Lord, the days have grown dark with smoke
and the nights are lit with missiles
and I will not see another moon.
Have mercy.
My bones are wax.
My soul is ash.
O God, how long?
Will violence forever be progenitor
of this world’s values?
Will the malignancy of bloated egos
forever lead us beside death’s waters?
Will the ministers of illusion and conspiracy,
with slogans from our shrunken vocabulary,
forever divide us, then provide us
as convenient targets — scapegoats, sacrificial victims?
Open your eyes, Lord, the land is sprouting roadside crosses.
Who will be left? Who will think to praise you?
I am sick with grief.
I swim in tears.
I am undone, but for these hollow heaves.
Here I am, 21, and consumed by sorrow.
I stagger in the dark, up your holy mountain,
as under a sack of rocks.
I do not reach you.
There is no holy mountain, no holy mountaintop.
Oh, but if there is, if you’re listening,
if you understand my cries through my weeping,
deliver us, O Lord, from heads of state who walk on faces,
save us from all small politicians
who do the bidding of bankers,
who grow fat from the economies of war.
And may the wisdom of our spiritual lineages
rise and walk under no banner, but truth,
and may we fight the worst with our best.
Then, let commissars and presidents fall, headlong,
into the shame of their own making,
let the Generals be confounded,
by the laughter rising from old women,
and by the singing coming from the young,
and let soldiers everywhere, refuse their orders,
drop their arms and return to their mothers.
I think we all pray that all soldiers will ” return to their mothers “
May it be so.
Thanks Phil.
Amen to that
Yes. Thanks Ananda.
heads of state who walk on faces….. powerful image.
thanks Steve
Thank you Joanne.
Thank you, Stephen, for your always moving poems. Here’s a recent (almost always minimalist) one of mine.
Pietà
A bronze Pietà in front of a Florentine church,
Mary cradling her dead son in her arms.
Not the thorn-crowned one, but a soldier.
All the spent casings.
All the grieving mothers.
Thank you Sheryl. And thank you for a most striking ‘response poem’!
The heads of state sit and talk and smile and nod
While bombs and body parts explode
Never again means nothing to old men who send young men and women to war.
Thank you Louise, you’ve described the awful reality, there is no glory in war.
Thanks for this prayer, Steve…
It’s really hard to be a pacifist…
What does one do with one’s anger??
Thank you, Sam. Hard, indeed. Daniel Berrigan just kept protesting, until the end, channeled his rage into founding the Ploughshares movement and other anti-war, anti-nuclear movements. I’m not that courageous, I just rage on the page, occasionally write a poem.
Heart wrenching
Lord be our Good Shepherd
Thank you Heather.