Remembering our terrible human flaws

Yes this is Remembrance Day, a remembrance of the suffering of "the six million Jews and millions of others murdered"* during the Holocaust. It was a terrible unthinkable suffering on an unprecedented scale engineered by the Nazi regime which mechanized the dehumanization, suffering, and deaths of people it did not value. This day of remembering in particular, commemorates the liberation of Auschwitz death camp by allied forces during World War II when the horror of starving and gassing and cremating millions of people first began to be known.

On this day of remembrance we can rightly consider our peculiar human blindness that leads a people of any persuasion or ethnicity to take power and crush another that is different without mercy almost as a privilege born of their belief in or assertion of their own "special" place in history, their so called destiny - by dehumanizing and blaming the other, stripping them of their homes, goods, social rituals, food, neighbors, stealing their labor also, and finally cramming them into cattle cars, express to the "showers" a euphemism for communal gas chambers, and subsequently incinerating the evidence leaving only piles of shoes and eyeglasses - so many that the sight is heartbreaking to look at as if the starving skeletal bodies were not enough.

And we say #neveragain and over and over it happens with other groups, over and over, in and out of the light, seen and unseen, large scale and small scale. Sometimes the abused and the abuser (assuming there are survivors) might switch roles over a generation, over a governmental coup.

Don't kid yourself that we as a nation are above this. Consider who this land belonged to only a few hundred years ago. Consider Guantanamo. Consider how it still has to be said that "black lives matter." Consider your favorite political or spiritual enemy who you think is ruining or threatening this country, the economy, the world. How easily each of us could be lead into the dark. How easily we could turn a blind eye while someone else is lead..

And don't you dare say say oh that was a group of Nazi monsters that has nothing to do with us. According to one of the Smithsonian's web pages, the genetic difference between human beings is around %.01. That is, one hundredth of one percent. In other words, we share 99.99% of common DNA with Adolf Hitler. We can embody brave compassion, horrific cruelty, callous indifference.  All of us.

Poem for April 1 - Unmaking

NaPoWriMo #1  - The prompt this morning was to write a poem with the same first line as another poem. For my first line I chose a first line from a Robert Frost poem called Fragmentary Blue.    NOTE: This poem is subject to change!  

Unmaking

"Why make so much of fragmentary blue?"
when a sky could just as well be
yellow or peach on the long curve
of another day's horizon.

And if the world were different
if what happened had not
if this swatch of sky were onyx
or vermilion or sienna

or scribbled with crayons,
or if a particular bee fancied
a different flower, a daffodil
instead of a blood root

then this tangle of happenstance
might have unraveled quietly like a worn rug,
left to us our fragmentary peace
in another hue, not blue. not blue.

-- MM Walker

NOTE: the unmaking I had in mind was the unmaking of the Sandy Hook massacre.  


.

Helen of Troy, a treat at WCSU

Classic Greek drama visited Danbury Monday night. It questioned the efficacy of violence and the benevolence of the fickle "gods."  The play was Helen of Troy by Euripides. The performers were a professional touring troupe under the direction of Eftychia Loizides.

The play provides an alternate view of Helen. In this version she'd been whisked to Eqypt by Hermes and never taken by the warrior Paris, who instead, stole a phantom of smoke, whipped up a goddess bent on mischief. Yet as we find out - this means all the blood shed, lives lost, agonies endured for the sake of Helen during the ten-year Trojan war, had been offered up in vain....

Literature Professor Donald P. Gagnon, PhD  set the play among Euripedes other works, before the curtain went up on this performance, noting that it was banned for a time some 2400 years after it was first produced, because it was considered too powerful for the situation then.

It took me a while to get used to the stage voices, but after a while I was immersed.  It was tastefully done with a minimal set and some beautiful (haunting) singing.

The production stared Leslie Fray as the beautiful clever Helen, Brian Scannell as craftly but noble Menelaus, the delightfully villainous Chuk Obasi as Theoclymenus, and an equally strong cast of other players including Aaron Barcelo, Nora Aislinn, Katia Haeuser, Stevan Szczytko and Sandra Maren Schneider. (Leonidas Eftychia Liozides Theatre Group)

The production of Helen of Troy was sponsored jointly by Western Connecticut State University and The Deno and Marie Macricostas Family Foundation.

A reception with delicious food, coffee and Baklava afforded an opportunity to chat about the play, with the actors and the sponsors immediately afterwards.  A delightful event, entirely free to the public. Thank you. This low budget person says, Thank you very much.

