Spring is yet a long way off.
Cold as this winter day has been
-- and it has been -- we heard the
sweet song of goldfinches
and watched as robins flew
around the forest stream's
frigid ice-released waters on
a beautiful afternoon in the
country to which we were born.
Half a world away there are other
countries we've never seen
though our parents escaped them
when the century was in its infancy
migrating here so we would be
born free from persecution.
That happenstance choice saved
us from war and deprivation of
our very lives. And so we live in
gratitude and leisure, realizing that
others do not. Why, even this very day
this day that has given us so much pleasure
the country my mother left sent convoys
of aerial peacekeepers to bomb the cities
my father abandoned so many years
previously when life had abandoned
him. In my leisure time I shake in
dismay and pray for those living in
danger and fear of death's knock in
their winter of miserable discontent.
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