ID#: 81

They Weep Here (2025) ; 5:42

by Jerod Sommerfeldt

State University of New York at Potsdam

I remember vividly the night one of our local colleges hosted a fireworks display to celebrate the start of a new academic year, which coincided with my attempt to rock my newborn son to sleep. In my attempts at comforting him, I reflected on the stories of parents caught up in wars around the world, rocking their children to sleep amidst the sounds of very real, dangerous explosions. I wrote the piece “They Weep Here” to reflect on these feelings as I considered the suffering in this world. As a parent of a young son, the tragic stories of the children caught in war haunt me. There truly is unimaginable suffering in this world. Read by Francesca Hilditch, this piece utilizes texts from Virgil’s Aeneid, found within and around Book I near line 462. The various translations used for this piece are as follows: “What land is left, what tract on earth that is not full of our agony? Here mortal estate touches the soul to tears.”, “There are tears to flow and human hearts to feel for human woe.”, “The world is a world of tears and the burdens of mortality touch the heart.”, “What spot on earth, what region of the earth is not full of the story of our sorrow? They weep here for how the world goes and our life that passes touches their hearts.”