Abhimanyu was a teenager

Chakravyuh or disc formation of warriors :Google images

What we did to that kid  -  Abhimanyu -

has it changed at all?  in two and a half

millennia, a killer joke, heartless laughs,

a foetus remote-taught to break into

complex war formations, the chakravyuh

but without an exit. Choreographed

murder of innocents, children bluffed

drawn into war, and worse.  Takes quite a few

thousand years to wipe that clean, and don’t come

mouthing that love can fumigate all sins.

Strain and you can still smell that old bloodstain

and the stink of fresher ones through the balm

two thousand years and more to make some sense

of it, and still it doesn’t, not one grain.

Abhimanyu is a character from the Hindu epic Mahabharat, who listens in on his father explaining the disc formation used in war from his mother's womb and is sent later to battle with such a formation when he's just sixteen. He fights bravely but is killed because he heard only the  entry and not exit.

Missed linking up on last week's prompt on sonnets at dVerse, so here it is for the OLN