Category: violence

When They Are No More…

December 29, 2025 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

The snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children.
~Kobayashi Issa (translated by Robert Haas)

A voice is heard in Ramah,
mourning and great weeping,
Rachel weeping for her children
and refusing to be comforted,
because they are no more.
Matthew 2:18 and Jeremiah 31:15

…as you sit beneath your beautifully decorated tree, eat the rich food of celebration, and laugh with your loved ones, you must not let yourself forget the horror and violence at the beginning and end of the Christmas story. The story begins with the horrible slaughter of children and ends with the violent murder of the Son of God. The slaughter depicts how much the earth needs grace. The murder is the moment when that grace is given.

Look into that manger representing a new life and see the One who came to die. Hear the angels’ celebratory song and remember that sad death would be the only way that peace would be given. Look at your tree and remember another tree – one not decorated with shining ornaments, but stained with the blood of God.

As you celebrate, remember that the pathway to your celebration was the death of the One you celebrate, and be thankful.
~Paul Tripp

We think of him as safe beneath the steeple,
Or cosy in a crib beside the font,
But he is with a million displaced people
On the long road of weariness and want.

For even as we sing our final carol
His family is up and on that road,
Fleeing the wrath of someone else’s quarrel,
Glancing behind and shouldering their load.

Whilst Herod rages still from his dark tower
Christ clings to Mary, fingers tightly curled,
The lambs are slaughtered by the men of power,
And death squads spread their curse across the world.

But every Herod dies, and comes alone
To stand before the Lamb upon the throne.
~Malcolm Guite “Refugee”

When Christ was born in Bethlehem,
Fair peace on earth to bring,
In lowly state of love He came
To be the children’s King.

And round Him, then, a holy band
Of children blest was born,
Fair guardians of His throne to stand
Attendant night and morn.

And unto them this grace was giv’n
A Saviour’s name to own,
And die for Him Who out of Heav’n
Had found on earth a throne.

O blessèd babes of Bethlehem,
Who died to save our King,
Ye share the martyrs’ diadem,
And in their anthem sing!

Your lips, on earth that never spake,
Now sound th’eternal word;
And in the courts of love ye make
Your children’s voices heard.

Lord Jesus Christ, eternal Child,
Make Thou our childhood Thine;
That we with Thee the meek and mild
May share the love divine.
~Laurence Houseman “The Holy Innocents”

There is no consolation for families
of those children lost to death too soon:
a rogue king’s slaughter of innocents.

And still today – so much intentional death of the young,
to inflict the most pain,
lands flooded with blood,
across disputed borders and faith.

Arms ache through centuries with the emptiness of grief,
beds and pillows lie cold and unused,
hugs never to come again.

There is no consolation for loss then or now;
only mourning and great weeping,
sobbing that wrings dry every human cell,

leaving only dust behind:
our beginning
and, without salvation,
our end.

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(this article about JFK’s granddaughter’s terminal diagnosis was particularly poignant for me this morning)

Strung on the Necklace of Days

November 22, 2025 barnstormingblog1 Comment

It is a dark fall day.
The earth is slightly damp with rain.
I hear a jay.
The cry is blue.
I have found you in the story again.
Is there another word for “divine”?
I need a song that will keep sky open in my mind.
If I think behind me, I might break.
If I think forward, I lose now.
Forever will be a day like this
Strung perfectly on the necklace of days.
Slightly overcast
Yellow leaves
Your jacket hanging in the hallway
Next to mine.
~Joy Harjo “Fall Song”

November 22 always has a sadness about it for those of us who listened to the tragic news reports and experienced the aftermath of that day…

In the seemingly endless,
sometimes bleak string of fall days,
each one differing little from the one before
and the one that comes after,
there is linkage to winter on its way,
inescapable and unrelenting.

If I were to try to stop time now,
hold tight to a particular moment,
this necklace of days would break and scatter,
as a sustaining connection depends
on preserving what was before,
breathing deeply of what is now,
and praying for what is to come.

Each moment
never in isolation from those surrounding it.

