the victim pleading innocence

Why does the conscience scream at the sight of natural disaster,
at the Big Problems that we all grieve.
Not everyone has this arrogance but I am certain
it lives like a sewer in a city, everywhere running
implied by the facts we know of our day to day lives.

Look at Hurricane Katrina. What
negligence of the Bush Presidency to send off
the Guard from the levies,
baring New Orleans to the Gulf-

Or the typhoon that swept across Asia, 2004:
orphans and widows left behind as people
washed out to sea, the dead victims of a
sudden pestilential rain. the sea gulls
were flying axial changes in Australia.

The Gulf Oil spill, the thick red drops
of oil and chemicals in the water
Barack Obama approved increased off shore drilling
just last year.


Seen in day light these must be the acts of God
at the most incomprehensible. Our ability to choose destruction
no cure for the tendency to be victims of God's will.

But how many people, like me, unwillingly opt
to cull from these evil moments- guilt,
that we pulled the trigger, in some way that we are connected
and culpable.
The attacks against us increase, we grovel and fend off
guilt and self-hate. Our thoughts within the confines of our hearts
connect us to the problems of the world.
A psychosis of responsibility or of power
created by lack of position or influence
and the tragedy of others becomes diminished to
our small mistakes we misconstrue as causes
and this travesty continues without ceasing
in the paranoid heat of our minds.

In response:

God cannot be that arbitrary.
The Creator and Sustainer of the Universe
is no unsteady adolescent.

The secret solution:

To cultivate the joyful moments
as a buffer from despair,
and the grandiose presumptions that
our death, or even human hate prompts.

Our true responsibility:

To bathe carefully, and notice the smell of azaleas after rain falls.
To chew our rice. To speak more softly than those who speak to us.