Bloom Like the Wildflowers

Bloom like the wildflowers,
as if you had no choice.
This wreck of a world deserves
rampant beauty and cascading love
and desire that scorches the flagrant banners of cruelty.
When did we lock our hearts in cages?

Our true hungers hide in our minds' cages
building machines to devour wildflowers.
These are the fruits of a nation's cruelty.
Don't pretend that the subjects of tyrants have no choice.
Songbirds and honeybees can still feed on the remnants of love
and build the intricate homes that the earth deserves.

A bare floor and a cold cell is all that a man deserves
when he turns away from children sobbing in cages.
How can this stark wilderness grow love
when our  combat boots trample children and wildflowers?
Count the moments on your rosary. Each one is a choice,
a momentous leap, a tango between kindness and cruelty.

When a tiger devours its prey, is that cruelty?
Is animal instinct all that the soul deserves?
How can we call it instinct when we have the power of choice?
Even animals twist into insanity when they are kept in cages.
If we poison monsters and devils, will they vomit up wildflowers?
When they die, can their rot and decay fertilize acts of love?

These days, people sneer at the idea of love
and feed on glorious visions of cruelty.
The streets teem with hatred and nobody hands out wildflowers.
The boiling ocean simmers  - the only soup our failure deserves,
made from the bones of sea-starved whales that become our cages
if we embrace despair and squander choice.

In a moonlit desert, pilgrims wander past the hope of choice,
searching the sands for wisdom, mistaking mirages for love.
This parched place needs no cages.
The landscape is its own cruelty,
a desolate and lonely shrine that no supplicant deserves,
a holy land too harsh for wildflowers.

One day fields and forests may overwhelm our barren cruelty.
The earth's great dance of existence deserves
nothing less than the partner of its choice.

I remember: Pre-apocalypse

I remember when summer's warmth was not
an angry hellish thing
I remember when islands did not drown
and winter did not ravage
when subway tunnels were free of floods
and mountains were covered in snow
and hurricanes and earthquakes and volcanoes
only occasionally laid waste
I remember when apocalypse was a subject
for speculative fiction
and doomsday was a war-born event
that treaties could at once prevent
I remember when humans were not dinosaurs
and water was not poison
and skies were not orange
and fish did not suffocate
and polar bears made sense

Summer, 2018

My Heart Cries Havoc!

My heart - oh, my heart -
cries Havoc! Mercy! Kyrie!
"Unthinkable" has vanished.
All, all, all is thinkable:

Waters poisoned forests flaming islands drowning -
Wolves at our doorstep with teeth of bullets -

And the children -
God, the children -
Dead, dying, futures mortgaged
Shot down in schools
Homeless in hurricanes
Motherless mobs with
Jackals as nursemaids.
A cage, a cage, for their tender age!

All, all, all is thinkable -
imagined, enacted, decreed and designed -
Locked
and
Loaded.

In a punch in the gut on the morning commute
A bumper sticker flaunts two stark silhouettes:
"Your son," the figure on the restroom door,
"My son," armed with the rifle-death-machine.
"Come and take it" demands the man
With the banner of death by the hotdog stand.

Oh, God! God! God!
What threats are here made,
taunts are here laid
down at our feet?

What will we - can we - wear to shout
our pain - shame - defiance - unity?
What rainbows? What colors? What ribbons?
What orange vests with lists of death?
What shroud, sackcloth, or ashes would be
Enough?

Enough.

"Enough" - an impossible word.

God! Oh, God! Has this world ever learned?
Do we need another flood
to wash clean our sins
of cruelty, violence, greed and despair?

Oh, God! Havoc! Mercy and kyrie!
My heart! oh, my heart!
Break my heart, break!
Oh, Absalom! Oh, fallen sons and daughters!
Fallen on the battlefield of these
thinkable tragedies!

And you who watch and teach and lead -
you who stand and speak and rule
you who make and buy and spend
and end your days when you begin -
arrest your beating hearts.
Drop into time's abyss with me
and see:

In this yawning moment
Your next words matter -

the way light matters or air
or the sun, stars, cosmos,

or this green earth that we
burn so callously
crumbling its nourishing dirt
into garbage dumps
and choking its living waters
with plastic poisons
that suffocate sea turtles -

Oh, god! Can't we see?
Every death is mine-yours-ours.
We choke and gas
ourselves
We massacre
ourselves.

We are the ones
who swallow the plastic
who immolate our souls and our futures
under this brown, sulfurous sky
while children fall - pop! pop! pop! -
to the thinkable tragedy
of our indifference.

"I REALLY DON'T CARE, DO U?"

Cyberspace is a place where nobody hears,
A soul-less Beast - all mouth and no ears -
An impotent hydra with infinite heads -
A machine made of fury, a furnace for a heart
Gorging on our madness
While we, the blind, gouge out our own eyes,
Bash in our own skulls.

Oh, God! Havoc! Mercy! Kyrie!
Let poets scream and wail!
Let artists paint with blood
and writers carve warnings on living bone
while teachers count carcasses
from dawn to dusk.

Hearts of mercury, lead, and fumes - awake!
Wail! Wail and break.

Is there not one soul living to heal the wounds?

My heart - oh my heart -
cries Havoc! Mercy! Kyrie!

The World Has Entered My Classroom

The world has entered my classroom.
Past and present and future,
Islands and oceans and continents,
Sit in a circle on my classroom floor -
Watching, waiting, wondering, wiggling,
Weeping, quarreling, pouting, giggling,
Pouring their everything into my heart.

War and Poverty fight over erasers.
Famine and Terror fold paper airplanes.
Racism blurts out impulsive answers
While Sexism quietly waits her turn.
Slavery and Suffrage and Civil Rights
And the royal lineage of African kings
Doodle absentmindedly in the margins of their notebooks.

Gunfire and bombs explode from
The grinding of the pencil sharpener and
The fingertips of unthinking playmates,
While lessons drift away on ocean breezes
Lost in the rustling fronds of palm trees
And the scent of orange groves.
The taste of coconuts tangles with the fear of police
As deportation hovers over hunched shoulders
And haunts tired eyes.

The world has journeyed here
Across rivers and mountains and oceans and deserts
By plane, by bus, by foot, by truck,
By rafts and boats and ships
Whose timbers now rot in underwater graves.

The sounds of a thousand dialects tickle
The tongues that chatter away at hard-won silences,
Mingling mysteries and histories of Chuukese and Vietnamese
Iraqi and Cherokee, Haitian and Jamaican and Filipino,
Ecuador, Guatemala and Peru,
Russia and Ireland and Sierra Leone,
Germany and other places lost and unknown
That brought forth these faces.

How can I carry the world in my heart?
It's too big, too big, too big for me.
Its stories sizzle my skin and burn through my fingertips.
Its sadness and cruelty, courage and beauty
And laughter and pain drown my blood
And flood my veins leaving me
Unable to contain the tidal waves.

The world has entered my classroom.

Resistance

Reeds,   bend but do not break.

Eagles,   soar above the fray.

Swans,   remind us to value grace.

Insects,   break down massive oaks.

Squirrels,   prepare.

Tigers,   attack.

Ants,   collect.

Nursing mothers,   feed your young.

Cats,   protect your territory.


Every soldier has a weapon.