Susan Parker - CHARACTER COUNTS!

CHARACTER COUNTS!

Where Monsters Can Grow

Beware of the monsters
Who dwell in the mind,
Who grow in the shelter
Of shadows they find.

Beware of the demons
Who hide from the light,
Who only survive
When our spirits lose sight.

Those creatures can thrive
Where our knowledge is low;
They fill in the spaces
Of what we don't know.

Beware of the monsters
That cause us to hate,
To strike out in anger
When we can't relate.

For ignorance darkens
The mind and the heart,
And helps all our monsters
To tear us apart.

But learning and thinking
Will strengthen us so
We won't be the places
Where monsters can grow.

The Cold Within

Six humans trapped by happenstance
In black and bitter cold.
Each one possessed a stick of wood,
Or so the story's told.

Their dying fire in need of logs,
The first woman held hers back
For on the faces around the fire,
She noticed one was black.

SchoolCenter Picture The next man looking cross the way
Saw one not of his church,
And couldn't bring himself to give
The fire his stick of birch.

The third man sat in tattered clothes;
He gave his coat a hitch.
Why should his log be put to use
To warm the idle rich?

The rich man just sat back and thought
Of the wealth he had in store.
And how to keep what he had earned
From the lazy poor.

The black man's face bespoke revenge
As the fire passed from his sight,
For all he saw in his stick of wood
Was a chance to spite the white.

And the last man of this forlorn group
Did naught except for gain.
Giving only to those who gave
Was how he played the game.

The logs held tight in death's still hands
Was proof of human sin.
They didn't die from the cold without,
They died from the cold within.

Abraham Lincoln (1809 - 1865), Lincoln's Own Stories