Does It Yet Wave?

Often do I sit and stare,
Sometimes in contemplative despair,
Those bloody tides
Patterned with blank purity
Seen in the flow of distant nations.

There the crimson stains
Of the dared not refrain -
Splatter of the earthly spirit,
The essence of living,
Smeared delicately upon that waving canvas.

Brutal, barbaric truth, it Does Not seem.
There's denial in that extreme.
The altar of the willing sacrifice,
Ceaselessly drenched thick and crimson,
From blurry dawn to condemning eve.

Oh, here is the faded light.
I count fifty star tonight,
Guarded by martyred men.
The cost of range-less horizons,
Told by the bubbling blood streams,
Is un-mistakenly not free.