Aging Capriciously

The mother cries for her dead child

The man cries for the loss of his spouse

The child cries for fear of loneliness

All over the world, there is a blanket of tears.

The soldiers cry for the loss of their comrades

The wounded cry for the loss of their limbs

The Generals cry for their failures

The battlefields ring with the cries of the dead and dying.

The soil cries out as it is poisoned with a stew of rot and pollutants

The air cries out as it is smothered with a brew of fumes and gases

The water cries out as it is fouled with a soup of oil and garbage

The earth shudders and heaves as it cries itself to sleep each night.

God looks down upon the earth and crying says, “What did I do?”

A note on this small bit of prose:

At my retreat this week, one of the exercises given by Father Shea SJ was to imagine that we could look down upon the earth.  Using our senses of sight, sound, smell, taste, and touch, what do we observe?  I closed my eyes and imagined that I was on some distant star.  I looked down upon the earth, but I could not see anyone.  What suddenly came to my attention as the blue ball of earth rotated beneath my gaze was the sound of crying.  All over the earth, I could hear crying.  From every part of the earth I was conscious of the sound of crying.  Hence, I wrote this small bit of prose to capture the lamentations of our planet.