She was beautifully, delicately made,
So small, so unafraid,
Till the bomb came.
Bombs are the same,
Beautifully, delicately made.C. S. Lewis
QUESTIONNAIRE
State briefly the ideas, ideals, or hopes
the energy sources, the kinds of security,
for which you would kill a child.
Name, please, the children whom
you would be willing to kill.Wendell Berry
______________
C. S. Lewis, in Poems, edited by Walter Hooper, 1964. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich. This is from a section entitled “Epigrams and Epitaphs” at the end of the book.
Wendell Berry, in New Collected Poems, 2012. CounterPointPress. p375. This is stanza 5 in a poem called “Questionnaire.”
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