"The Year of Mercy."
Michael Broder has been, over the last couple
of years, been doing a series of daily poems.
One was the HIV Here and Now project.
And then he started doing the aftermath.
So "The Year of Mercy" was in the HIV one.
And this is, the Pope said, in 2014, he said, this
was the year of your mercy.
"The Year of Mercy."
The news is swift and swift swoops across our minds,
then loves until the next disaster.
The spent storm excels timber, cars, cradles, sodden food,
and sad sobbing people.
The Pope has declared a year of mercy.
One year?
And then what?
A year of retribution?
Why not a decade?
A century?
Or a millennium of mercy?
Why not a year of pacificity?
A year of deep, committed loving.
A year of tongue scrubbing of the men and women
who grope us with language as nasty
as their tender prodding hands.
The news twitters away silence and opens hearts to failure
or the possibility of evolution in manners and morals, even
unto that dream of equality, the one slaves understood
could not be a dream, but had to be a reality.