Simple Tools

There is something wrong with you.
It has taken you sixty some odd years to understand
just how wrong,
that the simple things you believe,
the Sunday School lessons of simple kindness
and golden rules
are not so simple after all,
that too many are too broken,
too full of fear and anger and needs
that go too far back, that are so interwined
with who and what they are,
that simple, even when true,
is not easy.

It is an irony, you think, that it took brokenness,
complete and utter, to bring you to the place
where you could live with that simplicity,
that it was ever reached when “all was well”,
never reached until you lived your season in the wilderness
without light or color or self.
You became childlike. A believer again,
built on the hard experience and the kindness of strangers,

just enough to understand the wisdom
of simple love.
An obvious thing the world around you,
somehow, for all it’s wrenching pain,
has not been broken enough
to believe.

About this poem

I find myself both angry and sad at our nation, it’s poverty, it’s brokenness, it’s racial wars, still with us after all the journey we have made, all the battles fought. I thought, and I suspect the politicians thought, it would fade. But it’s not.

I find myself praying that is the case for all of us.

A bit of autobiography in this one.

The pictures are masonic symbols from the time of George Washington. One of the tenets of masonic life is that we all live in the “straight and level” – with the simple laws of of the golden rule. Something most faiths, certainly mine, agree with. And yet….

A bit sad. A bit mad.

Tom