Suffering

About suffering they were never wrong,
The old masters; how well, they understood,
Human life; no matter how dramatic
While normal people carry on with their normal lives, school, work, sleep;
So when the aged pass silently on,
We mourn and weep, but forget before long,
Children are unaware of the births and deaths in the world,
They play and carry on with their life,
Whilst beyond this shallow fantasy,
The full harshness of reality hits us hard,
The starving masses,
The dying patients,
All the while the children play and jump and skip,
Unaware and blissfully ignorant,
Bruegel’s Icarus drowns and thrashes in the water,
Not even the ploughman, or the shepherd come to help,
They’re just normal people, carrying on with normal, boring, lives.