Worlds Apart

In India distraught parents are
inconsolable in their pain and grief
where life on a high geological plateau
will never be the same again after a
school bus driven carelessly veered
off the mountain into the abyss below
and twenty-four rural children will now
miss their life-lessons permanently.
In a Canadian prairie town a hockey
team setting out for another town where
boys of 18 and 20 test their skills and
mettle against one another, their bus
collides with a tractor trailer and fifteen
are dead, others in dire medical condition
and the nation responds echoeing the
shocked loss of that distant town.
And surely for those parents one of
whom declared of his son paralyzed
neck down that at least he is alive
and life is all parents want for their
children. Then it transpires the coroner's
office misidentified a dead youth in
stark error for all the players were
formidable in the youthful vigour of
their appearance despite the carnage
inflicted on their bodies. Two sets of
parents identified their offspring through
their haze of grief and the twisted and
damaged condition of their loved ones
but each verified another's child not
their own. Now one youth accepted as
dead is not, but in parlous condition
and the one identified as having
survived his dreadful ordeal is dead
and the parents, somehow coping. In
Syria children die as a blood-hungry
dictator sends chemical weapons to
destroy them, simply because he can.