Need help explicating a poem

[sharu7]

While I was building neat
castles in the sandbox,
the hasty pits were
filling with bulldozed corpses

and as I walked to the school
washed and combed, my feet
stepping on the cracks in the cement
detonated red bombs.

Now I am grownup
and literate, and I sit in my chair
as quietly as a fuse

and the jungles are flaming, the under-
brush is charged with soldiers,
the names on the difficult
maps go up in smoke.

I am the cause, I am a stockpile of chemical
toys, my body
is a deadly gadget,
I reach out in love, my hands are guns,
my good intentions are completely lethal.

Even my
passive eyes transmute
everything I look at to the pocked
black and white of a war photo,
how
can I stop myself

It is dangerous to read newspapers.

Each time I hit a key
on my electric typewriter,
speaking of peaceful trees

another village explodes.

Can someone help me explicate this poem? And what literary devices are present? What the tone, the mood of the poem and the author is?

 

[Harthan]

It's a metaphor for a simile.

 

[X]

It's basically just a poem about humanity's love of warfare and how the writer feels guilty because there's nothing he can do to stop the cyclical nature of violence and war, soldiers and combat will still happen no matter what the writer says or writes. Not sure who wrote this but it does sound a bit familiar. The mood and tone are both dark and grim, almost nihilistic.

Hope that helps.

EDIT: Google tells me it was written by a woman named Margaret Atwood.

 

[Blue Chipper]

Do your own homework. Amiright?

 

[Kermit]

Now I am grownup
and literate

 

[sharu7]

I thought similies were comparisons using Like or As, but there isn't one there?

 

[Kermit]

He was joking.