Two Worlds
Yet friend-bound
Two minds
Yet heart-bound
By accident, almost
Conversing, sometimes brokenly
Translating, sometimes poorly
Yet we understood enough
To laugh
To long
To care
And sometimes I don’t know
What clay has molded you,
What sun has melted you,
Though you are human
And so am I
Brother and sister, we’ve teased
Yet sometimes it frightens me
For you see the world
Through eyes with different focus
Sometimes, I think, a blindness
And you would bay for blood
Upholding the law
Ancient law, it’s true
Harsh as the heat beating down
And you see no contradiction
In the blood on the sand
And our smirking banter
No, you are from another world
Another time, almost
Yet in this one…
To many that is the terror
You, and your ways,
Something from an old realm
And there be dragons
And we recoil
For such things should have passed,
Or so we say, in haughtiness
As if inoculations cure all
But we both have our own ways
Side by side
Two worlds
And worse, you believe it
Yes, you do, no false show
You’ve terribly good intentions
Frighteningly so
You believe this is the way of God
And you will be judged,
You and your land,
By the justice of the scarlet sand
It is strange how different we have become
I find myself
Half-admiring, half-recoiling
For we’ve become the rationalists
We’ve become the cynics
We’ve said
“God is dead”,
And gone on to commit our murders
Yet prefer our hands clean
And our liberality in check
Perhaps here nothing’s sacred
Yet your sacredness scares me
Part of me fears the cut of you
The brutality you live with
Or that lives with you
And the other part knows more
It cannot make a monster of you
No matter the war of worlds
No, humanity is complex
Just as friendship is
Perhaps only God is fitting
To judge it, judge us
To give us the wisdom
To change it, change us
To know how far is too far
And how far is not far enough
Perhaps only He can light our hearts
Guide us on the way forward,
A way to honor Him
While seeing ourselves
In the face nearest to us
And to know that life
Is of greater worth
Than blood