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Quail Not At Death's Door If You Wrought No Wilful Harm

Quail not at Death’s door if you wrought no wilful harm Quail not at Death’s door if you wrought no wilful harm Should turning back in vengeance be the Dead Man’s qualm Though even as the end nears the comfort of proffered pardon Will in no way replace the sacrifices to expunge the burden Sure everyone wreaks harm by chance or through ignorance During those moments when control depends on circumstance The way the chips fall is not a matter for individual call Is not that the way centillions of quarks knock into it all Do the Dead turn back to set right their splintered houses Or do the worlds keep spinning guided by original causes Tell not the man whose wits desert him what’s really wrong The punishment the Dead incur is a judgement well foregone He who turns self-righteously around to avenge or to meddle To set right the world’s injustices in the Manichean treadle Might earn himself a life’s sentence to roam all over again Dead people walking numb through friendless terrain All they may be able to do is to warn you of a fiddle Of some danger sapping your strength the key to a riddle Even if friends and relatives who betrayed your confidence Will cling to spurious justifications ever through repentance Think not of the lives milling lost in the neck of your clouds Is there no end to ramifications vilifications in livelihoods Do the Dead take along with them the history of their lives And in which distant sibling planet are they stored in archives If only it were as easy as to look up and wish them all away What good can this earth be with us all dead in it anyway Bickering for pieces of molten land pieces of names in decay Metals and rock on fire hurtling down minuscule Milky Way What need has the Maker for such a vast and roving Empire Even children give up playing with trains and coaches on fire Do the Dead renew passports before entering galactic spaces Or do they coddle up in comfort in inalienable birth-places Wouldn’t our world be some thing else but for this baffling secret The foregone fate of earth-born gods if it weren’t for this regret. © T. Wignesan – Paris, 2014

Copyright © | Year Posted 2014




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Book: Shattered Sighs