You wake up one morning and you see a beautiful sunrise.

Iridescent, enchanting it starts out blue… the blue of wishes and fancies, of love just out of reach and waking dreams. Then a streak of gold appears, you stretch yourself to trace its source, it is so light, so faint and then so golden in a moment, you lose yourself in the moment. The colours begin to come now… reds, pinks, oranges, bright beige and saffron, you can barely contain your excitement, the feelings that dance within you. The overwhelming sight of beauty.

The next day, the sun rises, and it is equally gorgeous. Not the same, it couldn’t quite be the same, but as dancing in its burst of colour – tenderness one moment, boldness the other.

The next day, the sunrise is again stunning.

And the next.

Soon you begin to find that no matter how beautiful the sunrise, other things begin to creep in and you begin to lose your fascination. The wonder of the first morning light.

Is that then a change in the sunrise? Or a change in you?

The answer is clear and there is no one to contend with but still, when asked, the sunrise just didn’t seem as gorgeous as the first time round.

Must it always be this way? Must one lose the depth of feeling, the wonder of creation, the de-sensitising in the face of pain?

Listen:

The Child Dancing

there’s no way I’m going to write about
the child dancing in the Warsaw ghetto
in his body of rags

there were only two corpses
on the pavement that day
and the child I will not write about
had a face as pale and trusting
as the moon

(so did
the boy with a green belly full of dirt
lying by the roadside
in a novel of Kazantzakis

and the small girl T. E. Lawrence wrote about
whom they found after the Turkish massacre
with one shoulder chopped off, crying:
‘don’t hurt me, Baba!’)

I don’t feel like slandering them with poetry.

the child who danced
in the Warsaw ghetto
to some music no one else could hear
had moon-eyes, no
green horror and no fear
but something worse

a simple desire to please
the people who stayed
to watch him shuffle back and forth,
his feet wrapped in the newspapers
of another ordinary day

- Gwendolyn MacEwen

Irony. but her crude comment on mankind is honest, is it not?

We humans have such short memories we forget, we shut out. We accept the evil as the norm, the unkind as the reality.

Must it always be so?

How did Jesus, a God yet just a man, see all the pain, the suffering, that he would weep blood, fall with compassion, and yet still know all the pain, the cruelty on and on without losing touch?

To feel it all, and yet to act with resolve, to fulfill his life mission.

I marvel.