Snarls of a ruby banner strike pale sky as the muddied ground churns in vehemence. Treat this moment – these burnished helmets and cocked conches – as if you will never again hold this spear, feel this blood coarse your forearms, and that perhaps the stars will come out tonight in this very place. 

Now cry out.

One! 

For fathers and forefathers. For seeds sown and ploughs trawled by intrepid oxen. One millennium of twirling spits and sickly infants breastfed at the same pools we gutted wild boar. And now the colonel is bellowing:

Two!

“Dawn your mutiny! Dawn uncle’s scar and grandfather’s eyepatch and brother’s dirtied blood so that dawn may yet break upon the horizon. Drape jagged toothed warlords in their entrails: strings of malevolence rung taut with the sweet syrup of revenge.” For blood is only crimson until it dries to the wine tinted stroke of royalty.

Three! 

Don’t you see God's golden hand catch the daylight? Don’t you see Satan's fiery aperture beat manacled men in their hubris? You will stand, drenched in the pride of slaughtered victims, leering because you can no longer tell the difference between distilled berries and severed necks, between the slumped companion and the stifled empire.