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...
