When the Killer Comes: A Poem for the Peacemakers When They Have Almost Lost Hope

Days of fire,

day of rage.

Days of weeping,

days of grace.

The Killer comes, powerful and sly.

Sometimes he drowns the moment with the clanging of his engines of death,

and sometimes he is still, with his justifying smile.

These are the days to love your children and hold them tight,

these are the days to pray for light.

And the makers of peace wait quietly, joining hands,

while the Killer revels in his work.

And the makers of peace are weak and foolish and their words

are laughable, are lost on the wind, lost in the flame,

lost like a tarnished penny

that can buy no moment back.

The Killer thrills to the sound of hope draining away.

In the Killer's wake comes nothingness,

and that is all that the Killer loves.

Words are not nothing. Words live.

Words hammer or float, words sink in or skim or fly forth singing.

Words are not piled with the dead in mass-graves and forgotten

but spoken into the storm, into the rage, into the weeping,

into the darkness, into the hopeless moment.

With words we can be mistaken, or we can lie, or we can even

join our voices with the Killer's awful cry.

Or with words we can tell a story.

The story that must be discovered, recovered,

again and again. Discovered, recovered, 

followed, disentangled, set free,

the one bright thread, the golden thread.

And then,

we breathe its Name like a prayer,

weaving the gold

back into the dying day.

Matthew 5: 9