This Poem is a Tired Grandmother

 

This poem is a grandmother

whose soul has grown weary.

This poem has seen too many

children dying.

This poem is thirsty

for a song of hope.

This poem is a heart that once held

hope as wide and blue as the sky

and as deep as the sea.

This poem once believed

we were better than we currently are.

This poem once dreamed

we would figure out how to live

on this beautiful planet,

with each other and all the other creatures,

in time.

This poem is losing hope.

This poem is a grandmother

whose soul has grown weary.

This poem is a grandmother

who turns on the news

to find children dying, everywhere:

the children of Gaza, and Ukraine,

African children, starving children,

children shot in classrooms,

while adults cling to their guns

as an inalienable right.

(It is alien, all right.)

This grandma remembers a time

of childhood innocence and safety.

Where has it gone, and why?

This poem has seen too many

children dying.

This grandmother misses the time

when she could look up at the sky

and feel much was right with the world.

This grandmother misses leaders

who had the best interests of the country

at heart,

who had not sold their souls

to money and corporations,
who put serving the people
before political ambition
and partisanship,

men with clear eyes, and vision,

and an attitude of service,

who could speak in full sentences

and were not clearly deranged.

The dead-eyed and soulless are leading us

over the edge of the cliff, clutching money

to their hollow chests as they fall.

Children lecture us at the UN,

showing more wisdom and maturity

than their elders.

This grandmother needs inspiration,

needs to hear the voices

of women and grandmothers, rising.

She needs to see patriarchy fall.

She needs the transformation of consciousness

to happen soon,

while there is still an earth to save,

for "what we save, saves us".

This poem is desperately thirsty

for a song of hope.

This poem is waiting

for the grandmothers to rise

all over the world.

This is a poem from 2019, written loosely in Hannah Gosselin's Boomerang Metaphor form, which is one of my favourites. It spoke to me this morning. There are many more children dying now. I added in the children of Gaza and Ukraine.  It seems we don't learn that war never "wins" anything.