Let’s Try Everything
POETRY FORMAT, 2 Sep 2013
Tom Greening – TRANSCEND Media Service
Back then
I was a young and sheltered American,
but I remember the newsreels:
Refugees on broken roads
trod east, or was it west?
How many of them
got to a safe place?
The nuclear menace
is not like a Stuka-—
It doesn’t bomb and strafe
and then disappear
into an April cloud.
No baby carriages
are overturned,
no car radiators
are riddled with holes,
no one is dying
in a muddy ditch.
Since Hiroshima
roads are wider,
cars are faster,
but our modern freeways
become more crowded,
like our minds.
We refugees
escape neither east nor west
and April clouds do not hide
what we know.
I’m told that
despair alone
does not empower.
Before the radioactive dust
stuffs us up,
let’s try singing
a loud, inspirational song
with quavering voices.
Let’s try acting,
if it hasn’t been too long,
as if we had choices.
Let’s try
everything.
_______________________
Tom Greening: “I engage in five professional activities:
Faculty Member at Saybrook University
Private Practice of Psychotherapy
Clinical Professor of Psychology, UCLA
International Editor of the Journal of Humanistic Psychology
Writing (Poetry).”
www.tomgreening.com
This article originally appeared on Transcend Media Service (TMS) on 2 Sep 2013.
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