This Week in New Orleans and Manchester

If wishes were helpers, how we’d abide.

The tale, two cities in best and worst of times.

Humanity sought and illuminated in one,

its vicious darkness exploded in the other.

In New Orleans the city which begat jazz,

monuments to a racist war come down.

Deliberate restoration, hope’s future

in one empathetic step eases forward.

Jim Crow holds hesitant to full embrace;

lynch the officials the confederate cry.

Their hatred still a snake of poison with us

coiled in a corner, its shadow skulks.

In Manchester, an open, inclusive metropolis

the commodity of carnage crusades in stealth.

A cult of harm, indiscriminate of cause

lurches in self-loathing on its perverse path.

In the caldron moment, the helpers,

good neighbors, right where they need to be.

Instinctive as humanity’s first responders,

unpremeditated assistance, comfort.

And so the spectrum since the garden goes.

To love your neighbor much harder,

than to hate? Out of many, are we truly

one? Awakened or immune we rally on.