i read, watched, and listened in horror to some fragments of the terror that is being experienced in the middle-east… it is very distressing to watch a traumatized old man who’s just lost his wife, home and hopes when the rockets/bombs fell… or to see families being separated in their attempts to escape… or civilians being injured, maimed, shredded…
it’s just incomprehensible that everyone is relying on violence to get what they want… and they themselves are behaving like the terror they wish to curb.
all this madness… it will not end… it will not end… the pain… the pain…

PAIN
Manjack home from the wars walked down the street —
bent like a bow his body round its great scar —
and held his head upright. I saw his eyes
flaring and fixed, a tiger or a dark star.
Pain, what ist it? The sycthe turned under the ribs,
the soft explosion in the belly that means death,
the hornet where were berries, the snake in flowers,
the ice about the heart, the lung that leaks its breath —
that which drives out love, hunger, thirst or hate;
the trap that waits, the precipice past hope
upon whose edge we walk, how delicately —
the loaded whip no shoulders can escape.
Pain, what is it? That which keeps alive
amoebae doubling from the acid; pain
that forces flesh to wisdom: hedge of swords
beside the road from protoplasm to man.
Pain that fierce darkness thrusting at all life
that drives it up to light; pain the black No
that knifes us in blind alleys; pain that can only say
You have chosen wrong; this is no way to go.
Manjack home from the wars walked down the street,
and in his flesh a fire that ate him lean.
Vision of famine, death with blazing eyes,
what shall we do to save ourselves from Pain?

~~~Judith Wright~~~
from Woman to Man, 1949, in Collected Poems