See also www.loizidis.com and http://helen-oftroy.blogspot.com

Coming home - for some it's not easy or simple

 from the archives of the Puzzled Dragon:

 

Tim O'Brien's book, The Things They Carried 

A few years ago in October was a series of  local events on the book, as a part of  the "One Book, One Community" series including a visit by Tim O'Brien.  That's why I've reposted this bit - I have changed my blog name several times since posting it originally.

DEATH AND THE FUNHOUSE MIRROR

To clearly see ourselves whole, stripped of the polite social mask, is at once privilege and nightmare. Tim O'Brien's self-reflexive novel The Things They Carried offers a soldier's view of the Vietnam War, but also a view of how a man's socially sanitized vision of himself can break down during war.  More than this, O'Brien takes readers on side trips, where they can feel a portion of what he felt, where they can envision their own disintegration.

After describing in a dozen different categories the things they carried with them, O'Brien the author tells us this:

"For the most part they carried themselves with poise, a kind of dignity. Now and then however, there were times of panic..... when they twitched and made moaning sounds and covered their heads and said Dear Jesus and flopped around on the earth and fired their weapons blindly..... In different ways it happened to them all."

It is a rare thing for me to fall speechless after reading a novel. Some of this novel is like Lock-tight and stays around when it is no longer convenient to remember. For instance the passage where the medic in grief and rage shoots a baby water buffalo to death one small divot of flesh at a time making sure that it is alive and suffering.  Or the repeated references to the Lemon tree, the light and the explosion, the clean-up.... Despite the amazingly different content, this book bears a great structural resemblance to Gertrude Stein's Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas. Like Stein's book, it discusses itself to death, one chapter discussing how the previous chapter was written, discussing if any of it is really true.  The book also uses Stein's device of the endlessly repeating iterations of cubism. Many scenes first appear in a slice, then in part, reveal just a little more, then the full version then recede, but never completely.... This cycling structure, Stein's "little waves"  lapping, lends itself to the material in that it mimics the soldier's inability to let go of the experience of combat in Vietnam, just as O'Brien the writer could never let go of it.  It also mimics the reoccurring nightmares of Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome and the mind's inability to let go of this self-disintegrating experience. This whole structure is  echoed in the chapter "Speaking of Courage" where Norman Bowler drives around and around the lake after returning from the war, unable to stop driving or thinking about the shit field by the river and Kiowa drowning and Bowler's failure to rescue him. Then in the next chapter we discover maybe it was O'Brien the writer who let Kiowa disappear in the muck. Maybe it was true, maybe it was a story. How Steinian. One of the oddest chapters is "Sweetheart of the Song Tra Bong." In this chapter O'Brien the writer effectively shows an aspect of war rarely discussed with non-combat veterans: that for some soldiers nothing in life will ever be as physically thrilling and challenging (nor as traumatizing) as survival, will never involve as much of their instincts, not as civilized beings but as cunning animals, tribe members, ritualistic hunters.  This is usually only hinted at in much war literature. By couching it in a double fiction, showing the transformation as a fable that supposedly happened to a women in a pink sweater, O'Brien both externalizes this transformation and at the same time, frames how easily, how steadily civilizations slips away from even the most innocent and loving.

--- M.M. (Mar) Walker author of Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding, editor and writer at the  Puzzled Dragon and former editor of Bent Pin Quarterly originally written in November of 2003 .
Previously  posted on all my variously named blogs, puzzleddragon, MMW113, etc etc etc

Returning to be ignored?

The troops finally will leave Iraq. How will they be treated? Will there be jobs? Not yet apparently. Will there be healthcare through the VA or will that be gutted too? Have their homes been foreclosed while they were gone?  How many lives have been disrupted and then changed irrevocably?  War takes a bitter toll even on those who can walk away.
Click here for the LA Times on the withdrawl announcement

(below a note on the vicious Stop Loss program,  from last January)
 You can tell there is an unspoken caste system in the U. S.
 Here is how you can tell:

When the economy took a dive and the feds had to bail out so many giant financial corporations, the lobbies and lawyers screamed that contracts including big bonuses to CEOs CFOs COOs, traders etc, had to be honored. Start breaking contracts and Western civilization would crumble, according to the bankers and their lackies in government.  When the fed finally got busy and put some restrictions on bonuses - the banks couldn't pay the TARP back fast enough.

