A Terrible Day

Often I scan the news and let it roll over me. I add the daily count of deaths in the Middle East, be it Syria, Egypt, Iraq or elsewhere to my cringe-reaction. Everyone of those deaths was a  person fighting for what he or she believed ... well, not every one, some were by standers, people simply in the wrong place at the wrong time (as when a bomb went off  in a market place), all had mothers, fathers, loved or loving ones who were shocked into grief.  It's hard for me to think about it. 

I read about trials and verdicts, about police brutality and various kinds of injustice in our country. My cringe reaction works a little harder -- so much of what I think we believe is not what our country does, not how our elected officials and justice system are supposed to work. 

While I am cringing, an American woman who I've come to know through the internet, someone with whom I share many interests and values, who lives in Sweden -- a country with a different political attitude -- is aware and not self-defensively cringing.  She is feeling and reacting to these same headlines.  Arlene Corwin writes poetry like many of us drink coffee -- daily, satisfying a need she has to express herself and to help herself face the world as it is. 

A long introduction to a moving poem she has given me permission to print here:

This Is A Terrible Day.

This is a terrible day.

Outrageous day.

Over thirteen hundred murdered:

Women,

Men

And children

In

A gas

Attack in Syria

Whose rulers say “Not us!”

Then there’s Bradley Manning

Who leaked

Military secrets like:

“let’s get ‘em, kill ‘em all” the …

Or words to that effect. 

For that

He’ll suffer thirty-five years

In a prison. Here

In Sweden he’d have got

Six months, a cell phone, and a lot

Of loving letters.

Speaking of which,

Swedish citizens are going sick;

Taking billions from the taxes

To recover (or do something)

From the new bipolarist depressions ups and downs;

Stress related illnesses that do not end in ouch.

Taxes taken

From the healthy watching TV on the couch

To pay the weakened on a couch

Without a cure in sight.

But worst is loss of life.

The Mozarts, Rembrandts, who’d have been

Now dead without a fight. 

This is a terrifying day.

This Is A Terrible Day 8.22.2013