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Tragedy begets itself – until the cycle is broken.
 

An ignorant man falls back on brutality out of lack of imagination.
 

Anyone can fight but it’s your wits that make you a man.
 

People who have little regard for their own lives could hardly respect anyone else’s life.
 

Justice is incidental to law and order.
 

Tears
Had been going for a thousand years:
Old women crying useless tears,
Crying for boys lost and dead,
Fighting on a country splattered in red.

Will be going for a thousand years:
Old women crying more useless tears,
But that won’t wipe away the strife
Of killing a man with a soldiers knife.
 

No End
You hear the cries,
You feel the pain;
But still you pull the trigger once, again

You wonder why;
You search your mind;
A rising body count is all you find.

A white flag flies;
Is this the end?
And if it is, when will war’s damage ever end?
 

For the Taking
And always, the damp blonde curls
on her temples
and bountifully down to her shoulder blades,

the rich loose curls all summer mixed with sand
and sweat,
and the rare, voluptuous double

curve of her nether lip -- most children lose
that ripeness before
they can talk -- and the solemn forehead,

which betokens thought and, alas
for her, o-
bedience, and the pure, unmuddied line

of the jaw, and the peeling brown shoulders --
she was always
a child of the sun . . . This

was his sweet piece of luck, his
find,
his renewable turn-on,

and my brown-and-golden sister at eight-
and-a-half
took to hating her body and cried

in her bath, and this was years,
my bad uncle did it
for years, in the back of the car,

in the basement where he kept his guns,
and we
who could have saved her, who knew

what it was in the best of times
to cross
the bridge of shame, from the body un-

encumbered to the body on the
block,
we would be somewhere mowing the lawn

or basting the spareribs right
outside, and -- how
many times have you heard this? -- we

were deaf and blind
and have
ever since required of her that she

take care of us, and she has,
and here's
the worst, she does it for love.
            Linda Gregerson
 

What they did not see, they could ignore; what they did not see, was not really there.
 

The world is an unthinkable mean place if it would allow a ten-year-old girl’s life to be devalued to such an extent that the only words of approval she ever heard from an adult were those spoken by the demented man who abused her, that the only possession in which she could take pride was the underdeveloped sexual aspect of her own thin, prepubescent body.
 

There are two types of survivors in life: those who find the requisite strength in having once been loved with great intensity; and those who, having not been loved, learn to thrive on hatred, suspicion, and the meager rewards of revenge. They are at once scornful of the need for human feeling and envious of the capacity for it.
 

No one can make you feel inferior without your consent.
 

If I could give you one gift, I would give you a single day to live without fear.
            Anna Quindlen - Black and Blue
 

Rage, uncontrolled, chooses it's own course.
 

Courage is resistance to fear, mastery of fear, not absence of fear.
            Mark Twain
 

Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
            Salvor Hardin
 

The only justifiable fight is a defensive one, and in any fight it is the innocents who ultimately suffer the most.
 

The Entry
"In Paris, there is a hospital
and a police station," I read
from the yellowed pages of my journal,
though I had forgotten, or pushed somehow
from memory, that one pathetic entry
scribbled on our seventh day
in the most beautiful city in the world.
But there they are, years later,
those words streaked like snuff
across the page, a stagnant pond
through which her face
now rises, that bright senior
dreaming of graduation, her future
almost close enough to kiss.
And there, too, the face
she later recalled, as she wept,
tugging at the inadequate gown
the nurse insisted she put on.
Face of that young man
who spoke no English, so daring
in his pointed snakeskin shoes
and leather jacket, the dark eyes
and bushy brows that spun her pulsing
amid the colored lights of the discotheque.
And then the white interior of his car,
that room he dragged her screaming to,
strewn with women's lingerie and shoes.
And afterward, the odd, distant keen
of sirens, all night, as she lay there,
still, beside him, staring into the dark,
into the rest of her only life.
            Cathy Smith Bowers
 

Sleep is their only refuge,
Dreams their only joy,
Survival their only hope.