But, WHAT ABOUT OUR SOLDIERS WHO SIGN A ONE YEAR CONTRACT for military service - but then the U.S. engages its "STOP LOSS" program and they aren't allowed to leave, sometimes having to serve a second or third term against their will. Their contracts are broken, and they have no legal recourse. So a contract with a banker is sacred. A contract between the Federal Government and a soldier isn't worth the paper its written on.....  (See Stop-loss policy entry on Wiki)

Of course a whole list of American Indian tribes could have told us this.....So according to U.S. practice -- If you are a well-connected banker the government will go broke to protect you and your contracts are sacred.(Unless of course there is a populist outcry of VOTE THE BUMS OUT!) If you are just a foot soldier, or an Indian Tribe, historically the government says, screw you. Obama may have fixed the first part - but he hasn't gotten around to the second part yet....Check out this NPR story about a  soldier the army wouldn't let go --  who is going to get a court marshal because he wrote and sang a song protesting the Stoploss program. The military actions against this soldier are unAmerican.

NaPoWriMo #9 - Survivor's Epilogue

Survivor's Epilogue

We persist like sentinel chimneys
teetering  alone when the house has burned.

Hazmat walkers sift pumice and ashes on the fringe,
sort remnants, ask questions, circumnavigate the wounds.

We sip coffee bitters all night, startle easily, but do
the next task, massage our bruises in silence.

A jug of rain,  a pail of tears cannot wash this.
Through coming years, we bloom

like mower-schooled violets in the lawn
heads tucked, eyes open.

-- Mar Walker

NOTE: I  only used nine words from prompt rather than 12. -- down to eight now that I changed the title (I also misspelled Epilogue originally. Coffee bitters was the flavor, silence was the sound. the lawn violets image was was from a previous poem I tried to write that didn't work out...  I took the photo six or seven years ago in New Milford, CT. I have changed the title three times. who knows what it will end up....

The PROMPT:

"Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to: Use at least twelve words from this list: flap, winter, torch, pail, jug, strum, lever, massage, octopus, marionette, stow, pumice, rug, jam, limp, campfire, startle, wattle, bruise, chimney, tome, talon, fringe, walker; Include something that tastes terrible; Include some part (from a few words to several lines) of a previous poem that didn’t quite pan out; and Include a sound that makes you happy."

Nature's economy

I was looking out the window yesterday afternoon and noticed a big black crow on the lawn. It seemed to be watching something. Across the street in a neighbor's yard two squirrels sprinted face first down a straight tree trunk. They were moving very fast, hit the ground flat out. The first bounded across the road; the second was turned back by a car.

The lead squirrel had something in its mouth. I thought it was a hunk of  bread, and that must be what was so interesting to the crow. Then I realized the bread was wiggling, had legs and a tail. At first I thought it was a mouse, and marveled because I didn't realize squirrels were carnivorous.

When the victor squirrel got into our driveway, it stopped and started to eat the poor thing alive, opening  a bright bloody wound in its throat as it struggled. Of course I ran out yelling like a fool.  I  guess I thought it might drop its prize. As I approached I realized, this creature (whose species I had previously admired) was a cannibal. It was eating a live baby squirrel, and not a tiny infant either, a juvenile, about a quarter of his size, but still recognizable as a grey squirrel with a grey coat, white underbelly and a long but less fuzzy tail.

The crows, three at this point, were closing in too, and the squirrel leaped into nearby  tree with its poor prize clamped in its jaws. A neighbor approached and I had to explain why I was yelling.  By then I couldn't see where it went. So I went back inside the house,

Less then a minute passed and I looked out the front window. The crows had won the second round. They had the taken cannibal squirrel's meal which was now in three pieces, one bloody piece in front of each crow. And the crows were polishing off their meal. Nature is not gentle, but in its stark economy there is a great horrific beauty.  Trust me - it's not  the invention of a loving kindly god. I'd hope as a species we can have as a goal to be kinder  than nature.

I still don't know if the squirrel chasing the cannibal was the mother squirrel or a bystander like the crows, who was trying to steal dinner.

U.S. has class system: Bankers are sacred. Soldiers are ignored.

You can tell there is an unspoken caste system in the United States. Here is how you can tell: When the economy took a dive and the feds had to bail out so many giant financial corporations, the lobbies and lawyers screamed that contracts including big bonuses had to be honored. Start breaking contracts and Western civilization would crumble, according to the bankers and their lackies in government.  When the fed finally got busy and put some restrictions on bonuses - the banks couldn't pay the TARP back fast enough.

WHAT ABOUT OUR SOLDIERS WHO SIGN A ONE YEAR CONTRACT for military service - but then the U.S. engages its "STOP LOSS" program and they aren't allowed to leave, sometimes having to serve a second or third term against their will. Their contracts are broken, and they have no legal recourse. So a contract with a banker is sacred. A contract between the Federal Government and a soldier isn't worth the paper its written on..... Of course the Indians could have told us this.....

