Piece 5: The Minister.

I had become their minister,

Oh so long ago

After I had heard stories of such terrible woe.

I sent myself on a quest

At his & myself’s behest.

I searched not so high & extremely low,

To find this town so full of woe.

My faith had never yet been tested

Until I found such a dark & unholy place.

I believed, I believed,

But how, how could it be?

The people I saw

The people I met

The people I came to know

Tears in their eyes

Despair in their voices

They confessed to me, on the dirty park bench,

Their pains, their struggles, their loss of gains

Lost sobriety chips,

Empty hearted quips,

Quivering lips.

The cruelty I’ve learned of

Everywhere, unbeknownst to we.

To this day, while my body lays just a few feet

From that dirty park bench,

I still don’t understand.

No matter how many hours I spent reading my scriptures,

They didn’t say anything so,

Speaking only of happiness, bliss, love of life, & virtue.

But not of the useless sentiments we tell ourselves

Or of the forgotten warriors

Resisters of the status quo

Victims of unchangeable standards

Vandalists of society’s norms

People who don’t regard their mortality

People who believe in false prophecies

Those who can’t speak for themselves, without a voice of their own

Now I see, my God couldn’t help these poor souls

It was not him at work there,

But his opposite, his enemy, his foe

The breaker of wills, he who steers the sheep off the lit path,

Away from the shepherd’s view

The arsonist of lives is who guided them then & now,

The ones who defied, denied, who didn’t fit into the status quo,

Society’s unworthy; Society’s adversaries

My journey had just begun. I had work to do.

I needed to help those lost souls

Fill their voids & patch up some holes

Scrub away the evidence of their pasts

And the sins committed by those who betrayed them.

The ones who stranded their friends

The ones who strayed, breaking their oaths

The parents who left their child on some random steps

And those who left in the middle of the night,

With the moon still shining ever so bright.