BANG!] (The chorus stomps the floor in tandem.)

(Each chorus member pulls out a length of red cloth which has been hidden in their fists and
places it over an imagined wound, as each strikes a contorted pose as if shot, and should have
expressions of fear, anguish, confusion and despair on their unmasked faces. They freeze until
the reader moves.)

Robert René Galván