Hate no more!

Crime of pride, anger, jealousy,
Sins capital, theft, murder, rape, adultery,
Pardon can all wrong-doing and all sin efface.
The Father Lord is clemency, life and grace.
Regret is human; one can always be reborn
Self-mastered, purer, wiser, richer with reform.
With the third millennium and the dawn of a century,
Some nations are sunk deep in misery,
Submitting themselves to God and his Providence.
While others have riches and science and eminence.
History repeats the story since ancient days
When Cain and Abel went separate ways;
One, self-assured, defied God by his work,
One, poet and shepherd, was bound to his flock,
Seeking no more than joys of the mind
And finding Nature amply kind.
Then Satan came and placed in the heart
A mortal venom of anger and hate,
The means that Lucifer would employ
To counter God’s work and mankind destroy.
The third millennium at last has dawned
And science reached heights we could never have dreamed.
But faced with hate man stands in despair,
For when love has fled no hope is there.
It was not humans that September day,
Who brought destruction and did slay
Innocents by the thousand as engines from the air
Crashed on a city with which none compare.
No, it is hate, hate that brings a neighbouring state
Under the heel of a tyrant irate;
Iraq, land and people, are trod to the ground
And no invasion can ease the wound.
Babylon, where gardens once hung high in the air,
Babylon, Semiramis, what beauty was there!
Now all the remains are trampled and looted,
Then come under fire from troops heavy-footed,
The G.I. who came with power yet untold
To rain down death on even the bold.
Hate it is that kept women down
And denied her the rights she claimed as her own.
Hate came to Bosnia and the Afghan city
To make them hell where men had no pity.
But all things that begin, they must have an end,
Cities and empires and every trend;
And as living beings for ever transform,
No spirit may halt or to fate bow down.
Extremists, fanatics in all religions exist;
Away with them all! lest hate persist.
Explosions and violence and suicide slaughter,
Vicious circle of hatred that gives no quarter.
What torment and woes in this world, Africa,
Palestine, Sudan, Levant, South America!
Let each forget the hate he feels
And embrace with whole heart man’s lofty ideals.
Let us turn to liberty, equality, fraternity
And practice tolerance, love and charity
The world will go well when the hearts of the great
Are back to their innocent childhood state.
Late hate go away and forever depart,
To leave only love in each childlike heart.
Man shall then find his true nobility,
Compassion, affection, and deep tranquility.

Tidal Wave

This late December, the planet earth, to punish or to warn,
Belched forth its waters in cataclysmic storm.
In the Austral Asian Indies the New Year was awaited
By fishers of the coast and tourists by the sun elated.
For the first there was work and for the latter there was joy,
From dreary winter climes they came to lands of fantasy,
Bronzing their white bodies on the surf-bathed sands,
Served by smiling brother humans of exotic lands.
But for people of both races, terror was in store,
For Providence sent disaster from the Indian Ocean floor.
Call him Neptune, call him Poseidon, raging god of the waves,
Summoned all the vengeful forces that were his eager slaves,
Rousing them from a century’s sleep
In the silent blackness of the deep.
In blind fury he launched them on the shore,
Making no distinction between the rich men and the poor.
A towering wall of water thundered on the placid isles
Then tide followed tide, scouring inland many miles,
Sweeping away young and old, farm crops and cattle,
Devouring all the land and leaving not a chattel.
Humble huts of fisherfolk and tourist palaces of stone,
Trees deep-rooted, in some minutes all were gone.
Corpses floating in the muddied ebb and flow,
While some seized the debris to fight the under-tow.
Boats were carried on the roads, resting on their keels,
While carriages went out to sea with idly turning wheels.
People crowded on the roof-tops where safety might be found,
But the walls split beneath and even they were drowned.
Mothers held their babes in tight embrace
As both were carried seawards face to face.
We think of catastrophes also tragic,
Agadir, Lisbon. nine-eleven and Titanic.
Men are not fish who in water delight,
For their nature craves air and the light.
Water is a world with images strange,
It undergoes all kinds of change,
Disappearing when heated from our sight,
Transformed when frozen to purest white.
Dew, mist or raindrops, it takes the form
Of sweet April shower or violent storm;
Although of all life it is the source,
Against its fury there’s no recourse;
Whether silent sea or river that runs,
It is like Saturn who ate his own sons.
O water! You gave life but your horrors eclipse
All that was written in John’s Apocalypse.
Never was there such a spectacle sad
At Hiroshima, Waterloo or Leningrad.

Joseph Matar
All rights reserved © LebanonArt
Translated from French: K.J.Mortimer

>> Third Page <<