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The Wildness and Wet

November 4, 2025 barnstormingblog1 Comment

What would the world be, once bereft
Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,
O let them be left, wildness and wet;
Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.
~Gerard Manley Hopkins from “Inversnaid”

In my anguish at the chaos in the world,
let me remember,
when I look closely,
through the rain,
even the weeds,
the unruly, unholy weeds
are connected
in this wilderness.

There is order here
even if I can’t feel it now.
Let us weeds be left.
We are meant to be.

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Lamenting Leaves Scattered in Ruin

October 26, 2025October 27, 2025 barnstormingblog4 Comments

October’s bellowing anger breaks and cleaves
The bronzed battalions of the stricken wood
In whose lament I hear a voice that grieves
For battle’s fruitless harvest, and the feud
Of outraged men. Their lives are like the leaves
Scattered in flocks of ruin, tossed and blown
Along the westering furnace flaring red.
O martyred youth and manhood overthrown,
The burden of your wrongs is on my head.
~Siegfried Sassoon “Autumn” (about his time in the trenches in WWI)

Over more than a century,
we have learned little
about how to resolve
the bellows of outraged men.

The fruitless harvest of battle,
counting up each violent death,
as warships gather
for unsanctioned war games.

Lament the tossing and blowing of lives
like October leaves, in a show of force
as transient and arbitrary as the wind,
merely to make a fruitless point…

to what end are the feuds of angry men?

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October 19, 2025October 19, 2025 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

Like You Don’t Belong Here

For grace to be grace,
it must give us things we didn’t know we needed
and take us places where we didn’t know we didn’t want to go.

As we stumble through the crazily altered landscape of our lives, we find that God is enjoying our attention as never before.
~Kathleen Norris from Acedia & Me: A Marriage, Monks, and a Writer’s Life

It happens in an instant.
My grandma used to say
someone is walking on your grave.

It’s that moment when your life
is suddenly strange to you
as someone else’s coat

you have slipped on at a party
by accident, and it is far
too big or too tight for you.

Your life feels awkward, ill
fitting. You remember why you
came into this kitchen, but you

feel you don’t belong here.
It scares you in a remote
numb way. You fear that you—

whatever you means, this mind,
this entity stuck into a name
like mercury dropped into water—

have lost the ability to enter your
self, a key that no longer works.
Perhaps you will be locked

out here forever peering in
at your body, if that self is really
what you are. If you are at all.
~Marge Piercy “Dislocation” from The Crooked Inheritance

This Self—Hispanic, Latin, blond, black,
olive-skinned, native and immigrant—
dispersed far and wide
was here with everyone, yesterday and again today;

I am large, I contain multitudes.
They will not manage to deny me or ignore me or declare me undocumented:
I am written in you, in all,
as all are in me…
~Luis Alberto Ambroggio from We Are All Whitman: #2:Song of/to/My/Your/Self

Each of us a work of art,
heaven-sent,
called to reflect
on our own creation,
placed in this world to
feel grace
when we stumble,
unsure where we are to go,
who we are meant to be,
as if we don’t really belong here,
a feeling of jamais vu
when the familiar becomes strange.

This is who we are:
called to act out that grace –
to praise goodness,
to protest evil,
to grapple with reality,
to respond to injustice,
to change the direction we’re heading
fearing who we become if we don’t .

A traditional Catalan Song from Pablo Casals, a symbol of peace and freedom worldwide

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October 16, 2025October 16, 2025 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

The Singers of Life, Not Death

The rain falls and falls
cool, bottomless, and prehistoric
falls like night —
not an ablution
not a baptism
just a small reason
to remember
all we know of Heaven
to remember
we are still here
with our love songs and our wars…

Here too
in the wet grass
half a shell
of a robin’s egg
shimmers
blue as a newborn star
fragile as a world.
~Maria Popova from “Spell Against Indifference”

…I had sat down to rest with my back against a stump. Through accident I was concealed from the glade, although I could see into it perfectly.

The sun was warm there, and the murmurs of forest life blurred softly away into my sleep. When I awoke, dimly aware of some commotion and outcry in the clearing, the light was slanting down through the pines in such a way that the glade was lit like some vast cathedral. I could see the dust motes of wood pollen in the long shaft of light, and there on the extended branch sat an enormous raven with a red and squirming nestling in his beak.

