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Veterans Day Poem: Pray For Me Father
Pray For Me, Father © by Sherwood Ross
Pray for me, Father, mine is the sin of cowardice
For I do not set myself on fire at the White House gate
To protest murder. I am a glutton for God’s blue sky.
Pray for me, Father, for my tax dollars set a banquet for Death
With napalm and daisy cutters and snakelike missiles
That blow apart other men, and their wives and children
While I walk secure along the shore of the tranquil sea.
Pray for me, Father, and I will pray for you.
I will pray for a church that does not decry an Inquisition
Where men are broken and driven mad in the dungeons
Of Bagram, Kabul, Gitmo, and Abu Ghraib
A church of priests who recall Golgotha
As if Jesus and Jesus and Jesus by the thousands
Are not being crucified now by the Masters of War
Are not shuffling home on artificial legs
Are not staring sightless from wheelchairs
In VA hospitals into God’s blue sky.
Pray for me, Father, and I will pray for you.
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Posted by Sherwood Ross on Nov 11 2012, With 0 Reads, Filed under Living, Of Interest. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
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Yusefguitar, given your email name, I hope you are writing some anti-war songs! Veterans everywhere could get their American Legion and VFW posts to go on record calling for bringing our troops home and diverting war spending abroad to America spending at home. Such resolutions could be publicized on the Internet and sent to local newspapers and broadcast outlets and to public officials.Get your people on local talk shows and the 6 o’clock TV news. Copies could be distributed on busy street corners and to shoppers everywhere. Grass-roots protests can be effective protests. — Sherwood
Thanks so much to those of you who took the time to write in support of the ideas in this poem. This poem is written because when I have attended church I have never once heard the subject of the war
brought up, yet I believe that if Jesus lived today his first order of business would be to condemn the wars America has launched against other nations. That’s because as a Jew, Jesus revered the Ten Commandments, including the injunction “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” — Sherwood
Amen.