Common Moon | pictured words

Tag: Common Moon

A Syrian friend
flees the supper table with
her whole family

leaving home-cooked meal
to decay in silence, as
bombs scream her story.

While bombs shake her house
in Ukraine, a sweet young child
runs out the front door,

glares at a gutless
foe, shakes her fist, and bellows,
“You cannot scare me!”

A gentle woman
from Afghanistan stumbles
as she tries to bolt

away from the bombs
in her path. She breaks her nose.
But her lungs still breathe.

More friends from Ukraine
had no light, no heat for months.
This, in my friend’s words:

“Life is divided
into before and after
war came to our house.”

In shadows, evil
slinks across the globe beneath
our sentinel moon.

© Marie Elena Good, 2024

These are just a few of the stories of war-weary refugee friends of mine. These few don’t express but an infinitesimal spec of the havoc war wreaked on our planet in the time it took me to pen this poem. What we humans are willing to do to fellow humans is unspeakably horrific.

May 30, 2021

BENEATH THE MOON OF GOD’S CHOOSING

In the midst of war
(and there is always a war)
lies grim misjudging.
Fear of difference.
Insatiable greed for land.
Resolute loathing.
Dire false impressions.
Grave miscommunications.

And a common moon.

And beneath that moon,
in God’s perfect alignment,
is home to us all.
We’ve food and water
(if only we’d gladly share),
great plains and mountains,
celebrated seas
with unfathomably large
communal mammals.
With microscopic
yet astoundingly complex
sentient beings.
Sands God has numbered
stay in place as our home spins,
not spilling a drop
of the vast waters
that both adorn and provide,
beautify and quench.

And though we do not
tend to her needs (let alone
the needs of “others”),
God gave us this home
brilliantly placed beneath the
moon of His choosing,
populated with
children He chooses to love.
(There are no “others.”}

pictured words

Tag: Common Moon

April 21, 2024

HUMANITY, ECLIPSED

May 30, 2021

BENEATH THE MOON OF GOD’S CHOOSING