A Brief Image

"God created man in his image;
 in the divine image he created him;
male and female he created them."
--Genesis

There are no poppies blowing in the little breeze
that flows across the smooth clean white cloth
wrapped around these simple contours
with such perfect grace.
Each fold, made with trembling hands,
blessed with love, with tears, with loss.
Every hope ever placed, in years that will
no longer come, caressed in prayers
to a silent God;  this last remnant of desire.

In a quiet that strikes the eye with the
force of abiding rage, of sorrow,
the broken continuity
of a wish that was stolen in it's
first becoming; a mother's travail,
a father's sweat, a grandparent's solace,
of a breast emptied of its precious gift,
the treasure gone from an inmost heart.

This face, burned, eyes vacant, a dark
nativity proclaimed in death's swaddling,
the tight cold hand of an infant
clings to the debt laden account of
cowards in the sky,
of criminals in the chambers of the law,
of councils in the halls of power obsessed with
insane processes of a diseased and degenerate rule.

All this once radiant wonder,
resting here amid these crumbled stone walls,
now to be interred,
lowered into some mute and ancient clay,
recalled only in the anonymity of
a sister's heart, a brother's soul,
in dreams that cannot escape the darkness,
bundled among the martyrs to an
enemy never known.

Every war a siege on innocence,
Every soldier a burden on the
conscience of a weary world,
every slain infant an investment
in the accounts of the damned.
In the background the dark music
of exploding cluster bombs,
the light show of white phosphorus
and con trails of Israeli F-16s, all marked
"Made in America".

From the warm wet pink womb of love,
this pure white bundle in green embrace,
has transited through a too brief passage of
wind and light, here below the whirling stars,
long before the proper time,
into the eternal dark cold of the dry earthly night.

What random intent to carelessly destroy,
what false projection of quivering anxiety,
what glut of unsatisfied, quenchless greed,
the calculus of what cold trajectory of hate,
has wrapped this small bundle in the grief of an
unexpected glory, uncomprehending,
unknowing, forever still?

A brief image, flashed across a high density screen,
that flies so briefly, like a stone from a sling,
straight to a trembling heart but can not awaken any words
oh you masters of finance, and kings of war,
In your "Liberty's" deaf ears,
or sight in your "Justice's" blind eyes.

This miracle undone,
whispering savagely
with his silenced mouth,
from temple in Viet Nam,
from a blasted mausoleum in Gaza,
from an inferno at Auschwitz,
from Babi Yar,
from the Black Hills,
from Hulegu's dusty roads,
"I was your child, Oh Jerusalem."

This small, broken, unmoving, silent bundle,
this bombed out mosque,
this unique tabernacle of love,
soon sliding forever into the cold mouth of the ground
and yes America, and oh yes Israel,
this, this too,
was your own soft child.
was your own soft child.