This world’s anguish is no different from the love we insist on holding back.

In a world gushing blood day and night, you never stop mopping up pain.

In an age of bombsguzzling blood, skylarks merge peacewith thought and action.

What can bombs know of the illuminated fields so golden with heaven in your heart’s sacred lands?

Simple shifts in points of view can open doors to expansions of consciousness as easily as rigid dispositions can close hearts and minds to such elevated awareness. It generally depends on whether you allow fear and violence to rule your actions or whether you give wisdom, courage, and compassion the authority to do so.

Before the thunderous clamor of political debate or war set loose in the world, love insisted on its promise for the possibility of human unity: between men and women, between blacks and whites, northerners and southerners, haves and have-have-nots, self and self.

In my head this cruel unspeakable truth: that we battled and we cursed and we spilled each other’s blood, we relished our taste of hell and strangled heaven’s love.