Lahore, Easter Sunday, 2016
POETRY FORMAT, 10 Apr 2017
Barbara Millar – TRANSCEND Media Service
Blessed child of my child, son of the dawn over the Indian
Ocean, darling of robins who sing in the spring;
it was a perfect day, balmy air and gentle breezes.
The bulbs sleeping in the earth burst through their skins
and adorned the daffodils in yellow dresses, dogwood
put forth thick white blossoms, tulips wore scarlet garb
hollyhocks against the hedges,
silver roses curled around a carousel.
I taught you the names of all the flowers in my garden
where you fell in love with ladybugs and hated spiders.
You watched the silkworm feast on mulberry.
Before you were two, you knew the succulence
of truffles on roasted lamb with jasmine rice.
You lived each day anew with that ineffable delight
reserved for the aged and innocent.
Each laugh set my heart assail like golden lanterns
on an evening lake. Your eyes were two coals on fire.
All my hopes and all my dreams lay within
the parenthesis of your smile.
That was before the Taliban.
Who knows what turns men to beasts who lack
remorse for the slaughter of women and children?
Wiser and ennobled men, who understand
the obscurity of war, curse and weep .
The shrapnel took the lion’s face
and broke the tiger’s back.
The giraffe’s neck was cut in half.
The pony lost his shaggy main.
The spray of nails tore through
the swan’s feathered breast and your brain.
No one caught the golden ring the day the music stopped.
_________________________________________
Barbara Millar is a free lance writer and poet from northern California who was a young anti-war protester during the Vietnam War.
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 10 Apr 2017.
Anticopyright: Editorials and articles originated on TMS may be freely reprinted, disseminated, translated and used as background material, provided an acknowledgement and link to the source, TMS: Lahore, Easter Sunday, 2016, is included. Thank you.
If you enjoyed this article, please donate to TMS to join the growing list of TMS Supporters.
This work is licensed under a CC BY-NC 4.0 License.
Wow! Very powerful. More so because of the quiet beauty of the beginning–and about 2/3–of the poem. And then, the shattering explosion.
Not “mankind,” but “manunkind,” the great poet, e. e. cummings wrote. Truly, we are becoming “beasts who lack remorse,” as Barbara Millar writes here. “What hath God wrought?” was the old question. But, modern humans have mastered the thunder and lightning bolts of Zeus, the sea-winds and cyclones of Neptune, the miracle of atomic energy. So we wonder: “What have we wrought?” Can we not wring the miracle of empathy out of our equations?