Skip to main content

Obedient Mayflies


Every child upon the earth feels with their spirit, mothers tell them to stay by their side, there’s less panic in proximity.

They’ll learn that they cannot remain when the wind calls out to them, lifting their feet in freedom, fluttering their briefness like mayflies.

They love, yet do not understand that Love is a lifelong journey that expands only after all of their suspicions sleep.

Their small hands hold my sleeves as I weep for my own youth’s span that suffocated from a lifeless tongue.

A thousand gallons of flesh and blood still pours over the soil as testimony, as marker for my loveless obedience.

The half-love I taught only hobbled, it didn't dance or soar with charity until, from back to front, it was unwritten.

I cannot bring them around with war, with anything that teaches separation. What on earth made me think I could?

The scenes of battle, real or imagined, steep my familiar sleeves in blood and mask innocence with casualty.

How long did I think it could last, my smile beneath such heaping fear?

Now everything hammers of sorrow, eyes wide with an absolute disbelief, innocence thrashed with liquid dreams, righteousness deprogrammed by deceit, proper Love left behind by coldness.

Bring my affections out to greet them, heal their fears with the power of love and hold close the child's gleeful innocence, it’s the only thing standing between them and the somber instructions in my breath.


© 2011 by mark prime


Comments

Popular posts from this blog

........•SHRIEKING MACHINE•........                  •HEAD-LINES•                           •RIP•     ---(“Russian missiles blast Ukrainian military academy and hospital, killing more than 50, officials say”)---    There are no more lessons to learn here, no more beds to hold the human wounded, just missile’s shrieking their grotesque ode, The Death of Humankind! RIP, children of God…    ---(“Hundreds attend Mercer Island vigil, march for murdered Israeli hostages”)---    Dear mourners, this is the brutal vacuum of a genocidal, terror-filled, indiscriminate war-machine made of fear and we are all hostages to its deafening roar! RIP, children of God…    ---(“10-year-old allegedly confesses to fatally shooting 82-year-old man and his daughter”)---    I must confess, this is part of war’s shrieking, children lost with a we...

sdrawkcaB nruT (Turn Backwards)

I have been witness to the four pillars and see no reason to carry death there. Doesn’t the world know that life moves for more than just the sons of Abraham? O! I see the stunned throats floating by in the dusk to their stiff-limbed sleep as metal rains down over the Jordan’s western prophet, children dying there. I am here, waiting, breathing in the dusk under the shadow of the patriarch, asking, can we again build the shrine inside the soul and leave our flesh to time? © 2008 mrp/thepoetryman

Per Plex Ed

            PER+PLEX-ED When you haven’t heard the truth in so long, when you do, it rings a most familiar s ong. That’s the human song, the truth rolling out exactly when it should.      (If a truth is told and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound only to the one that spoke it?)    Yes, but our ears aren’t strong enough to hear it.     [a perplexed silence] © 2017 Mark Richard Prime