Cycle of Sorrow
By John Herlihy

I
The days of apple blossoms have long passed away,
The days of happiness and peace no longer hold sway.
Fallen leaves and faded petals announce the passing of autumn,
By the time they land, the world will hit old rock bottom.
We have arrived at the moment of counting days and hours,
The cloak of winter will be upon us, good-bye to spring bowers.

II
Over the edge of the horizon creeps the shadow of human sorrow,
Day after day it approaches closer and closer, until tomorrow,
When the unthinkable happens and our world falls apart,
Terror and turmoil invade the tranquil cavern of our heart.
We are faced with images we never thought we could imagine,
Much less welcome into our world as a reality we must fathom.

III
The cries of the innocent shout disbelieving in the concert hall;
Little children running in fear get blindly shot against the wall;
The image of a lifeless boy face down as if sleeping on the beach.
There was a time when none of these images were within our reach.
We need to stack them now in our mind and never forget to remember,
Man’s inhumanity to man now ushers in the presence of Divine Sorrow.

IV
When the Divine Presence looks down upon the world He created,
Who can imagine His thoughts of the world we have desecrated?
Human misery is now reflected in the mirror of universal sorrow;
His tears would fill vast oceans to the peaks of Mount Kilimanjaro,
With fathoms of emotion whose weight the world could not bear,
Falling down, then fell into a bottomless pit of universal despair.

V
Life’s journey leads us now forward through a canyon of tears,
Misery has carved contours into the rocks over countless years.
Where is the spirit of the sacred trust between God and humanity?
Where is the beauty of our human nature to eradicate the insanity?
God’s divine love and compassion we must once again borrow,
If we ever hope to finally escape from this inhuman cycle of sorrow.