The Eternal Revenants

How readily do people affect a
grievance not theirs, perceiving
injustice in an confused landscape
of dire human convergence of
spite, hatred and victimhood
head to head with the aspirations
of others to obey the imperative
to survive, by hopeful co-existence.

Hatred destroys those it drowns in
a sea of vast self-pity and the will to
avenge. Both inspire a cunning to
enable portrayals of abandonment and
piteous need where the goal is not to
seek conciliation but to impose a violent
reckoning for nothing less in flawed
human certainty will ease the anger
and the pain but to inflict revenge.

Clever manipulation of perceptions
provoke a soul-satisfying backlash
of heated denunciation to harry and
condemn those innocent of intent to harm,
whose feckless enterprise in ensuring their
own longevity has aroused the fury of
others, resentful of their presence in a
time and a space felt reserved for them.

A nation alone and condemned in its
establishment, where once its forebears
held thousands of years of custody of the
land, now isolated in stern denial of
presence. A nation, long homeless, dispersed
and oppressed, yet again singled out among
nations for contempt and rabid denial.

A people whose presence brings the genius
of knowledge to the world unparalleled by
any other, suppressed regardless, their
numbers brutally abbreviated in a vile
collaboration of planned extinction. The
remnants forge on instinctive with hope
and belief to meet again and yet again
brutal adversity without surcease.

Ancient sages forecast their dim visions
of an eternity of wild nightmares of
horrors and degraded aspirations. A people
apart yet of this time and of this place
held in uncertain esteem and quite certain
disdain. Holding fast and true to the
living dilemma of their presence in a
hostile world of others' beliefs.

Tragedy and opportunity are visitors
in equal measure on the threshhold of
that welcome-impoverished people. Their
struggle to surmount the obstacle of
apartness, other, and the strangeness of
subordinate status as lesser than most, yet
sustains the vigour of their needs and their
resolve and inner resources will, in the
final analysis, prevail; that stubborn lot.