The real world is complex and sometimes none of the choices we have are good ones. If Attila the Hun is coming through, it’s not a matter of being moral. It’s kill or be killed.
                                                                                                                –Theodore Postol

In Spite of Our Wishes for All Good

It seems for every good in life, there exists an evil.
Tomatoes suffer mildew and cotton has its weevil.
As north has south and light has dark, it seems the world is run
by drought balanced with rainfall and dark replacing sun.

It isn’t how we’d have it if the choice were up to us.
Who wouldn’t rather have the joys of life without the fuss?
But anima and animus and yin and yang are what
seem to keep our lives out of the same old rut.

As much as we might put off death if we had our druthers,
without it there would be no room for more sisters and brothers.
Would that the inevitable could just be delayed,
the game would turn out more like we wish it could be played,

but somehow the world’s demons like Isis and Attila
are the bitter flavors that balance the vanilla.
The words I write are hard to take when evil in this world
is visited on those we love and sadness is unfurled.

We all agree it isn’t fair that one should have good luck
while others suffer pain and sadness, buried in the muck.
Many try to change it but the changes never stay.
Night often cancels out what we’ve achieved by light of day.

The religious live on faith, but others curse the day
that they were born into a world that’s so suffused by gray.
For light and dark are always mixed in varying combinations.
Each day we choose our focus: good or abominations.

Those who focus on the bad confront it for us while
those others of us plant the crops and fix the broken stile.
Some preserve the joys of life while others fight the ills.
Some swallow the honey and the others bitter pills.

In this as well we find that nature provides opposites.
Some farm in the highlands while the others mine the pits.
But all are necessary for the progress of the whole,
for as the world keeps spinning, it functions as a bowl

filled with all the opposites the universe provides––
that force that makes it necessary that we all choose sides
and pull or push to keep the carousel securely spinning.
It would seem that in the good life, there must also be some sinning.

About the Picture:  I just wrote this as a comment to a friend on Facebook who said she liked the picture above.  After I’d posted it I decided others might be interested in the story, so here it is:

• Since I have a bad reaction to the sun, I get up at 6 and walk on the beach in the dark, then return by the time the sun comes up over the buildings and trees, so there are very few people on the beach when I walk. This stranger I’d passed on the beach a few times came up one of my last days there and pressed a starfish into my hand…small, orange, beautiful and yes, dead. He said he’d had three for me the day before but hadn’t seen me and asked where I was. This from an utter stranger who I guess had noticed me picking things up each day and stowing them in my bag. I still have the starfish. Yes good things happen.

  Actually, I had been frightened when I saw him from far away carrying a machete because a madwoman had attacked my neighbor the day before and I couldn’t see who it was and was afraid it was she…I was getting ready to jump in the ocean and swim out from the shore when I realized it was not a woman but a man with the machete! And felt relief. What a funny juxtaposition of normal fears. And then after all that, he gave me that wonderful and thoughtful gift. This is why I chose this photo to illustrate my poem.
  

Wicked witch. Today’s Prompt: Wicked Witch–Write about evil: how you understand it (or don’t), what you think it means, or a way it’s manifested, either in the world at large or in your life.