The sound that awoke me was the outraged cries of the nestling’s parents, who flew helplessly in circles about the clearing. The sleek black monster was indifferent to them. He gulped, whetted his beak on the dead branch a moment, and sat still. Up to that point the little tragedy had followed the usual pattern.

But suddenly, out of all that area of woodland, a soft sound of complaint began to rise. Into the glade fluttered small birds of half a dozen varieties drawn by the anguished outcries of the tiny parents.

No one dared to attack the raven. But they cried there in some instinctive common misery, the bereaved and the unbereaved. The glade filled with their soft rustling and their cries. They fluttered as though to point their wings at the murderer. There was a dim intangible ethic he had violated, that they knew. He was a bird of death.

And he, the murderer, the black bird at the heart of life, sat on there, glistening in the common light, formidable, unmoving, unperturbed, untouchable.

The sighing died. It was then I saw the judgment. It was the judgment of life against death. I will never see it again so forcefully presented. I will never hear it again in notes so tragically prolonged.

For in the midst of protest, they forgot the violence.

There, in that clearing, the crystal note of a song sparrow lifted hesitantly in the hush. And finally, after painful fluttering, another took the song, and then another, the song passing from one bird to another, doubtfully at first, as though some evil thing were being slowly forgotten. Till suddenly they took heart and sang from many throats joyously together as birds are known to sing.

They sang because life is sweet and sunlight beautiful. They sang under the brooding shadow of the raven. In simple truth they had forgotten the raven, for they were the singers of life, and not of death.
~Loren Eiseley from The Star Thrower

Each of us at times are as vulnerable as a nestling, just hatched.
The world is full of those who would eat us for lunch and do.

The world is also full of those who grieve and lament the violence that surrounds us, the tragedy of lives lost, the unending wars, the bullies and the bullied.

But the bird of death does not have the final word. He will soon be forgotten, forever sidelined as we reject what he and others like him represent.

Our cries of lament, our protests of violence transform into a celebration of life – we do not abandon all we have lost, but no longer allow any more to be stolen from us.

Only then may grief’s shadow be overwhelmed by joy.

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Trying to Make Sense of It

October 11, 2025 barnstormingblogLeave a comment

Mid-October and the calendar
of ladybugs directs them to move inside.
Following some unwritten date, they form
colonies of strange ideograms on the walls
and ceilings, their orange-red lacquer
dotted with different combinations
of black spots roving in afternoon sunlight.

Each year they turn back memory’s clock—
thirty years ago, my wife is in Chicago,
I’m in Connecticut with our three children,
just home from a soccer tournament.
Our middle son, nine, flush with pride
of his team’s championship, finds them
that first time: hundreds and hundreds

of ladybugs crawling on windows, walls,
ceilings. And then, my wife’s voice on the phone
from Chicago—her father has died.
For an hour the keening whine of the vacuum,
the peppery smell of ladybugs still alive
or dying inside the bulging bag. After,
I tell our children: Their grandfather is dead.

It’s the first death for each of them,
but the crash of sorrow into happiness
overwhelms our middle son, a wave
of joy and grief roiling inside him.
And then, twenty-two years later,
he too would die in mid-October
with the ladybugs’ arrival, with fall’s gold

leaf light and candelabras of sumac.
Don’t try to make sense of it, I told my son
back then. I thought: all these things,
inextricably but insensibly connected.
That’s what I tell myself every October,
the still unvacuumed ladybugs
like trails of language leading nowhere,
untranslatable and senseless.
~Robert Cording “Ladybugs”

The little fly you squashed and put into the ashtray
—how it walked out later that same day, bold as
you like across the carpet, cold-shouldering your

botched attempt at homicide with the aloofness of a
hired gun to the extent you broke into guffaws then
fell, stricken, to your knees and sobbed, forgiving

every one of your murderous intentions, forgiving
yourself, letting the patch of sun claim its prize.
~Claudine Toutoungi “Lazarus” from Emotional Support Horse

Humans have a love-hate relationship with insects. Mostly hate.

But bugs don’t like us any better when we attempt to swat, step on, smoosh and poison them to oblivion.

