Short Stories for Teachers
Broken walls,
things in time,
thoughts not yet pondered,
thoughts divine.
-
Visions stare up,
from multitudes past,
giving no feast,
from the somber fast.
-
Where is tomorrow?
When was yesterday?
-
Forty generations call out,
call out in anguish,
call out in silence,
call out!
-
No stillness of rest
is theirs to begin,
in agony of breath
that was theirs to forgive.
-
No pause in triumph
have these generations gained.
-
Brother against brother.
Father against son.
Sister against sister.
Mother against love.
-
Sun beats hard
the parched land.
The yoke of another
is the yoke that commands.
-
And yet there stands,
defiant below,
the stinking sweat
of nation's back,
bent low,
in strictest servitude!
-
Freedom is a world,
only a word.
A house divided cannot stand,
and hear the voice
clearly of birds,
drifting above land,
singing their joy,
that is a sound
of springtime past.
-
When was that last springtime,
green so filled with mist,
before some shadow from hell,
over this land passed?
-
Forty generations,
in puzzled grief,
call out for final relief,
from the yoke,
from the pain,
for the strength
and sweetness of soul,
to break the will
of tyrants who, sit on
blood stained thrones.
-
There is an ultimate justice,
somewhere, somehow, somewhen.
-
Forty generations cry out,
once more to providence,
once more to be free.
-
Forty generations cry out
to the forty first.
-
(I see from some musty notes how the Troubles thing was in the news around 1979. Though I disapproved of violence on both sides, I never the less was reminded of the date of 1170, the year the foreign invader first came and never quite left the land of my ancestors. Thinking of those many generations and their struggles, I wrote this poem. We are now in the forty second generation from that old historic date. Perhaps peace will last.)
