Page 24 - A Qualified Acceptance of Sorrow

A Post-Modern Hell

1.

Circumstance and sorrow had aged me
by the time I found my way into the fire-blighted wood
scorched by flames rising from an earth

ravaged by explorations for oil, its water table
plundered relentlessly by impulses of avarice
until there seemed no more hope.

I found my way through the still warm surroundings
and bowing under the leaning tower, once tree,
soot above me, ashes beneath,

glimpsed the hellish minds
of those who had contrived
this destruction.

Here were those who had destroyed life,
reducing sentient beings of leaf and wood
to rectangular pieces of coloured paper;

here were those who betrayed
the created order, consigning beast
and bird and creeping thing to death –

CEOs and sycophants
moaned of perishing thirst,
writhed with silent burning

for each stolen molecule
each lost life
until the original suffering had been undone.

I marvelled that
their empathy, once abandoned,
was transmuted to embodiment

and prayed that this vision
be within them a long nightmare
awakening them to compassion

so that returning to the world