I don’t really feel like explaining the backround for this poem. It’s not offically a poem, either. I’d like to know what you think about it anyway, and how it might be improved.

Tortured soul, this is not compassion,
But strange fury-fled obsession,
self oppression.

You have left. Has your gypsy heart eaten the wanderer’s desolate seeking?
You have sent. Feet to the battlefields, slinging a wasted weapon on your back.
Now your eyes bring back men wasted, wreckage, and decay.

For truth to ponder, must you gaze
upon the widow’s mourning face? Must you embrace
or beget the sobbing child; must you the sullen stranger’s steps retrace?

These filthy bodies upon your breast,
these empty vessels of hunger and distress–
Must you reject hope to have a share of hopelessness?

Violent is your love, Passionate your peace!
Stand not so close to rotted teeth, breath not so deep
to make their breath your own.

Gypsy heart, tortured soul, can you not love peaceably, from a distance?
Why do you drink the music of a haunted generation and eat the lyrics of the dying?
Stealing tears, coveting despair–is it not enough to own that this is life?

Cannot our knowledge cure men’s woes and strife?
Cannot the Saviour’s bruised and broken heart suffice?
Would you take His place, make void His sacrifice?

We loosed your chains, but you’ve run off to join the slaves.
We sparked a light, but here you’re wrapped, blind, dark again.
Even as I write, you are tearing up this wisdom, stabbing yourself with my pen.

Someone sent me this, and I like it.

In the Children’s Home founded by Mother Teresa in Calcutta, India there is a sign on the wall that reads: 

People are unreasonable, illogical and self-centered,
love them anyway.
If you do good people will accuse you of selfish ulterior motives,
do good anyway.
If you’re successful, you win false friends and true enemies,
succeed anyway.
The good you do will be forgotten tomorrow,
do good anyway.
Honesty and frankness make you vulnerable,
be honest and frank anyway.
What you spent years building may be destroyed over night,
build anyway.
People really need help but may attack you if you do help them,
help people anyway.
Give the world the best you have and you’ll get it in the teeth,
give the world the best you’ve got anyway.

Before the book came into my possession, I’d been capturing bees in my kitchen apron and releasing them back outdoors. Twice, large, black bumblebees mazed their way to my upstairs bedroom and butted themselves furiously against my window-panes, humms lost in the chiffon mist of blowing curtain, wings dashing to be free.

"I didn’t know what to think, but what I felt was magnetic and so big it ached like the moon had entered my chest and filled it up." ~ Lily in Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees

That’s just what I felt like, too, when I finally started the book. While Lily Owens entered her new life and home, I felt I was entering into a newer love for this world, and all the ordinary people who make it beautiful.I felt sad as well, every time I took a breath or turned a page and realized that I couldn’t stay. The story would end and I’d be here again, in an equally less lovely world, but unequally unsolvable. The story has ended, well circled in family love, full of happy mothers and a girl who’s found herself. Happy, of course, it’s a novel. True or false, I have returned different. I know what to think, now–truths for my falsehood.

Bees have stripes.
Yellow, black.
Yellow, black.
As for me, Chinese yellow, I don’t know where my Black went. Raised outside the hive, I don’t hum the same. I don’t talk their language, or even speak it. I feel. . . different.
And being treated different, in very thought and deed and deeds-received, AM different. Rebel bee? No, just lost a stripe. Paint it on? I canot. They start from your insides, and pass your heart.
Prejudiced? What, against myself? Maybe. In a secret life, where sweetness decays, and the gold-brown honey of my skin fades to the black darkness of my many-threaded heart.
But the entire, exhusting, foreign experience of being among (part of) my own race and being frightened, amazed, out-of-place. . . is less secret now. For the first time in my life, I feel a little. . . What do you call it? "Black pride." Something of the sisters brushed on me, startled me from somewhere deep inside, and swelled up past my heart.