A Sunday Afternoon Poem

After All This

After all this life I no longer have an alibi.
These days that turn towards violence —
even my best hours pay with guilt
for silence and mistakes

human nature makes of a lifetime's desire.
After this, should I care who I offend —
politicians, terrorists, religious inquisitors
corporate murderers, assassins

of the language structuring the soul?
Caught in the act, how can I hope
to give birth on this earth we've failed
to honor? After all this life I move

willingly towards extinction,
remembering those who, feeling tremors
in the grain of the bone clawed the earth
in storm, but did not survive,

who came to me on a road to nowhere,
barely covered with flesh, with one eye bruised,
the other closed completely; who, in the mortal
urgency of their lives, could not refuse to suffer.

~ Lee H. Mccormack