We are told that hearing you will hear and not understand and seeing you will see and not perceive.  Simple words meaning simple things?  But of course you see and of course you hear unless physical impairments prevent us.  But it is even more than that.  In the process there are the cries in crisis and there are the tears that are not seen.

The father asked his son at breakfast,  ‘are you not speaking?’  And  the son answered ‘I  spoke yesterday.’  They were across the table from each other but worlds apart.  The father was asking why are you silent.  And the son was already mentally in school and  gave his oral report yesterday.

The daughter was hurting and gathered courage to tell her emotionally distant mother why she ached inside only to find later her brother coming  into the house mimicking her talk with her mother, laughing.  The daughter shared her heart and her mother not knowing the place her daughter was speaking from, dismissed it as a nothing.

Neither parent heard nor saw what the child’s body language, words or eyes were conveying.  The Master said, ‘hearing you shall hear and not understand and seeing you shall see and not perceive.’  How much are we missing?  We should at least be wondering.  What is more to hear than what we hear or see what we see?   When the process begins, the pain will be poignant but welcome it.  It will mean that you and your god are in conference.

Times Such As These

I lock up the room
and pocket the last remnants
of words laying about
unattended.

Fearful that pieces
of my heart may be found
scattered among them.
And why not?

Times such as these
leave us with little salve
to heal the open wounds
which once were hearts.

For whom do we weep?
The children whose siblings
will no longer come to the table
to covey with no doubt
the events which took their innocence?

Or the parents
whose hearts were transplanted
when word came
that these unspent stars
were already breathing the rarified air
as heaven’s most blessed?

Look at us here.
Pleading that our children
will be safe as they try to understand
what we in our dotage have not learned.

To resort to arms means death in any country.

Photo by
John Hallissey