Who is Your Neighbor?
My friend Victoria sent me this message: “Would you consider writing a poem on the theme of personal freedom and sacrifice? See this post http://www.peaceistheparadox.com/“
Reading Victoria’s thoughts and collecting my own as I tried to write that poem has helped me redefine my own beliefs on sacrifice and personal freedom. While it is too big a topic for a single poem I offer this as my response to Victoria.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” -Letter from a Birmingham Jail April 16, 1963 By Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Inclusion in the institutions and the fabric of our society is integral to our sense of substance significance, wellbeing, self worth. To be ignored, cast out, or excommunicated is, in some very real way, to cease to be: I am not acknowledged, therefore I do not exist. No experience (is) more powerful or more immediately destructive than the exclusion and invisibility that accompany homelessness.” -Homelessness in America: A Forced March to Nowhere, by Mary Ellen Hombs and Mitch Snyder
Who is Your Neighbor?
Mothers do it for their children
They clean shit smeared bottoms
Bandage wounds
Dry tears
They sacrifice
Dr. King did it for sanitation workers in Memphis
When a shot rang out at the Lorrain motel
He’d been to the mountaintop
He’d seen the promise land
His life had been defined by his acts of faith
He had sacrificed
Mitch Snyder did it
An imperfect man who committed petty crimes
He abandoned his family but not his neighbor
He admonished us to see the invisible ones
inspired us to look after them as we would a child
to ignore the stench the rags the sores
He sacrificed.
The Samaritan did it when he soothed a stranger’s wounds with olive oil and wine
and bandaged them.
Who is your neighbor?
What would you sacrifice?
WOW, this poem reminds me so much of what my next blog is going to be, especially the Mitch Snyder reference. Love it as usualy Brenda!
Dear Brenda,
I thank you, from the bottom of my heart. I needed this connection today. Perhaps you could keep the challenge going, by passing our work to someone else, like a “peace chain.” Each writer could add their own link to the chain. I wonder how far it might travel.
I love your poetry. I love that it’s not long-winded, that it does everything it needs to, with less.
Beautiful!
Victoria