Rainbow Song

ALL IN PURPLES AND BLUES

DADDY MAKE ME A RAINBOW

SO I CAN CLIMB UP TO YOU.

SHE STOOD IN THE DOORWAY

FACE DRAWN WITH DESPAIR

TEARS SHONE ON HER CHEEKS

SMALL HANDS FOLDED IN PRAYER

MOMMY SAYS YOU’RE IN HEAVEN

YOU GOT HURT IN IRAQ

DADDY, I REALLY MISS YOU,

AND I JUST WANT YOU BACK.

ALL IN PURPLES AND BLUES

DADDY MAKE ME A RAINBOW

SO I CAN CLIMB UP TO YOU.

SHE RAN THROUGH THE DOORWAY

SMILES BROKE AT THE SIGHT

FOR GOD IN HIS WISDOM

SENT HER RAINBOW FIRST LIGHT

 

THE HOUSE IS CLOAKED IN DARKNESS

SHREDDED WREATH ON THE DOOR

ANOTHER CASUALTY OF WAR.

                                        WRITTEN BY MARY E. WRIGHT, 90 YEARS OLD

                            

Usually my blog postings are impassioned screeds on what I feel is a world besieged by a species that has evolved (and multiplied) but has never overcome its primal nature - the homo sapiens. Our  primal nature shows up in the ease in which we accept these endless savage confrontations called wars. We are a species that has refined our tool making capabilities, our evolutionary adaptation, to the degree that we now can't even utilize our most advanced  lethal creations - our chemical, biological and nuclear weapons. The consequences of their use are simply too horrible even for us.  One would think that having devised something so awesomely horrible, so massive in scale, so doomsday-like as a thermonuclear weapon, that it would spell the end of the grand old game of war. But no, on any given day somewhere in the world (usually many places at once) armed bands, sometimes ordered into combat by their governments sometimes not, packs of young men are hard at work trying to kill each other with devices of lesser levels of magnitude by no less level of lethality. But what makes it so much worse is that innocent outsiders, non participants such as children, who have no idea what the fight is over, or simply members of the wrong tribe, religion or nationality who are caught in the crossfire.

The above poem is a step or two back from that long view. People like me who focus our rage at the malign political processes that produce wars often forget that the fundamental tragedy of war is at the personal level. The above poem hones in on that side of it – children who lose a parent in a war, seemingly inexplicably...