How Long?

How Long?

They said they spoke for you,

those men of old.

They claimed that you spoke through them.

“Thus says the Lord,” they say,

“the High and Holy One”.

They had great visions:

justice and equity for the poor, 

swords beaten into ploughshares,

spears into pruning hooks,

the horror and waste of war finished,

everyone having their own vine and fig tree,

the lame leaping like the deer,

the blind receiving sight,

the desert blooming,

tears wiped away

and best of all, the prisoners, 

those appointed to death,

unshackled and set free.

Trouble is, every day 

I hear screams of children,

see mothers cradling starving babies,

watch the thick smoke of war 

blanketing the near horizon,

read of detestable men in high office,

villages covered by sludge slides,

the sea rising, glaciers melting,

species disappearing,

cities running out of water,

a huge tide of refugees

adrift and homeless,

on and on that old repeated story

of corruption, inequality and blood.

Those promises were ancient long ago.

Millennia have passed since their 

“Thus says the Lord”.

And what I want to now ask

are questions also asked long ago

by prophets and psalmists.

They cried out in their anguish and confusion

and I cry out the same.

How long, O Lord, how long?

Will you keep your promises?

Will this earth be restored?

When will you fill it with your glory?

When will the knowledge of you

fill the earth as the waters cover the sea?

First published in Verse-Virtual, March 2018