Eyes for Seeing

The curse, the pang with which they died,

        Had never passed away;

I could not draw my eyes from theirs,

        Nor lift them up to pray.

                ~ Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Their eyes still stare through death that you and I

Cannot imagine, no, not fully, like

We cannot photograph the final cry

That Dracula produces with a spike.

A Buchenwald or Auschwitz live beyond

Our Christmas-time imaginations, far

Beyond our soccer moms and Walden Pond

In philosophic mind of Henry, star

Of Transcendental village with his friends

Like Emerson whose ditties Whitman scorned

In Dead Sea prose tricked out as if in bends

Of poetry, not rhetoric suborned.

  Lift up your eyes in prayer if that will aid

    Those victims, though it seems that Christ has strayed.