Wall

Can you only know immense suffering
 after it touches personally?
Will compassion only be skin deep 
until the mortars break apart everything you´ve known?
Who builds the walls between "us" and "them"? 
A wall is a division.

On windy nights, my cheeks touched with the freezing frosts of horror,

I am left stumbling and gasping at endless hate
Still warm to life’s goodwill, though growing cold by the second, and though my own hate cools, too,

I try to catch what life remains with peace throbbing through veins.

Is it true The Wall Will Fall? Whose wall?
I wonder when will bullets echo, and finally shatter into emptiness,

ceasing, and no longer hitting human shields carried as hardened human emotions.
What crumbles in the softness of tears?

Vulnerability is a human thing.
Every pool of blood,

it laps at eyes and hands and feet,
but festers only in those who swear it isn't theirs.

Buddha said breathe it in:
every scream, and fear and pain, 

every ache and sob and shudder -
 every mortar, every dead child.
all of this is ours to breathe in and out, released beyond the borders and walls of experience.

For each of us have these walls insde.
 Each constructed by every division.
And renewed we will be, to go past these walls in ignorance laid, past the headless graves, 
where concrete turns soil. Here flowers grow again 
despite what they know -
 despite what they saw.  Between the hard places and the soft. Heart.

We don't have to try to heal the pain from these walls. The pain is too great, too deep in our viens.
But Listen! What throbs! Memory touches deep into our cells.

Life enduring through every imprisonment, every death and every ricocheted dream.

Because oh! how our hearts keep persisting. Know we could be free. If the wall falls. 

All walls are just as high. 

(image: banksy, 2005)