One morning of a great dawn,
I receive a letter.
This letter commands me
to bow to patriotism.
The so-called homeland that gives everything and nothing.
I am told to buy my equipment.
I am told to defend against the invader.
I am told that anti-imperialism is my path.
That same voice tells me: I am afraid, my family suffers from this new reality.
The next day, the army comes to my door.
It tears me away with violence. I refuse to kill my own.
I end up on the battlefield despite myself.
I see only frightened people,
people who, in a fraction of a second, have nothing left,
only the flag that serves as their shroud.
That same shroud killed, on the very first day, thirteen proletarian comrades.
The storm turns the worker
into a shield for industrialists.
Every minute, the cannon grows louder, profits grow…
Days blur together in the mud of the trenches,
where fear learns to walk alongside human beings.
They speak of victory like an empty prayer,
repeated by those who will never see the front.
We are promised land, flags, borders,
but I see only nameless graves everywhere in the world.
An officer shouts words without flesh or fatigue,
as if life could be contained in a dry command.
But order does not hold back falling bodies,
it does not stitch up the flesh torn open by morning.
So I think of escape as a light,
a breach in the machinery of slaughter.
Desertion becomes a breath, a refusal, a line
drawn against the machine that devours the living.
And if leaving were already surviving the lie,
refusing that death wear the face of duty?
Dear government, I will desert,
never again will the word war be able to exist.
Your religious homeland, dead through war,
I am desertion, and you are death.
I walk beyond your maps and your orders,
beyond borders drawn on living skin.
I leave your flags soaked in old blood,
I return your symbols to the dust they deserve.
For nothing is sacred in a mass grave,
nothing noble in a field ploughed with cries.
Your heroes are shadows made of silence,
your victories numbers written over corpses.
And I choose emptiness over your cannons,
the step that moves away over the step that marches.
I choose bare life, without uniform or command,
life that refuses to become machine.
So listen, world of iron and flags:
every deserter is a breach in your empire of chaos.
Every refusal is a dawn cracking your walls,
every awakened conscience a slow collapse.
And when your armies no longer know whom to kill,
when your words break against closed mouths,
there will remain only an immense, clear silence:
that of living beings who have finally stopped obeying.
DESERTION will be our collective path.