Mercy

About suffering, I’ve mostly been wrong,

about belief, about the noise of bells cleaving

the dark eye of fevered mornings, given to high-flown

ideals, to just fictions, I’d known the mind has its own

instinct for mercy, as those bare trees lashed, most

altered, by wind had seemed to me newly alive—or more so

than in their stillness—not pausing then to question why,

as if that reckless surge were the meaning of living, to be

turned, acted upon by forces unseen.…

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