Men Don't Cry

I heard quite often "men don't cry"
Though no one ever told me why
So when I fell and skinned a knee
No one came to comfort me.

As I grew to reasoned years
I learned to stifle any tears
Through "Be a big boy" it began
Quite soon I learned to "be a man".

Then one long night I stood nearby
And helplessly watched my son die
And quickly found to my surprise
That all the tearless talk was lies

And still I cry and have no shame
I cannot play that "big boy" game
And openly, without remorse
I let my sorrow take its course.

So those of you who can't abide
A man you've seen whose often cried
Reach out to him with all your heart
As one whose life's been torn apart.

[Ken Falk]

Where does wisdom come from?

Even though the bench had a plank missing from the base, but when you sat on it you couldn't feel it missing. The wood was a very dark brown. The frame of the bench was made of a very very heavy kind of iron. Very solid. Really heavy, but there was a leafy design in the part on which your arm rests, which would have given it a really artistic look when it was new. There were splatters of white paint all over it, as if it had been sitting under something which had been painted white and the bench was utterly neglected through the whole process as if it wasn't there at all. I imagine later someone removed it from the freshly polished neat and clean place and placed this worn out 'thing' where I found it, under a very old, very huge, very shady tree. The tree had millions of clusters of leaves of a very very dark, almost blackish leaves. Maybe emeralds were black in some world. The grass that must have grown in a time was long, dry and faded under the wood and iron. I was only in F-9 Park, Islamabad, but it seemed like a tiny patch of forgotten land, where I spent some 40 wonderful minutes imagining what the tree or the bench might have seen to become so wise :)