"This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our
nation's homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of
hate in to the veins of peoples normally humane, of sending men home
from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and
psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and
love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money
on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching
spiritual death...We will never have peace in the world until men everywhere recognize
that ends are not cut off from means, because the means represent the
ideal in the making, and the end in process. Ultimately, you can't reach
good ends through evil means, because the means represent the seed and
the end represents the tree...The old law of an eye for an eye leaves everybody blind. It is
immoral because it seeks to humiliate the opponent rather than win his
understanding. It seeks to annihilate rather than to convert. Violence
is immoral because it thrives on hatred rather than love. It destroys
community and makes brotherhood impossible. It leaves society in
monologue rather than dialogue.Violence ends by defeating itself. It creates bitterness in the survivors and brutality in the destroyers...When evil men plot, good men must plan. When evil men burn and bomb,
good men must build and bind. When evil men shout ugly words of hatred,
good men must commit themselves to the glories of love.Where evil men would seek to perpetuate an unjust status quo, good men must seek to bring into being a real order of justice." ---Martin Luther King, Jr.
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Our limbs now fight to narrowly survive
These morbid characters of XENO, the son of PHOBIA.
(This poem is dedicated to all the victims of recent Xenophobic attack in South - Africa, the injured, the dead, and the fortunate survivors...old, and young.)
Mother Africa…there’s fire on the mountain
We are no longer at ease with one another
Shall we let go…look on, and vanish in silence
While things continue to fall apart?
Must we set forth at dawn
Ride on the famished wings of time
To finally right that which is wrong
Or forever shut in this horrid room called hell?
Broken and shattered, we nimble on
As always, to reluctantly pick up
All there was to remain
The broken pieces of our concocted lives
Withered limbs, we gasped
As we struggled to fight to breathe
But not to poison the sacred air
And the fragrant pleasure it has to give
Yet, unable to mend our broken ways
We have turned pieces of bent and broken limbs
From decades of fraud, arrogance and blatant misrule
Which have remained a naked sore on their wicked souls
Their stubborn indifference…crass laziness
Paved our common streets every night with poverty
Hunger, diseases, hatred, war…and death
And now the birth of XENO, son of PHOBIA spilling blood
Our hearts must have been made of stone
Even when healings came through the backyard of victory
That EBOLA fell to the damning claws of our collective WILL
After many cries run into tears of doom
Together we tore down the evil fabrics of APATHEID
And now are over-joyed with grace and hopes
When our Nation willingly DECIDED to move
Past the strange verdict of the foreign apocalyptic prophets
But joy, has a slender body that breaks too soon
Eventually, that too was broken
As our limbs now fight to narrowly survive
These morbid characters of XENO, the son of PHOBIA
Oh Mother Africa! There’s fire on the mountain
We are no longer at ease with one another
Shall we let go…look on, and vanish in silence
While things continue to fall apart?
Must we now set forth at dawn
Ride on the famished wings of time
To finally, right that, which is wrong
Or forever shut in this horrid room called hell?
©adeolagoloba 2015