So according to U.S. practice -- If you are a well-connected banker the government will go broke to protect you and your contracts are sacred.(Unless of course there is a populist outcry of VOTE THE BUMS OUT!) If you are just a foot soldier, or an Indian Tribe, historically the government says, screw you. Obama may have fixed the first part - but he hasn't gotten around to the second part yet....

Check out this NPR story about a  soldier the army wouldn't let go --  who is going to get a court marshal because he wrote and sang a song protesting the Stoploss program. The military actions against this soldier are unAmerican.

A Song by Markella Hatziano

[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=klpjjFf9fL8&w=560&h=349]
‪You can really tap your feet or dance all around to this one..... Well, I could. The words are very powerful and enhanced by the grim and very real pictures of violence done in the real world to real people in the name of god. Her words describe a joyful determination to be done with all this cruelty. The refrain says this:

"All I see around me are the casualties of god delusion
Everyone bamboozled with the certainties of god delusion
Why cant we have freedom from the cruelties of god delusion
Save us all from god delusion" - Markella Hatziano

Click through - and watch it on its own YouTube page where you can see the rest of the words (just click "show more" in the box under the video.)

Visit the song-writer's website: http://www.markella.com/‬
or  http://www.newageofreason.com/‬

Poet, Playwright Allan Garry - difficult truths, well-crafted poems

Allan Garry brought the realities of his past life to the Wednesday Night Poetry Series this past Wednesday night. He read well, spoke well, brought a balance of darkness and light to bear on the difficult subjects of war and death.  (He writes about other things as well.)

Garry is a Vietnam veteran who recently returned to writing after a long hiatus. He served in a morgue in Vietnam, searching bodies for ID, trying to honor the lives of men he didn't know, trying to make sense of random slaughter, preparing the bodies for their return home. He began writing in college after his discharge, but stopped, only starting up again in the last few years.

 He is, he says, experiencing the benefits of 18 years of therapy to recover from his experiences with war and with Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome. Much of what he had to say is so very current, with the endless treadmill of duty tours in our present wars.

His new play Gathering Shells, co-written with Crystal Brian, (who also attended the reading) has  been produced at the Long Wharf Theater and the Little Theater in New Haven, CT,  and will be produced at the  Abingdon Theater in New York on Dec. 3, 4 & 5.  Admission is free; seating is limited. For more information and tickets, call 203-582-3500.

Garry's poetry has been published in The Red Fox Review; the Pennypaper, Curbstone Press and Helix. He has read his work at Wesleyan University, Yale University, Trinity College, Connecticut College and a number of other venues as a winner of the Wesleyan University Honors College Connecticut Poetry Circuit. New poems will be appearing in the forthcoming issues of The Connecticut River Review, Connecticut Review and Avocet Review.

He doesn't have a chapbook yet, but his well-crafted poetry will surely find a home. If you get a chance to hear his work, don't miss it...

-- Mar Walker

Bent Pin: Christina Hoag, Jim Harrington - murder & mayhem!

OLD POST about my dead ezine:

I've put a new page up on my E-zine Bent Pin, called "death's messengers" Both works on the page highlight damaged human beings caught in undertow of  their own narratives.  The Target by Jim Harrington is a short fiction on the death-for-hire theme.  The other is an experiment by a news writer from AP. about "your average run-of-the-mill drug murder in Los Angeles." The work is called LA Doggs by Christina Hoag. The style is something she calls "Minific" which she says is short for Minimalist fiction. She defines that as a story told in words - nouns and verbs, as opposed to sentences.
   Read their work on Bent Pin
The photo in the background (above) --  I took that in a drug store. It's an inexpensive Halloween decoration.  With a little cropping and digital tweaking it looks pretty spooky. I have another more editorial picture  featuring the same item hanging in front of boxes of junk food....

-- MM Walker

A Poem & Digital drawing regarding the "Heaven's Gate" cult suicides

Heaven's Gate was a religious cult a bit sci-fi in nature.  The believed a UFO hiding behind the comet Hail-Bop would "beam"  their purefied beings into another, better realm. First of course, they would have to shed their mortal bodies by putting plastic bags over their heads after eating poison tapioca pudding.

Religious delusions haven't changed much since I wrote the poem below. Since the early 1990s we have seen countless religiously motivated killings in the form of suicide bombers, the 9/11 attack, abortion clinic bombers and doctor shooters.  Cult suicide is a tremendous waste of human life and potential. Of course it can't occur without blind faith. Heaven's Gate followers believed these things because their LEADER told them so.  Just one more little reason to never subscribe to a religion of any sort.

