“I Will Not Give You My Children” is a dramatic poem set to music — a litany of words naming greed, tyranny, deception, and despair, broken again and again by a single unyielding refrain:
“I will not give you my children.”
It is both lament and defiance, resistance and promise.
A cry that innocence will not be surrendered.
I will not give you my children
liar, deceiver
fabricator, forger, counterfeit
falsehood, propagandist
fabricated, distorted
indoctrinator, brainwash
hypocritical, scheming
manipulative, corruptor, perverter
I will not give you my children
idolatrous, antichrist, apostate
heretical, false-prophet, charlatan
fanatical, zealous
profane, blasphemous, sacrilegious
defiling, desecrator
I will not give you my children
genocidal, murderous, homicidal
lethal, deadly, catastrophic, calamitous
ruthless, hostile
tormentor, persecutor
infanticidal, predatory, violator
bestial, inhuman, barbaric
I will not give you my children
rotting, decaying
putrid, fetid
hollow, void, voided
hollowed, broken, forsaken, desolate
cancerous, infectious, plague
toxic, poisonous, polluting
ravager, deforester, stripminer
I will not give you my children
scornful, jeering, mocking
grotesque, monstrous
obscene, tawdry, garish, gaudy
spectacle, performative
tokenistic, tokenism
I will not give you my children
hopeless, nihilistic
spiritless, soulless
hollowhearted, apathetic
indifferent, uncaring
futile, pointless, sterile
vain, illusory
I will not give you my children
betrayer, backstabber
turncoat, traitorous
treasonous, oathbreaker
faithless, unfaithful, honourless
I will not give you my children
lustful, lecherous, debauched
perverse, corruptive
defiler, adulterous, unloving
I will not give you my children
armageddon, apocalyptic, doomsday
pandemic, pestilence, contagion, contagious
malaise, corrosive, decadent
smothering, suffocating, stifling
panoptic, surveillance, spyware
algorithmic, mechanized, artificial
I will not give you my children
Michael Appelt 
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