How can you understand? (Japan disaster 2011)

Mind flirts with understanding

but question after question subjective

and changing

like ink spilled

on a blank page

no reason

and

no rhyme

colleen hannah

I have written so many poems about Japan’s disaster over the last week and a half. I have never stayed so long in one place in poetry. I am what you would call a prolific poet rather than a editorial poet. I write, for the most part, exactly how I see the world, exactly how I speak the world, exactly how I feel the world. And this week and a bit, I have felt confused. Confused as to how so many can suffer, confused as to how we go on in the face of such suffering, confused as to why, why, why. I do believe in a greater power, in my God… but sometimes I have such deepened questions that no answers seem to make their way to the higher place I can make sense of them. And this is the reason why I wrote this poem, because the questions change with every wounding our earth endures, with every wounding our people endure and with every wounding my spirit endures watching the helpless live on. These question change and mutate with every click of my remote, and like ink blots sometimes they makes sense and sometimes there is no butterfly to be seen.