BJZ Poems and Musings

Our US society is in another phase of high profile murders, assassinations, violent rhetoric, and threats of more to come. Some of us remember how the 1960’s were punctuated with episodes of political violence – JFK, MLK, RFK, and others. We are, it seems, programmed as humans to include murder as an option when conflicts and differences could be solved without a hand gun or sniper rifle, or war. I wrote a poem years ago that gets at this sense that violence makes no sense, but sometimes feels preordained.

Rabbits Crows and War

In diffident turns
The rabbit’s warren
Winds the ground away;
The young lad’s face burns,
His clothes are torn;
He wipes the blood away

A rabbit sings in sessile notes –
Only rabbits too can hear-
The ears of the world so deaf, so deaf.
But young men sing like cawing crows;
They draw the wrath of the world too close,
And lacking crow-like wings to fly
Entangled by their briars – they die.

Brian J. Zink

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