May 2024
Ralph Skip Stevens
thismansart@gmail.com
Bio Note: It’s easy to feel helpless, hopeless, in these dark times. But then there’s Auden, in “September 1, 1939,” his great commentary on dark times: “All I have is a voice…” And a voice is what the poet has. I take some comfort in that. The following are a modest attempt to speak to the darkness, to the current violence and our need for mercy.

After Rafah

	At least 67 killed in Rafah
	during Israeli hostage rescue.
	  “The New York Times,” February 12, 2024

“Where you gonna run to?” 
Asks Nina Simone, and the night in Rafah,
As the IDF killed at least 67,
Was a night for running.
The war was four months and
Nearly 30 thousand lives old. 
Can the good poets tell us,
My son wants to know,
When the killing will stop?
But the job of the poet is
To answer that other question. 
Where?
Where you gonna run to?

Perhaps there’s no escape,
Not from Israeli Defense Forces or
For that matter, from any armed force. 
Killing is what they do, the soldiers. 
Isn’t that what Krishna
Tells the despairing Arjuna,
As he faces war with his brothers? 
“Everyone has a duty,
And this, Prince, is yours.”

But for the mothers and fathers,
Those who are not soldiers,
Not called to fight, whose children stand
In the way of the bombs,
In shattered buildings, the question
Is simple in its terror, where
Where you gonna run to?

Run to the green meadows,
The grasslands of southern,
Of eastern Africa, where the tiny
Crocosmia blooms, where it ranges
From there to Sudan, even Madagascar. 
Run to where it grows on the chains
Of underground stems,
The youngest at the top, the old ones
Buried deep in the soil, 
Where they belong, 
Grows where a heart finds ease,
In the gentle grass of African plains, 
Of pampas sunlight,
Tawny, tough against drought,
And sidewalk concrete –

Resisting without a murmur
The boots of soldiers.

Mercy

	The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
	It will flame out, like shining from shook foil…
		Gerard Manly Hopkins
	
And the same, I thought,
could be said of the mercy of God,
not always shining, alight with flame,
but glowing, like an ember
shook loose from the fire by a careless poker.
That alert pedestrian, helping an old woman
through the door, father consoling a child, 
her sobs fading along with the pain
of a skinned knee. Oh, the world
is a grand place, of monster glaciers,
mountain peaks, vast lakes and oceans, 
but there’s a grandeur of sorts
in the small skiff, tied to the dock,
waiting for a boy, oars on his shoulder,
in the shopping cart of canned goods
for the homeless shelter, family
gathered by the TV on a winter evening.
Grandeur meets mercy in such small things,
unnoticed by kings and presidents, 
tiny in scale, but no less divine,
a display as grand as snow-covered fields,
the shook foil of northern lights,
and never spent.

©2024 Ralph Skip Stevens
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