pictured words

a simple pairing of pictures and poetry

Tag: pray

A River Sighs in Silence

Image created by AI

Inspired by “ … and the river spoke in a language without words,” from The Dead of Night, a Measure of Rest after Karaoke by Mike Bayles

A River Sighs in Silence

Once the sky emptied itself,
moved on to another town,
and the swollen river below it
stopped chugging trees
and gorging children,
and the once-bawling waters waned,

the river’s shame released a sigh
too soft
too late for children’s ears
to hear.

© Marie Elena Good 2025

For the children of Camp Mystic, and all whose lives have changed from the recent flash floods.

HUMANITY, ECLIPSED

Photo by cottonbro studio on Pexels.com

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.