Sticks and Stones
Sticks and Stones
Sticks
and stones may break theses bones but
Words,
oh words: these words!
Red-lettered
or allegoried,
The
Prophet’s or King’s,
Behind
snipers’ sites, bombers’ thumbs,
Prophecies
fulfilled.
A
grandmother’s saccharin wisdom
Empty
words themselves,
Brushing
bruises from broken hearts,
From
bullies’ bombast,
Salves
upon wounds upon gashes:
Bactined,
Band-Aided.
Founding
Fathers’ tools and weapons
War,
Revolution,
Join-or-dying
Constitutions,
Rights,
hope, rebellion
Resurrection,
reconstruction:
None
without words.
What
of that time, time before words?
Before
grandmothers?
What
of that time before Fathers:
Heaven
and Nation?
What
of that time before sticks and stones?
Sharp
tools and weapons.
Before words:
No hate, no wealth,
No love, no poverty,
No jealousy,
No difference,
No sin, no forgiveness.
No
ours, no we: no us, just me.
Neither
law nor right.
Before
words: fittest survival
(Or
was it Eden?)
Before
words, neither truth nor lie,
Silent,
unhealed pain.
No
reflection, just shadows ‘til
Nights
fell, green and blue
And
dusk and dawn and the wonders
Of cosmos:
mere sky
Unattainable
and unnamed:
Beyond
dreams or grasps.
No
Russia, No China, No France:
No
America!
No Empire,
memories, or myths,
No
Iron curtain,
No
metaphor, no beat, no rhyme.
No
poets. No hymns.
Ideas to bombs
Chants to marches.
Cold to matches.
Words to war.
Words to brotherhood.
Damnation to Salvation.
Unbrandished,
unthrown, unuttered,
Harmless
in these states
Yet
for culture, society:
These
United States:
Worthless
unused, yet
In
peace and terrorism both
Priceless
wielded right.
Now
worded, granted memory:
Of
grandma’s cheek-pecks,
And
Fathers’ gifts to progeny,
And
stale sticks and stones,
Of
Saviors, of wisdom, of science.
Knowledge
housed in words:
Past
and progress melding now: Words.
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