Someone planted the wind and harvested the whirlwind—
see the shovelful of dust trailing the spade-edge, the hour-
glass almost run on the grave-mound. Who sinned—
the man with the gun or the one who sold it as Death grinned
from the shadows—or was it the trail of hatred limned
from a prior us & them, biblical Cain & Abel—or
was it earlier still, Nature, tooth & claw, jaws opened
and shut—as today—on the marginal, the pacifist, the poor?
“This poem opens with a line from the Old Testament, from the book of Hosea. Hate crimes are often perpetrated in the name of religion, but it seems to me that the current of violence is older still. Is this biology? And yet, so many of us admire pacifists, those able to turn the other cheek, those able to walk in love. How do these tzadiks do it? Teach us so that we can be like them?”
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