BEFORE TIMES
`submitted Rattle Poets Respond May 18, 2022- NOT selected
BANG!
WHIZZZ!
SCREAM
CHAOS
Running hiding
…in the open desperation
Silence pierced
by agonized groanings
SHOUTS
Ack-ack-ak-ack-ak-ak…
Stop please stop
GET Down GET DOWN!
Run… run…
No quiet at end of storm
Air filled with sobbing
….groaning
Pleas
For
Help…
Innocent grandmother down
Weeping…
I remember the before, I recall the quiet.
I remember the love we used to have.
There was time, before the now. There was life,
When all we threw were baseballs and footballs,
The only weapons we swung were golf clubs
At gopher holes, the only enemies were
Gnats and disease and sometimes high prices.
Before the now there were prayers at weddings,
Youth clubs and Girl Guide cookies, newborns and
Church baptisms. Before the now with its broken
Altars, broken vows, bullet casings in the aisles,
Dead grannies, babies praying in their unformed minds.
Before times, we did not teach hate, practice untruths,
We planted the trees of respect and fed their roots.
— —
One damned masssacre after another. We have become Bedlam. I wrote this for last week’s mass shooting in Buffalo, only to find another one Tuesday in Texas. We – both the USA and Canada – are setting records for fatal shootings. This morning, Wednesday, another killing in Surrey, BC. Look up such statistics as most deadly cities.
I had written this as intro to last week’s shooting:
Watching the news makes me feel eviscerated, totally powerless, however much I fantasize about getting up and out there righting the wrongs of the world. But there are too many wrongs. So, as a sentient and sensitive being, I write my poems as my small contribution to righting the scales between right and wrong, justice and lawlessness. Whatever happened to respect?
[Also: do we not have enough to cope with, with all the diseases, etc., plaguing us, with climate change, ad nauseum? Is this not Walk for Alzheimer’s month her? Are there not enough children with cancer? Is this not already enough to keep a people occupied?]
I live in Canada, where, by and large, life was safe. Seeing the recent carnage in the States, the re
—H. W. Bryce
petitions of hate––we see that here now, too––my muse nudged me, and this is wha t I wrote. I must write. Can’thelp myself. Today, there was a shooting in my home town.
BTW, this form of poetry is my own. I call it a fontanelle. First comes the unformed, the chaos, then comes the formal, the formed. The second part is the comment on the first part, the contrast usually being stark. It can be question and answer. Usually, the second part is a sonnet.
