Poetry

PASSION WEALTH

by Walter Boswell
02/08/19
Free to Share
Author requests article critique

  Message Writer
  Hire Writer

Tweet

Passion Wealth

Can there really be any mercy descent?

                Can divine love a miracle play

                for all that my broken legs can stand

                                and my arthritic knees to genuflect?

While the poor mourn a desolate earth,

while children starve and mothers weep

                and fathers die alone in war,

God sits like a miser over his horde of grace,

                withholding for however long his treasury

                of compassion and wisdom, his promise –

to make the last days end, and a rich earth begin.

First-Timer (Prophecy Return)

A fad of impropriety appears,

                                such as one … smoking,

                choking and gagging his first-time sensibilities.

By second time, the third, the fourth, the fad controls,

                as sensitivity drops by degrees with each light to darkness.

                Persevere the weeks and weakening until ruination.

So will I take the unseen damage

                                and make it real to you.

So will all the evil which broods inside you

                be coughed up out of your hearts

                                like the blood from your lungs.

So will the vision of dying come early to young eyes.

Children of Auschwitz

They held in retention what little the Lord Guards had left them.

I see them now, leaving, the survivors of the concentration camp,

                carrying their starvation loads, bent backs,

                and crimped hearts into adulthood;

                                unable to let go,

trying to preserve the sorry seeds of malformed spiritual growth;

                while alongside, smotheringly deep,

                                      in place, instead

                feeding them dry salt and acid fertilizer

                are the shadowy mercenaries of the Most High.

Were even this a matter of torture now, for a paradise later,

                they must still live through,

                                                come something to forget.

No heaven is so great as to reward such suffering,

                no rapture so deep as to cuddle such misery.

Ashes to ashes, dust to dust;

were it even the case of spirit before and spirit after,

                would their insistence had been so voluntary, given

                these early vyers for a regular playground were just

                                ready contenders for the stalag;

                and all the love                 and all the joy

resided merely in the ashes and dust

                of the prison beds they slept in?

Dr. Walter Boswell

[email protected]