I didn't raise the flag

when the corpse was lowered

when the body became seed

planted for another war.

I wept as the volleys rang

and the awesome silence revealed the truth.

For these dead are fodder

feeding the machines of revenge

are raked into piles like dry leaves

to be burned on the funeral pyre.

There's a question that I raise.

There's protest of this charade.

Why aren't the marshals of this holocaust

the first ones in the grave?

*To want to bring the Gospel back to its source - to let it be difficult, to refuse to turn it into cultural gruel - is this showing scorn for simple people?  For how many years I've heard that refrain.  The simple people, it's worth saying once more, have a spontaneous affinity for spiritual things.  It is the enlightened ones, rather, who think they possess the meaning of the message and keep cooking up gruel for the unsophisticated. They're the ones who show contempt by treating people like dunces and justifying the repression and guilt which consolidate their power. When I hear them I think of an old man leaning over a child and using baby talk; there's an ironic gleam in the eyes of the child that says, "Lay off, dummy!"

Genuine love of men  and women is shown first by rejecting the crowd as such.  That's what the Gospel does: it leaves the love of humanity to politicians.

-Jean Sulivan