"Death does not get the last word,"
a priest once said to me. He'd heard it all, seen every kind of horror, yet he smiled with irrepressible joy everywhere I saw him. He's retired now, and I miss him. I want to believe what he believes. I trawl social media for happy memes, hopeful reminders. #Life is good. Never mind about the dinosaurs. Forget the witch burnings, the lynchings and shootings, the Holocaust. Choose to be happy.
Rejoice!
source: What Do You Say to Your Kids About Dinosaurs and the Bible?
"Vengeance is mine,"
saith the Lord, and from infancy I was taught that we are to trust this God will, in some next life, orchestrate some Day of Reckoning, where wrongs are righted, the innocent are vindicated, the wicked held accountable at last.
As I scroll the walls of Twitter, I see two images conjoined, almost, but 15 hours apart, the mutilated horses, and the murdered girls. Violence is not uniquely directed at one class of people. Police brutality and corrupt cops affect us in all walks of life, even the apparently privileged. My own sister was one of these "disposable" young women. Lisa Peak was found dead in a ditch only half a year after Julie. Almost half a century later, #NoJustice was ever served. Try to get people to care, and you might see why so many protestors and activists resort to riots, fires, vandalism, and roadblocks. Anger, outrage, frustration at the apparent indifference of those who haven't lost a loved one to senseless violence: these are things we sort, sift, and try to channel into healthier outlets. Some days, it even drives me to poetry. And I am not a poet.
Women disposed of
like roadside trash,
their killers walking free.
Mutilated horses,
Dogs in chains, cats on fire,
Never seen by you or me
but from a safe distance, sheltered, unaware.
Turn off the TV, and they go away.
Remind me this is not all,
this is not the sum total, this human debris,
these creatures maimed
by killers among us posing as humanity.
Show us oh Lord where the suffering souls be,
help us to save them, heal them, keep them safe;
make us your hands, your eyes, your rescuing wings.
May we be guardian angels in this broken world
where smiling babies, puppy dogs and rainbows
and girls found dead in a ditch
are all said to be loved by their Creator,
Father God,
as alive and well as the dinosaur.
Quick,
tell me a joke.
Hand me the remote,
Turn off the TV, the truth, the sad, sordid stories of our lives.
Make me laugh, all you cats of You-Tube!
That's as far as I got
before remembering that I don't write poetry. Conveying strong emotions in the fewest number of words possible is beyond me. Sometimes, though, I feel like trying. The juxtaposition of mutilated horses, their attacker still at large, right above a memorial to a murder victim whose case is still cold, reminded of 
"High Kill." Now there's an example of taking one's personal pain and transforming it into exquisitie prose; taking the sorrows and injustices of too many lives, human and otherwise, and presenting it in the form of a novel.
Sometimes, pain is like the grain of sand irritating the clam to produce a pearl. Rhonda's novel is a pearl:
Pearls are formed when an irritant, such as a bit of food, a grain of sand, bacteria, or even a piece of the mollusk's mantle becomes trapped in the mollusk. To protect itself, the mollusk secretes the substances aragonite (a mineral) and conchiolin (a protein), which are the same substances it secretes to form its shell.
As natural pearls are very rare and hundreds of oysters or clams would have to be opened to find one wild pearl, cultured pearls are more common.....These pearls do not form by chance in the wild. They are helped by humans, who insert a piece of shell, glass, or mantle into a mollusk and wait for pearls to form. This process involves many steps for the oyster farmer. The farmer must raise the oysters for about three years before they are mature enough to implant, keeping them healthy. Then they implant them with the graft and nucleus and harvest the pearls 18 months to three years later.
How Pearls Form and Which Species Makes Them
Sadly, if you irritate me, you don't get pearls. You get bad poems.
Today (oops, make that yesterday; I decided to sleep on this one before posting) is the 44th anniversary of a young journalism student's brutal murder, and across the ocean, an investigative reporter in France remembered her.Bright and beautiful, strangled and beaten, tossed like an empty beer can from the window some a low-life's car, Lisa Peak's life was cut short, and the killer(s) walked free.
Other people insist our lives have meaning and "purpose." Forgive me Lord (if you even exist) for doubting that. Better to believe we matter--and be wrong--than to go through life feeling none of us matters and we all end up as dust.
We began as dust: we are stardust.
Whatever "God" is, may we manifest all that is good, and may we vanquish all who would harm another living creature or destroy what another has created. Let us trawl the internet for hopeful memes and keep the darkness at bay. Let us do good, be good, and triumph over evil.
Even if it drives me to writing bad poetry and painting silly cats on wood slices.
Captain Kitty
was the love of my life in early childhood, and I spent many hours staring at the fluffy white queen in her pearls. I also played with dolls and lived most of my days in an imaginary world, the real one (in which we led Willie the Pig and Jenny the cow and Weirdo the Rooster to the slaughter) being too harsh for my tender girlish heart.