The Faces of Humanity

The Faces of Humanity

One has the face of a chicken and is sweating,
And one the face of a dancing queen
Alone at midnight;
Nourish her
If you can.
One has the face of
A middle aged professor terrified
Of losing his job
If he says the wrong thing
And who has lately
Begun to realize he has something alien
Living in his soul.

One is a nice looking, clean-cut young man
Who opens and closes his mouth
Like a fish breathing through its gills
While gazing blindly
Into the sun with a salt
Of patriotism.
One has the face of a gunboat
Without the diplomacy,
And one that of a woman
Staring up at a sky full of chemtrails…
May death not come nigh…or the face
Of a man who rescued his son

From drowning the day the river
broke its banks,
Hanging his shirt on a tree
As he contemplated
The sandbags around the town center mall.
The flood of tears.
“Tell me, son, can you breathe?”
He asked.
Or the face of a woman trying
To describe
What happened the day they bombed her village
And killed her family…

Or the boy who shot hoops
And dreamed of greatness
Until one day his body was pelted
With police bullets
On his way to the store
To buy milk…
And…
In the light of the cold, gray dawn
The face of his mother
Who yesterday learned the cops
Who did the shooting
would walk free.

A thousand ears, a myriad eyes:
The face of the president who told so many lies
He lost track of them all
And one day got confronted with them but didn’t care,
Didn’t mind,
It made no difference
That he had been confronted,
And later he even joked about it.
And the face of the nonviolent
Activist who
Kept organizing protests even though
The wars never stopped;

The face of the woman
Who looked up one day and saw God
And began to
Write a series of poems about it;
And the face of the man who read the poems—
And so God was known
Even further.
The face of the ascetic who discovered the
Kundalini
At the base of his spine and in so doing
Journeyed
To Heaven;

The smiling, perspiring face of the
Apache helicopter pilot just after pressing
A button that sent
A missile
Into a crowded market—
The same Apache helicopter pilot who heard about
God at a base revival meeting
From a general who stood in a
Yellow spotlight
And told them that
God
Hated Muslims.

The face of an aging,
Balding man with a deep and narrow crevice where the smile
Used to be;
The face of the young woman,
Pregnant and unemployed, who gave birth to a son,
And who, as she rocked her tiny son, cried in fear at Satan’s
Dark playing of the pianoforte;
The face of the teenager
Who slit his wrist
To get the girl he loved;
The face of the
Native American holy man

Who looked into the open-pit
Uranium mine
And whispered
Something to the Creator
As the blackbirds of death flew
Above
The mill tailings.
The face of the painter
Who, after a life
Of haughtiness and egoism,
Discovered that the work he had always thought of as
His masterpiece was

No more
Than a drop in the ocean
Of God’s love.
And finally the one whose face consists of nothing more than pinpoints
Of brightly-colored light
Hanging suspended
In the night…
Suspended before the faces of those of the generation
Who will live
To see peace,
The death of this age,
And the birth of the next.

By Richard Edmondson

River to Sea Uprooted Palestinian