I’ve tried to understand the Creator’s design plan, making a place on this earth for mosquitoes, hornets, and scorpions and few other nasty bugs.

There must be some sense to their existence,
even if we fail to understand it.
There must be some sense to our own existence,
even if we fail to understand it.
Perhaps we humans exist just to make life difficult for the bugs.

…all these things,
inextricably but insensibly connected…

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Softer Than Rain

September 27, 2025 barnstormingblog1 Comment

Teach me to walk
with tender feet,
as the wild ones do.
Let me be the cinder-glow
of the fox in her burrow, wreathed
around the honey-spark fur
of her sleeping kits.

Let me be the shaded pools
of the doe’s eyes
in winter, when the snow falls,
when the stars lean down to listen,
when the world is darker
and softer
than rain.

Let me be the swallow
after flight, when she is
perched upon the branch
where the petals of the lilacs used to be,
and she is just still, and quiet,
her downy head inclined, as though
she is praying
for their return.
~Kimberly Beck “Tender Feet”

As the weather changes,
softening in the mists of autumn,
I walk each step with careful feet,
my tender heart singing songs in the rain.
I pray for peace in this troubled land,
for protection from harm until spring comes again.

May God grant a gentle night’s sleep for all His creatures.

Lyrics for Aragorn’s Sleepsong:
Lay down your head and I’ll sing you a lullaby
Back to the years of loo-li lai-lay
And I’ll sing you to sleep and I’ll sing you tomorrow

Bless you with love for the road that you go
May you sail far to the far fields of fortune
With diamonds and pearls at your head and your feet
And may you need never to banish misfortune

May you find kindness in all that you meet
May there always be angels to watch over you
To guide you each step of the way
To guard you and keep you safe from all harm
Loo-li, loo-li, lai-lay

May you bring love and may you bring happiness
Be loved in return to the end of your days
Now fall off to sleep, I’m not meaning to keep you
I’ll just sit for a while and sing loo-li, lai-lay

May there always be angels to watch over you
To guide you each step of the way
To guard you and keep you safe from all harm
Loo-li, loo-li, lai-lay

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In the Light-Charged Air

September 14, 2025 barnstormingblog1 Comment

When I saw the figure on the crown of the hill,
high above the city, standing perfectly still

against a sky so saturated with the late-
afternoon, late-summer Pacific light

that granules of it seemed to have come out
of solution, like a fine precipitate

of crystals hanging in the brightened air,
I thought whoever it was standing up there

must be experiencing some heightened state
of being, or thinking—or its opposite,

thoughtlessly enraptured by the view.
Or maybe, looking again, it was a statue

of Jesus or a saint, placed there to bestow
a ceaseless blessing on the city below.

Only after a good five minutes did I see
that the figure was actually a tree—

some kind of cypress, probably, or cedar.
I was both amused and let down by my error.

Not only had I made the tree a person,
but I’d also given it a vision,

which seemed to linger in the light-charged air
around the tree’s green flame, then disappear.
~Jeffrey Harrison “The Figure on the Hill” from Into Daylight

Who was it who suggested that the opposite of war
Is not so much peace as civilisation? He knew
Our assassinated Catholic greengrocer who died
At Christmas in the arms of our Methodist minister,
And our ice-cream man whose continuing requiem
Is the twenty-one flavours children have by heart.
Our cobbler mends shoes for everybody; our butcher
Blends into his best sausages leeks, garlic, honey;
Our cornershop sells everything from bread to kindling.
Who can bring peace to people who are not civilised?
All of these people, alive or dead, are civilised.
~Michael Longley “All of These People” from Collected Poems

Who among us appear
in the light-charged air,
visible on the crown of the hill of life –
who might be mistaken
for a martyr or a saint or a visionary,
when each one of us is
merely a person
responsible to a family,
committed to help friends,
dedicated to serve a community,
placed in this world to steady a broken civilization.

There is the simple truth that we need a person
with roots deep in the ground,
branches that reach up and out,
bearing fruit to share with those around us.

But surely not
this misery, not this blight, not this trouble,
certainly not these murders,
which only bears and shares
a heart-rending, horrible grief.

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