Nineteen years ago.
Deaths overwhelmed us,
Three thousand dead, ten times more injured.
We listened avidly to the stories:
survivors and heroes and
ordinary people who stood up
to help in an event
they could barely comprehend.
We stood, stunned,
and watched the towers fall
again and again and again,
hoping it would not be real the next time,
it would all be simply a dream:
the images on the screen,
the memory, the fear,
the gut-wrenching uncertainty
destabilizing all we knew.
We held on. We prayed.
We survived.
Today we stand, stunned
and overwhelmed.
We are losing sixty times that toll
to other enemies we do not understand.
We are losing the west to wildfires.
We are losing the faith of our youth
who no longer believe we can fix what is
so terribly wrong.
Protest and violence are our daily bread.
Our people, our land, and our future
are dying, and there aren’t enough heroes
to save us. It’s hard to believe in heroes
any more. We are beset
by dishonesty, by fear, by corruption.
Belief and trust are gone.
There is nothing and no-one to hold us together.
We are flying apart with each turn of the globe,
and we continue to whirl
out of control:
faster, faster, faster.
O God, slow us down.
Rewind the clock and make us try again.
Return us somehow to the point
where we were our brothers’ keeper;
where we reached out in sympathy,
not struck out in fear.
Take our disordered values
and rearrange them into what we
once knew them to be.
Have us look with new eyes
at the world we have broken;
have us look at each other and
give us the will to fix it,
to move on together
with faith,
with hope,
with love.
1 comment:
Amen!
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