Aftershock

[To Dream a Dream]

I wrote the following poem after learning of a particularly violent earthquake in Haiti a number of years ago. Metaphorically, it seems to aptly describe the current health crisis.

Aftershock

I believe in a benign eternity
Graced by our lonely, loving triptych God
Of infinite form and face.
Following the muffled voice in a wilderness of rubble.
Hovering beside with ancient anxious eyes.
Fluttering heart. And flapping crippled wings.

Born like each of us into a singular world
With little more than nothing. Many with much less.
Somehow. From somewhere.
To be sustained by a few drops of tepid water.
The tears of a divine compassion.
And the crumbling morsel of consecrated bread.

Dependent upon the kindness of inflated opportunities
And limited by cringing circumstance.
We learn to grab our wants with greedy desperation.
Always confronting the taunting paradox of sunshine and shadow.
Poverty and gain.

Until through some defining instant
A cataclysm yawns before us.
A sudden frenzy of struggling death and second birth
When the very earth shudders, cracks and falls.
Deafening. Senseless. The incomprehensible made real.
Leaving us cowering and bleeding away our agony of loss
Amid the wafting pathos of hastily buried grief.

Yet, beyond our own guilty revulsion of this happening horror.
Of weakening thirst. And howling hunger pangs.
A clumsy unity of the fallen slowly struggles to its feet.
With strength renewed by being reduced to our original morsel.
A living breathing manna.
Broken and spread indiscriminately among the ruins.
Hand to hand. Life to life.

1/24/10

[phozzy]

As always, your words strike a chord