For the World

By Joergen Ostensen

3.15.19

I'd like to cry a poem

For the world

The beautiful, horrible, lonely, spinning world

I'd like to cry a poem today

For all the sad, tired, broken, angry people

Who watch the moon rise

Over their ocean of tears.

I'd like to cry a poem

For all the poor,

Bleeding, desperate people

All the bitter, screaming, shouting families

The funeral tear mothers

The poem writing sons

The scared, fear filled infants.

I'd like to cry a poem

For all the prayerful protesters

Staring down the gas and bullets

Braving the long separations

In the never-ending prisons and for

All the old ones everywhere leading babes

Into struggles ancient as the stars.

I'd like to cry a poem

For the caged people from everywhere

Alone in this lonely world

The caged people fearing the darkness

In starless cells and the broken,

Scared, caged people who feel the walls

Closing in even in the sunshine.

I'd like to cry a poem

For the disillusioned lovers

Playing in shadows where it is too

Dark to see the outstretched heart

Who now stand near the breaking point

Of time with nothing but memories

And a pile of slow falling tears.

I'd like to cry a poem

For the would be saints

Lying on the bar street pavement

In a pool of Sunday blood

Gone and forgotten as everything

They were or would have been

Dribbles away through the holes.

I'd like to cry a poem

For the hate filled poor

Living on the white side of hell

Under unforgiving skies

In the dark morning ever presence

Of history's cold cruel lacerations

As time creeps forward on a hamster's wheel.

I'd like to cry a poem

For the children of the morning

Who smile in the face of a thousand

Reasons too sit down and weep

While they learn to read the word love

To live and breath and fear and cry

The word love in the morning.

I'd like to cry a poem

For all the fallen poets who awoke

To blue night bullets

One after the next into the negation of existence

Now never again to hear the sound of their

Mother now fallen from the cold real streets

Into a just as real collective memory of pain.

I'd like to cry a poem

For the wonderful, secret places

Where the trees laugh and whisper

To one another in the unblemished

Sunset quality of forgotten, fading forests

The last outposts beyond progress in

The peace beyond the modern take over of the soul.

I'd like to cry a poem

Today, tomorrow and always

For the beautiful, horrible, lonely, spinning world

For all the beautiful people loving, living, hoping, trying

Under the endless stars

I'd like to cry a poem

For the beautiful, horrible, spinning, crying, dying world.