Fractured Lives

This poem reflects events in the world in the past month, but those reflections themselves are but a part of a pattern that we see repeated in different variants, again and again. It is hard to see much hope in a world dominated by Mars, the Bringer of War, but perhaps Holst can supply a clue. Jupiter, the bringer of joy, is bright in the sky now, and while not permanent and for ever, our troubles are to the vastness of the cosmos as ripples on the edge of a shore before a vast ocean. They can give us a sense of perspective, that while our troubled times are truly dreadful, they will not last.

Fractured Lives

I remember the news about the crash:
The debris, bodies, charred and ash,
Scattered wide over such a distance,
And hearing of the final instance,
The screams of those about to die,
As the plane came down from high;
But the fractures do not stop there,
Every day, stories tell of the fear;
A university in Tunisia, students die,
Felled by terrorists. Families cry
At loved ones torn away so young:
The lamentations once more sung;
And stolen children, seized away,
Taken into slavery, even in the day;
How lonely the villages, now so bare,
And like widows, in grief and fear;
And an ancient past is torn apart
By conquerors who have no heart
Nineveh falls, as bulldozers destroy
Tear down statues, in hate deploy
All means to destroy relics of the past
A brutal regime, making a new slave caste
As women are trampled, men beheaded
A religion with horrors so embedded
Within its very rotten core of slaughter
Tears run like streams of living water
At this agony, this suffering, this loss
This is the end, the finality, the cross
Fractured lives: pray that all may cope
Pray to kindle again a flame of hope
As Mars is rising, blood red, stained
Bringer of war, and captives chained
And night is very dark, but stars shine
And Jupiter brings us with joy a sign.