I a child
asked her, an adult
what does it take? To be merciful?
How much effort? Will it hurt much? Why
doesn’t the whole world
try?
And she, an adult
fiddling with her rings, two on each finger,
because she had run out of places
to exhibit her finery, her sophistication,
she, thought of where she would go
when she left our run-down, poky house
and did not return for supper
and what she would do
when she wasn’t weighed down
with runny nosed children and yellowed aprons.
She, who has the mind of three bright men
and a heart that did not really hold space
for people who could not spell, or those who were
slow, ones who did not impress, their light not bright
but stuck in amber, she said naught,
for she liked fine things
over much
and that did not include
wellington boots and children’s well played with toys
dragged through muddy pathway, leading to small houses
where there is life, oh laughing, gainful life, but raw with
the knuckles of everyday, up to their elbows in greese
and the machinations of surviving.
I, a child
asked her, an adult
what does it take? To be merciful?
watching the baby bird, turn to bone and feather
beneath the great conker tree, its crimson roots
like great yawns beneath moss, reaching through
heavy clouds with the hands of imploring worship
and life
so harsh and unwilling, to include ‘fairness’
would steal away humanities belief in kind deeds with its
brutal parsing
which is why , my grandmother, sitting on our stoop, paring apples,
with a sharp knife inherited from her father
told me once
(and she could never spell, for she left
school early to work in poorly paid factories
only once managing to get through
The Communist Manifesto).
Child, we must be good, we must be kind.
For nothing else knows how to be, they simply
act upon their instinct to survive. Like
the lambing season, when a new lamb is
born and the mother dies, we turn our eyes
heavenward but there is no tenderness, only
the brutal knot of nature, felling her herd
till balance is restored. Our human hearts
with our aching over suffering, fit poorly
with the callous hand of nature, she must
cull with her sythe irrespective of who deservse,
there is no mercy as we know it, in this
whittling of life. Only those who survive
and those who do not, dying in bleached
bones by the thoroughfare of our journey.
I thought then of you, with your
fine clothes and your well trained mind
and empty rooms filled with piano playing ghosts
how you were
much like the nature I saw around me
beautiful, wild, out for your own gain,
surviving at any cost
and I
the strange flux of humanity and terror
seeking to be merciful
among the debris of our eternal battle
with light and dark.
I knew then, why you despised me
why I loved you
it is like the fable of the scorpion and the frog
it is your nature
to sink deep into the foaming earth
showing only your glacial tip
as it is mine
to seek mercy, in unyielding hearts,
two opposite ends of the same breakage.
If we always run from being stung, in Summertime
sometimes we miss out on dawn
thus we must permit
the risk to gain, a possible reward
high in silvering trees
where the sleepy bears
hide their honey.
TheFeatheredSleep 