I sit here, determined to write
Some lyric verse
Celebrating joy
With, perhaps, a comic lilt.
I squeeze my brain
To press out juice
Sweet with cheer,
Contentment,
Spiced, perhaps, with plain
Serenity.
The stuff we yearn
To hear and taste.
But then
The daily news intrudes.
Over a hundred killed
Stampeding to a Hindu shrine.
A schoolboy shoots a teacher
And himself.
Scores of innocents killed
By careless drone strikes.
Egyptian Islamists
Raid a wedding party
At a Coptic church.
Six bombed to death
On a Russian bus.
Seven bombed to death
On a Pakistani train.
Our largest bank
Offers thirteen billion
To cure its criminality.
Twenty thousand children
Die every day
From malnutrition
And preventable disease.
Twenty thousand, every day.
All this, an iceberg’s
Puny tip.
How?
How can we heed
The happy refrain,
And just, dammit,
Just
Let the sun shine in?
(10/23/13)