The King Of Hearts Is Dead Poem by S. R. Lavin

Somehow we all grow up
(even though a little child
lives inside each of us) .

Perhaps you remember the movie
“The King of Hearts” where all the sane people
are at war and only in the insane asylum
are people free to love life…
they see the monstrous nature
of sane society. At the end of the film
the Alan Bates character chooses to live with them.

That movie speaks in a parable.

One man, an officer, who fought in Vietnam,
told me he threw his gun away
after he killed a small boy who was running towards him.

How many nights the tears rolled out of his eyes
because of that young boy, reliving him running down the road,
the boy waving a candy bar wrapper in his hand.

Even when he came home to Ohio and married
and had a little boy of his own, he wept every night
for what he had done. “I killed God, ” he’d say…
“how can I ever undo that? ”

That’s why I write poems, so that someday
we might live in peace, in a place where love rules our hearts
and we no longer need to seek refuge from the insane ways of men.