Hear Our Voice

(Click HERE to Listen to this Poem.)

There are no acceptable casualties

Not as far as God is concerned.

There is no body count that will ever be OK.

In God’s place, you are the most important you that is.

The interrupted arc of any soul is not part of a greater plan

And no poetry or eulogy or elegy will suffice.

For God weeps when we, you, are in exile

From ourselves and God’s desire for life.

God we say, chafetz chaim, desires life

And all its glory, for this alone we are here.

To inspire we humans to choose life that we may live

This is the wildest call of all.

We are but long burning matches reaching for the wick

To shine brightly and with grace, wherever we happen to be.

To be partners, not servants, to the Divine, is why we are here

For God learned early on that God could not do it alone.

There is no one who matters not

No one whose journey isn’t blessed

No one whose question can be ignored

Because of how she has asked before.

Every life lost because his life “didn’t matter” to someone

Is a travesty of creation and the primordial light billions of years old

When even the smallest particle arrives after 14 billion years and cannot find one of us who should have been here to receive it

The angels cry and the firmament groans.

I do not know the answers for the forlorn

I do not know how to mend the most fractured hearts

Except to say that you do not have to be OK until you are OK

There is no remedy that can rewrite the past.

There is just we, our innately divine and human wiring

That electrifies our souls, and awakens us to what might yet be possible. 

Stay plugged in, even as you feel depleted

Stay connected even as you are frayed

Stay in touch, even when your skin smarts from the pain

For your life still matters and carries within it the grandest of possibilities.

Even as God weeps for the lost, God sits in shiva with you

Keeping in sight what is still yet unwritten by your hand.