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Home Voices | Lleisiau Poetry

Welsh Poetry Sunday: How can this be?

As we remember wars past, Richard Jenkins writes of the consequences and confusion of conflicts present, asking how can this be, still?

Richard Jenkins by Richard Jenkins
12-11-2023 15:43
in Poetry, Voices | Lleisiau
Reading Time: 2 mins read
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How can this be? Rusted bullet holes in a metal door

Photo by Tengyart on Unsplash

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How Can This Be?
How can this be?
A father who has lost two children
Sees the warmongers
Just one of many, many, far too many
Left to endure the reign of this belly gutting.
It’s counter intuitive to outlive your children
Leaves you to drown
in a hurricane sea of incredulity
I don’t know how many parents
Who have lost
are now lost
in that ocean of tumultuous, cruel waves that scream and scream;
How can this be
Is their grief
even after many
long hard days
weeks and years on years
still all consuming
Fathers are unmanned
and mothers made mad
Their sense of ever being
able to feel a tinge of real happiness
has left them forever
I don’t know how they drag
their unwillingness to live
inch by inch from unfathomable depths
for the sake of loved ones
I don’t know and I can’t ever know
I only know by the loss of reason
rhyme or understanding of
How these things can be.
How can this be
I see the living, breathing faces
of self-proclaimed followers
of the great fairy tale omnipotence in the sky
Selling a false dawn of reconciliation
How can it be
conspiring, secretive witches and wizards
dressed by Savile row for the occasion agree
jointly and severally to follow in concert
some oblique, self-determined moral compass
How can it be?
It guides them to satisfy the compact of their joint endeavour
their mutually held and shared hubris
To place an arms length scheme to kill innocents.
How can it be
They don’t tremble with grief and shame
I look and I am torn with a fervour to hurt that absorbs my soul
I want to scream in their ears til they are deaf!
How can this be?
consumed with anger and frustration
I want to hold their faces
over the bodies of the children killed
use matchsticks to stop them closing
their opaque, unseeing eyes
make them see!
How can it be
They won’t look forevermore at consequences
of their God-given talent
to tuck their empathy away
in a big, fat wallet
A wallet that has no room left now
it’s full of the money
earned from breaking the hearts and minds
of so many lost souls that scream and
scream and scream;
how can this be?!
Tags: Poetry SundayWelsh poetry
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Richard Jenkins

Richard Jenkins

Richard Jenkins is a retired director of the Federation of Master Builders Cymru, with extensive knowledge of housebuilding in Cymru. He has a masters degree in marketing from the University of South Wales.

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