Hostage to Hostility

The sainted embodiment of poets

and playwrights knew full well

that there is a corporeal language

shared by all humanity endowed

by nature in the primordial past to

bleed when we are pierced and

to feel pain wrack our frail bodies

to mourn when we have been deprived

of life's full meaning. Our faculties

of thought and sight and hearing

and movement are similar one to the

other. Each and all of us wherever we

live, however we live know fear and

humiliation, prize the dignity of the

person, ardently seek to secure our

unknown futures. Above all we evade

death for as long as we possibly can. This

the language of humanity languishes

with the calculated deliberate withholding 

of empathy for the pain and suffering and

loss by those whose culture speaks an

entirely conflicted language of hatred.