Monday, January 15, 2018

How to Kill a Living Thing


How to Kill a Living Thing

Neglect it
Criticize it to its face
Say how it kills the light
Traps all the rubbish
Bores you with its green

Continually
Harden your heart
Then
Cut it down close
To the root as possible

Forget it
For a week or a month
Return with an axe
Split it with one blow
Insert a stone

To keep the wound wide open.

—Eibhlín Nic Eochaidh

3 comments:

erin said...

oh yes. i know this one.

hard to say more.

Gary B. Fitzgerald said...


Bewildered

How reconcile this paradox,
this Creator who loves creation,
with the brutality and blood
that makes it turn,
the endless flow of life
forms granted their existence
by the eating of each other,
the bewildered, starving young
still awaiting their dead mother?

How resolve this lack of compassion,
this cruelly designed summation,
by the One who loves us all,
those lost to fire and fang and flood
or blown from nests in storms?

We will reason, for we are human,
and create our fine religion
which our reason then deforms.


Copyright 2008 - HARDWOOD:77 Poems, Gary B. Fitzgerald

kylie said...

Neglect and criticism are a powerful combination