Coping with the News From Afghanistan
Distressed by mounting anguish in the news
My blameless Dad seeks refuge midst his flowers
He settles on the terrace for a snooze
And wills his mind be rid of recent hours
Though blameless in it all, these eighty years
The sense of standing by racks up the shame
The empathy was good, but fostered fears
That life’s a ball in evil’s brutal game
So, summoning the Gods of nature hence
He focuses on their minutiae
He sees a spider’s web down by his fence
And in the spider’s web there is a fly
The fly is buzzing out its last life-force
The spider squats, complacent, biding time
My Dad sits quiet, observing nature’s course
But now a wasp would prick the paradigm
The wasp is veering, weaving, low and high
The spider sees him coming and keeps still
Attracted by the buzzing, wasp thinks FLY
And darts down swiftly for the kill
Of course, the wasp is quickly caught as well
The web vibrates as two buzz side by side
And so was woven nature’s magic spell
The predator is prey, the prize denied
No allegory this for human strife
But nature’s lesson’s clear, it seems to me
No sting can beat the spider’s web of life
For some things out there, what will be will be
