Monday, May 13, 2013

The Reason Why




Make sense to you?

Makes sense to me.

How could I tell you

How to be?

See that man banging his head

Against a wall so hard

That it makes him cry?

If you were standing 

In his shoes 

Perhaps you'd know

The reason why.

I composed this poem while driving one afternoon and seeing a crazy-bad bit of driving by a complete stranger. Why the sudden stops, why the multiple lane changes? Why ask why? 

When I got to the meeting I was driving to I wrote this down and read it fresh to a group of friends there. One of them told me about having seen two different people literally banging their heads against walls. Both persons had just witnessed the death of someone they loved, one in combat the other in a freak accident. Their despairing actions do make a terrible sort of sense, once you know the reason.

How about our own actions? What visible or invisible walls are we currently banging our poor heads into? Would any of our painful and persistent collisions make any sort of terrible sense to a disinterested viewer? It's worth asking the question.

Scotland's beloved national poet, Robert Burns famously put it well.

"O would some power the giftie gie us 

to see ourselves as others see us."

- "To a Louse" 

Today's image is from: slwakes.wordpress.com


No comments: