HOLY BROKENNESS
Missing the wildness of my younger self
I degenerate into words. Waiting, between
sentences, for the muse to catch up with me,
I fulminate, flash like lightning, explode
So that I catch myself thinking this
Is all an act to compensate for the time
Brian climbed that tree before disappearing
To Japan, for all eternity. I wish Haiku was true.
A cherry blossom flash of inspiration
To cancel out the impure repetitiveness
Of so-much empty rhetoric in public discourse –
Those who claim the mantle of Bertolt Brecht
So easily forget that every human life is sacred
Even those whose opinions you despise
Open up your eyes to the holy imperfections,
That make us love all that is frail, human, broken.
I degenerate into words. Waiting, between
sentences, for the muse to catch up with me,
I fulminate, flash like lightning, explode
So that I catch myself thinking this
Is all an act to compensate for the time
Brian climbed that tree before disappearing
To Japan, for all eternity. I wish Haiku was true.
A cherry blossom flash of inspiration
To cancel out the impure repetitiveness
Of so-much empty rhetoric in public discourse –
Those who claim the mantle of Bertolt Brecht
So easily forget that every human life is sacred
Even those whose opinions you despise
Open up your eyes to the holy imperfections,
That make us love all that is frail, human, broken.
John Marks
Sun 17th Oct 2021 21:54
Thank you Stephen, Pete and Holden. Islamo-Fascists, neo-Nazis, authoritarians of left and right, have one thing in common - they despise the ordinary lives of ordinary people. They have no empathy. In that great American anti-Fascist novel To Kill a Mocking Bird, Tom Robinson's defender, Atticus Finch, advises his daughter Scout that:
"You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view… until you climb in his skin and walk around in it.”