Wednesday, May 16, 2012

Morning's song


Man sets himself on fire at Breivik trial
The Canberra Times, 16 May 2012

That day it sure dawned on us
how powerful morning TV would be.
The previous day’s action on the pitch
might have been nothing without the pictures,
we’d just have had Eamonn Holmes’s commentary.

I dropped my razor and ran downstairs
half-shaved, half-dressed;
a mug had shattered on the tiled hearth
and a cry had risen from some deep place,

Fire! Fire!

Downstairs her face sank into my wet chest hair,
the searing image already impressed
indelibly on her life of an old man ambling across
a football pitch, seemingly unaware
that from his trouser cuffs to his old cloth cap
he was a biblical pillar of fire.

I memorized his name, spoke it like a mantra
often over the coming days
and it pains me that I can’t remember it today.
All I remember is how his suffering —
for he must have suffered in his stripped down
animal heart —
tore apart my certainties;

could a crucified Jesus
really have forgiven us?

I have carried the old man’s cross
just as mankind has its own disgrace,
the loss of my faith
just the first and not the cruelest privation
of witnessing that innocent’s immolation.

Now self-destruction is becoming
the weapon of choice, the nuclear option
for the sufferer denied a voice.
Outside a court in Oslo
a man takes careful aim. He lights a taper
and expects his target’s faith to be shaken.


(c) 2012 Slush Poet

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