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.
