Wednesday, September 10, 2008

Walk the line


Walk the line

Between truth and tale
Where the line in the sand
Was washed away
By the ocean of stories told
To help the naïve sleep:
Their dreams filled
With the belief and justification
That any action is acceptable
If you are beyond
Seeing the stains
Upon your hands.

Yet the stains they do see
Are the ones
They paint upon another
And then blame them
For not allowing others
To sleep through life.

Wake up,
Do not justify a closed mind
And act surprised:
It is only your ignorance
Of why
That explains away
The reason
A nightmare was placed
Upon your door.
So many innocents die,
Yet whose life
Is given more worth?



Creative Commons License
Walk the Line by Allison Brown is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non-Commercial-Share Alike 2.5 Australia License. Based on a work at allisonbrown.blogspot.com.

2 comments:

Allison Brown said...

Comment from the author about the poem Walk the Line

This is a revision of a poem that I posted previously http://allisonbrown.blogspot.com/2007/06/walk-line-tall-tales.html

I felt that this poem needed more work done on it, as do some other poems I have posted.

Allison Brown said...

I always try to avoid adding what I was thinking to the poems I post here. As I prefer to see what others think about when they read them. But with this piece, by doing that I am not being honest about this poem and now I realise that is ignoring the truth behind it. The inspiration for this poem was after reading the blog Baghdad Burning http://riverbendblog.blogspot.com/

I am not trying to lay blame on anyone - it is more a comment on conflict and how easy it is to blame someone else for things that go wrong in your life. The power of war, whether you call it that or a police action or by some other name - is 'that blame' ends up costing lives...

Every time I find myself thinking about Riverbend and what she wrote I feel admiration for her honesty and compassion - even when faced with the fact that her world was falling a part.