'Bless The Beasts And The Children' Poem by Magdalena Biela

'Bless the beasts and the children'

The Archangels Michael and Gabriel. I stare at the icon, the candle is flickering. I cannot watch the flame anymore without fighting tears. The candle's flame is also fire and fire isn't my friend anymore.
I am afraid to read the news from Romania, I am afraid to read letters from my homeland friends: another death, and another, and another. Every morning means news about more death. I could bear everything but the death of children: that breaks my heart. I'd like to howl in lament, the way only the peasant women of my country do, but in the country I live now people do not lament. They take care of their children.
Their children laugh. Their youngsters sing rock, they dance, they are free, they are YOUNG.
I am ashamed to be human. Beasts take care of their babies mercilessly, knowing no other law but the law of the jungle. We, humans, are hypocrites and crueller than the beasts.

It is the time when church bells toll in Romania, in thousands of Orthodox churches, calling people to mourn.
Priests are blessing, suffocated by incense and the arrogant idea that only their voice is heard by God.
From candles they all receive only the smoke, never the Light.
God is elsewhere, not in the Church. HE sits bent down, holding on to the ground where some children died, some youngsters died, burned alive, gassed.