The Way
This is the way the world is.
The way we raise our shaking palms.
The way we cast our ragged cloaks before the power.
The way we praise the hot, expected hour,
anticipating the gleeful retribution.
Remember the way the walls were once torn down?
The way the families stripped of firstborn scrabbled in the dark
for the child now lost?
The son that lies dead.
For violence wrought demands violence in return, we said.
This is the way the world is.
The fearful, forced, forsaken world.
The punitive world has its way.
This is the way the world is.
The way of what is done at night.
The bent conspiracies and betrayals, the silver pieces,
toil and trade and loyalties frayed.
The way poor women bruised their breasts and wept and wept and wept.
The vows not kept.
The way the oppressed persist in their lament,
backs bent, lives rent.
This is the way the world is.
The brutal, branded, blinding world.
The carceral world has its way.
This is the way the world is.
The broad and busy way into the city.
The way we pass by the dying unremarkable,
unwilling interruption for our errands there.
Where was it you were going?
The way what is important always seems to lie elsewhere.
The way we shy from what is shameful.
Efficient executions.
The way we once had a dream that the world could be better,
before the powers conditioned us, partitioned us, requisitioned us
and mocked the scars on the land,
the wounds on the hand.
This is the way the world is.
The weary, waste and disappointed world.
The occupied world has its way.
This is the way the world is.
The way the children seem to know
and thus they dance and laugh and grow.
The way the spoken stories sing.
The way hope burns.
The way what is most mighty arrives in such humility,
like the poured oil of the sure sunrise,
anointing the soil,
balm for blind eyes.
The way the sown seed meets the wide earth’s sacred need.
This is the way the world is.
The graced, embraced, love-riven world.
The healed, unsealed, forgiven world.
The real world.
The real world.
The real world has its way.
Note: lines 45 and 46 were inspired by a passage in Theodor Adorno’s ‘Minima Moralia’.
© Michael Manning
