The Ostracized: A Prayer for Peace by Andrea Shushan Burdick

The Ostracized: A Prayer for Peace

by Andrea Shushan Burdick

It’s hateful to be banished and turned out by the clan.

Shunned, stunned and disbelieving, by this brotherhood of man.

What did we ever do to them to bring about this pain?

They think of us as infestations of vermin,

A problem only solved by extermination.

So they call in pest control, dressed in uniforms.

I heard them chanting, “The Jews will not replace us.”

Why in the world would we even want to?

We want them to let us live our lives, as we want them to live theirs.

I remain haunted by images of how they rush to hide the evidence.

Disposed of, as so much trash, relegated to the heap of human remains, too decayed to remain human.

Bulldozers need to pick up huge piles of human leftovers, those heaps of Bones and empty shoes and dump them in a vast, canyon-sized ditch...

Covered up by dirt, designed to hide the nauseating stink of genocide.

Why do we fear the other?

The ones with different faces?

The ones from different places?

The ones of different races?

The aliens of scum.

They are the them of us versus them.

And we are the us, and we’ll all come to dust.

And all of it is born of Fear, the Mother of All Hatred.

I can even feel it in myself; the terror that says,

“Get them, before they get us.”

Oh, God forbid the onslaught of more cremains of human fear.

Those ashes bring more ashes and that filthy dust was ever thus.