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One Drop
By Aya Moscona
If each person would send to the world one drop of compassion,
And send forth one ray of light --
A rainbow of love would color the skies
And hope would once more be in our hearts.
Hands of the Excluded
By Marie Elena
I have held many hands.
Simple, half-minded hands,
Flailing, grinning, drooling
Food-stained, semen-encrusted
Thalidomide stumps waved in greeting.
Adolescent hands
Frenetic
Razor-scored, needle-scarred,
Reaching from thrusting, broken, thirteen year-old bodies
still desperately willing to love.
Psychotic hands
Violent, cowering
Blood-slick from skinning themselves alive,
soul-side out.
Old hands
Fragile, forgotten,
urine-soaked, weightless,
calling for mothers long dead.
And now, bone-worn, weary,
I wish there were someone like me to hold my hand.
Voices of the Excluded
By Marie Elena
It's going to be a long night.
The screaming will go on for hours, maybe even days.
I will spend all night holding the hand that lies next to the screaming.
The screaming is very strong.
It is very strong because it has swallowed up all the other voices,
all the voices that found themselves so alone they turned in on
themselves,
began talking to themselves.
For the voices' own protection they were put in a soundproofed room.
That is when the screaming started and it has never stopped
It's going to be a long night.
I will spend all night holding the hand that lies next to the screaming
because I believe that every voice deserves to be heard.
Lost in the Kitchen
By Marie Elena
Harriet is lost in the kitchen,
her kitchen of forty-two years.
She is calling me to help her find the rope
that leads to the doorway.
Somehow she got all turned around,
caught in an unfamiliar place
to the right of the wrong side of the table.
She lives in the world behind her eyes
where the emptiness goes on forever.
Sometimes it's hard to remember the way.
Harriet takes my outstretched arm.
Her fingers grasp the rope,
together we walk through the doorway.
As she releases my arm,
I know that sometimes I am as lost as she is
in an emptiness of my own making.
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