To make the bitter butter better
Death drops from the sky ablaze with alliteration. Don’t all weapons begin with the same intention? How heinous is hubris? How horrific is hate? How hollow, humanity? Do we talk like that too? Everything, an opinion Everything, so certain. Everything starting with ‘I’. I insist it is. I insist it isn’t. We normalize the bad like we flatten crumpled paper. Deny the wrinkles. See how the summer sun shines on the sand without shame. There is a little broken boy in a broken house. Still. There is a girl — and a god and a grave — gathered in conversation. Still. There are hungry children. Ribs clear as day. And that’s not all. But let us play word games. Myopia or malicious madness? Predisposition or pointless pursuit? Sacrilege or the savagely sacred? How deep in the fog were you before you heard the silence? How close to the fire before you felt its tongue? How old before you counted the circles of a different hell? On the road that runs through the roughest regions of redemption, how far gone were you before you realized you had left yourself behind?
#Poetry
I feel your pain, Rajani. I have been in radio silence, away from it all but know that the suffering of the vulnerable continues unabated. Your poetry helps me to know where to put those feelings.
Superb work! I love it when I can sense the theme at the beginning and then just spend the rest of the poem enjoying and appreciating the words, imagery and craft.