Evil Has No Easy Explanation

September 19, 2020

Dear Subscriber:

Each week we examine a theme from a variety of points of view. The theme for this week is innocence.

I welcome comments on my poems at https://nicholasgordon.blogspot.com.

A poem to a child about the guilt that innocent children feel when they are abused:

Evil has no easy explanation.
Everyone is evil and is good.
Sometimes we watch ourselves do something evil
Frozen in a scream that's never Heard.

We cannot stop ourselves, so we go on,
Knowing somewhere else the horror plays
And plays and plays until we are forgiven,
Healed by someone's gift of unearned love.

When someone has been tortured as a child,
Evil, like a mad dog, crouches near.
One buries it deep in a vaulted, lead-lined chamber,
But zombie-like it stalks the world within.

It's strange that darkened children need forgiveness
For evil that they suffer, innocent.
But guilt's the trademark of humiliation,
Burned into the flesh of memory.

Love washes over evil like an ocean,
Sweeping over seething, fisted anger,
Drowning it in cold, unquiet depths,
Leaving you weak and weeping on the strand.

You wouldn't be yourself without the pain
That twists inside like penitential dancers,
Making you the stage of some strange beauty,
Like no one else, the host of our redemption.

© by Nicholas Gordon

To see this poem on my site, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/evil.html. For more philosophical poems, go to https://www.poemsforfree.com/philosophicalpoems.html.

This week’s theme: Innocence
September 14: Forests Are a Glimpse of Permanence
September 15: There Is in Friendship Just a Bit of Eden
September 16: Fifteen’s Neither Child nor Adult
September 17: I Loved You, but I Could Not Wait Forever
September 18: Fifty-Eight Still Finds Delight in Learning
September 19: Evil Has No Easy Explanation