Photo from Every Day Poems at TweetSpeak Poetry

sometimes
it’s just the memory

the power of pain
traveling down the track

tourists and gift shops
walls and checkpoints

daughters and guns
there is light

two parallel lines
not quite parallel

a slight angle inwards
coming together

not fear and retaliation
but dialogue slightly inward

a beginning
finding the light

just a slight angle inwards
an encounter pulling away

from the memory
the power of pain

.
.
.
.

Today is Sunday. I finished my daily count of 2000 words for my current NaNoWriMo novel, The Lion Tamer.

I am enjoying the leftover good vibes from last night’s mass celebrating All Saint’s Day and Seinheim at the Church of the Holy Family.

And I’m wallowing in my daily addiction of Facebook cruising.

A photo from Tweetspeak Poetry caught my eye. It drew me back to a FB post I read a few minutes earlier.

Nadia Bolz-Weber, a local Lutheran minister, is visiting the Holy Land and I am enjoying the updates of her travels on her FB page. I admire those who are fearless and go where I would never dare and do things I don’t think I would even entertain the idea of doing.

Her piece touched me today. And when the haunting photo on Tweetspeak scrolled into my view, I knew I needed to use some of Reverend Bolz-Weber’s words to build a found poem.

So many of our problems today seem to come from riding the rails on parallel tracks and not noticing that we are going to the same place. Especially with the political season in full swing, we always seem to see the other guy as the enemy. We see those at work who don’t agree with us as the enemy. We see the car cutting us off in traffic as the enemy.

But we really are going to the same place.

We are here together on this earth as residents. All of us.

I wonder, if we would just angle ourselves in, just a touch, so those parallel lines come together, as those who founded the Palestinian Israeli Bereaved Families for Peace that the Reverend encountered in her travels, maybe peace could be a real possibility. Maybe we could see through the eyes of those struggling what it is really like, what the situation really is.

Maybe we would find the light to light our way.

Maybe. Just maybe.