Daily-ness and Disaster
©By Vijaya Sundaram
April 22nd, 2013
How banal, how mundane
How silly, how pointless
Our lives seem!
Sitting in class, pencils in hand
Trying to be good, while
The teacher gazes on.
Stern she looks, and somber
Trying to be vigilant
Wasting time on gum-chewers
And time-wasters.
When elsewhere, lives end
Abruptly, pointlessly.
Grief and loss bloom
Like a mushroom cloud
Over a teeming populace
Wiped out by violence,
Riven by famine and flood.
And children torn from the arms of love,
Watch as parents are afloat on a sea
Of uncertainty.
Where food comes from
Hardly matters, when
They worry about whether
It comes, at all.
Whether school is up and running
Seems to matter so little, and yet
Someone is shot at brutally,
Risking her all, to reach school.
Elsewhere, in the city, last week
A child of eight died, in mid-cheer
Abruptly, pointlessly, painfully.
A shining being, ready for greatness.
And here, in the humming peace
The strumming quiet
The numbing apathy of daily life
We sit, pretending what we do matters.
It may all seem pointless now,
In the aftermath of recent tragedy.
And I might be right.
But I’d like to be hopeful
I’d like to say it matters
I’d like to say, “Everything,
But everything matters.”
Writing matters, reading matters,
Being hopeful matters, being good
Matters a whole lot.
And I would be right.
~~~~~~~~~ The End ~~~~~~~~~~~~~