[Wild Bill]

I admire the trochaic meter, both for its just-right measure of the material and for the skill of execution. One almost expects to hear it sung from a minaret at dusk. It is very difficult to do well; I think it is nearly perfect here.

Although it was written as a lamentation for the American invasion of Iraq, we could also think of the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait a decade earlier when "men [came] for conquest yet [cried] liberation", or of the larger cycle of history of mankind's aggression. "Names shift like sand dunes" is a priceless line.