Children

The children we think are not ours, the children of others,
Who carry each other when there is no adult to hold them,
The girls and the boys who are suddenly mothers and fathers
To siblings too young to be hearing what no one has told them.

We see them, some wounded and bleeding, some silently shaking,
Some pulled from the rubble, some buried, uncounted and nameless.
The nightmares they see we can only imagine when waking,
And so we escape them by sleeping the sleep of the shameless.

An eye for an eye, and so many are left there, eyeless,
A tooth for a tooth, forty lives for each life that was stolen,
Not pretty, not easy to look at, not giving us smiles,
But ragged and cut up and broken and twisted and swollen.

There’s been so much death that by now we are numb to the number,
The victims, this side and the other, we quickly forget them,
And children are living their nightmares while adults grow number,
And adults kill children. We know, and we watch, and we let them.

The adults are telling each other the rhyme and the reason,
The rights and the wrongs that make adults the judge and the jury.
The adults are burning the branches of olives in season,
The adults are writing the stories of fire and fury.

But there is no land on this Earth that has only one people,
No matter how much you can flood it with blood and with tears,
No matter what bloodlines you cut or what bloodlines you keep, for
They run through the veins of the Earth, through the stones and the rivers.

But more, they will run through our veins, made of very same matter,
No matter what stories we tell, or what stories we silence,
We’re only as good as we are in our lives, and no better,
We’re only as good as our kindness, as bad as our violence.

“Don’t build me a temple, you’ve spilled too much blood” – can’t you hear it?
Yet wars are remembered, by wars is our history measured.
And kings are remembered for things that are cruel and feared,
And kindness forgotten for things that are gentle and treasured.

But etched into crystal and rock like the rose of the desert,
And running through rubble, it seeps into sands, ever-flowing,
It’s kindness that keeps, and survives, and escapes effervescent
Through intricate veins of the world that connect us, unknowing.

It’s faster than fire, it’s flowing, by hatred unhindered,
As stories forgotten are written again, every year.
Those children who carry each other are all our kindred.
And adults who kill them are ours, they’re us, they are here.

There’s only one world that is left, only so many hours,
We waste them by fighting for inches of land that we share.
Those children, the nameless, the broken, those children are ours.
We too were once children. How did we forget that we were?