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PostPosted: 01/07/09 6:46 pm • # 1 
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Joined: 01/04/09
Posts: 4072

I try to write poetry from time to time. Not long after the 911 event I was at work, a slow night, and I couldn't stop thinking about the people who loved the 3000 persons who lay buried in that empty, still-smoking place in New York - obituaries call them the survivors - and how suddenly, horribly devastated they must have been. I tried to express my empathy with them in a poem. Maybe it's as applicable to Gaza as it was to New York. Now it just feels to me like an anti-war poem.


We cry out to you now, we survivors,
Milling about in lives newly empty.

We husbands are empty at the sides
Where our wives were joined to us for life,
Today we are choking on saved up love words
Which we did not spend yesterday and the day before
While they had value.
Those places where our wives were part of us are bleeding.
We are never going to heal.

We mothers are hollow,
Vacant now in the deepest inside places
Where our children lived and grew
And glowed within us until yesterday,
Even the grown ones.
We are utterly empty now.

We children are lost.
We stand expectantly, for our mothers promised us.
They swore faithfulness with every breath we felt them draw
And so they cannot be gone, this cannot be.
We wait in horrified confusion for our dead mothers and fallen fathers
To lift us out of this empty place.

We wives find ourselves at an altar slab
In the middle of the empty place.
Our bridal gowns are bloody bandages
On wounded souls today.
The pages of our holy book of promises
Lie scattered and scorched at our feet,
With our ruined dreams.
Someone has killed all our husbands.
We are violated and betrayed,
We are too shattered to cry.

And we brothers and sisters!
We stand at the edge of the empty place,
Each remembering that man and that woman
Whose face and heart were so like our own,
Formed of the same flesh, blood and bone
In the same womb.
Like us but not us.
How incomplete we are
With the brother and sister parts of us torn away.

We cry to you out of new emptiness now,
Not demanding revenge
But an end.

Gramp



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PostPosted: 01/07/09 7:04 pm • # 2 
I have never heard it expressed better, grampa. Image




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PostPosted: 01/08/09 3:24 am • # 3 
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Joined: 11/07/08
Posts: 42112
WOW gramps ~ just WOW ~ extremely powerful ~ gives me the chills ~ and will stay with me ~

Sooz


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PostPosted: 01/10/09 9:35 am • # 4 

That was powerful, Gramps.



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PostPosted: 03/17/09 8:15 am • # 5 
Truly moving. Thank you.


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PostPosted: 04/05/09 12:09 am • # 6 
Bravo! Very moving words!


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