Their God Grieved

By Paul m. Strohm

Two children of the same father

Two beautiful boys

Two different women

One God with two sacred names

What fertile land

A thousand years of distrust

Hundreds of villages side by side

A conjoined history

An unaccountable number of graves

A multitude of enemies, real and imagined

One great city

Two separate temples

Good people and bad people

On both sides one wall

And no agreed boundaries

An endless number of rockets

An endless number of bombs

For Isaac

For Ishmael

 

Their God grieved!

 

Paul m. Strohm is a freelance journalist working in Houston, Texas. His poems have appeared in HuKmag.com, the Berkeley Poets Cooperative, The Lake, WiND, and other literary outlets.  He worked at the Humanities Research Center at UT-Austin cataloging the correspondence of D.H. Lawrence.  If he had to count the number of times D. H. wrote that imaginative  line, “ Dear ____. How are you?” he would never read Lady Chatterley’s Lover again.