The Fallen

By Patrick Draper

I could weep for an eternity

Tears washing over my body

Knowing how far we have fallen

Body of flesh

Grunting, moaning, transmitting

The primate within us roars

Sunlight glints through the forest canopy above

Luscious green and textured brown, splashed with vivid hues

Crouched low, eating, communing, living

Moving through an open glade

Domed azure sky and clouds racing overhead

Life is beauty in motion

The layers and millennia of pain

Have buried deep our ancestral home

Boxed and caged, we know only fear

We are not meant to live such broken lives

We are not meant, not meant, to live

Such broken lives as these

The world within and the culture without

Tremblings of sorrows to great to bear

Heaped upon wound after wound

Spinning wildly, frantically searching in every direction

Realization dawning, as a piercing scream on the lips

As only a caged animal could know

Imprisoned in bars

Infinitely more impenetrable than steel

And invisible to the naked eye

We are lost

Lost amongst a system of grinding inhumanity

Lost to the deepest part of our being

This is not a thought

Not an ideology

Or a wrinkle in Creation’s tapestry

This is a feeling of knowing

Deep within my soul

Knowing how wrong it all is

I can say no more

For there is no other way to explain

Than the tears that fall

For the fallen