.One-Way Portal -

As Earth’s mechanical eyes scan

this not-so-empty darkness, her restless

children ache to dance down galaxies,

chase cosmic winds on callused primate feet.

Unsatisfied as voyeurs, 39 webheads queued

at Heaven's Gate, backpacks at the ready,

humming at the window, eating tapioca.

They clutched plastic, vacuous and opaque,

waited for data retrieval, personal uploads

facing unrecoverable error, depression

deferred in bunk-bed suburban stillness, escape

velocity for the purple-shrouded dead.

They hardly knew their Mother.
Bury them in her darkest loam,
rich compost of stars.

April 6, 1997
©1997 M. M. Walker

-from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

  I was thinking about the ever expanding galactic structures of space and the even more convoluted eddies of the human mind when I drew this. As with all my digital drawings, it has been manipulated electronically in a host of programs over the years.

Poem: Tea at the end of the World - how crazy people who fear it mightcause it

a poem from my chapbook, Inverse Origami

Incoming at 4 oíclock... "Tea?" he asks,
slinging shiny steel kettle onto black coils,
citing communist conspiracy
revealing two red mugs
and two tarnish-patina-ed teaspoons,
my host, a post-glasnost peddler
of prefab fiberglass bomb shelters
pounds the pine table
predicting economic collapse
and unidentified flying objects
from the Book of Revelations.

Circumlocution, no pause, no breathing,
he's apple-pie slicing,
cerated knife in hands
ticking minutes
he does not have
years he will refuse to see
that he ís plastering over gaps in the logic
smoothing over the entrance
to a room under the lawn.

No matter if some other pie bakes
fragrant apples cooking easily
peeled and unpeeled the same,
he would seal his own fragility
under the browning crust
in under ground chambers,
closing his steel door
with its peephole and gun-sight,
sheltered from nuclear hell
by a thickness of cement
from change by brittleness of belief.

Radioactive words
firestorms over tea with mint:
"Commie pinko feds, homos with aids, the IRS,
fat people, stock brokers, illegal aliens
Don't trust, just stock up
on canned goods and ammo....."

He shoots peach-marmalade volleys,
apple-crisp pudding, his eyes, his ears impervious
to the kettleís screaming, to oven doors slamming
his cards face down, without looking, he folds,
pours boiling water for tea,
smiles and makes a little joke,
flexes eyebrows overgrown
as untended graves,
arching hoar-frosted inch worms
measuring Armageddon.

---

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

Another murderer made in god's image....

Dr. George Tiller, a father and grandfather, as well as a doctor who's abortion clinic performed late term abortions, was murdered in his own church where he was an usher.

My question is this: Why does it surprise us when those who say they are "god"s messengers whip out guns and start shooting?

The following is a list of murders ordered or carried out by "god" in the old testament. I found this on several websites but I am not sure it is a complete listing....

• All men, women & children on earth except for Noah's immediate family(Genesis 7:23)
• All inhabitants of Sodom and Gomorrah except a single family, (and he turned one of the spared family into a pillar of salt...) (Genesis 19:24)
• The first born of Egypt (Exodus 12:29)
• The hosts of the Pharaoh, including 600 chariot-captains (Exodus 14:27,28)
• Amalek & all his people (Exodus 17:11,16)
• 3,000 Israelites (Exodus 32:27)
• 250 Levite princes who'd challenged Moses (Numbers 16:1-40)
• 14,700 Jews killed with a plague (they'd rebelled against Moses following the killing of the princes) (Numbers 16:41-49)
• All subjects of Og (Numbers 21:34, 35)
• 24,000 Israelites who'd shacked up with Moabite women (Numbers 25:4, 9)
• All males, kings, and non-virgin females of the Midianites (Numbers 31:7, 8)
• The Ammonites (Deuteronomy 2:19-21)
• The Horims (Deuteronomy 2:22)
• All inhabitants of Jericho, except for a prostitute and her family (Joshua 6)
• 12,000 residents of Ai. Joshua hung the king on a tree. (Joshua 8:1-30)
• The population of Makkedah (Joshua 10:28)
• The people of Libnah (Joshua 10:29, 30)
• All inhabitants of Gezer (Joshua 10:33)
• All of Lachish (Joshua 10:32)
• The entire people of Eglon (Joshua 10:34, 35)
• The population of Hebron (Joshua 10:36, 37)
• All inhabitants of the "country of the hills", and (of course there's more), of the south, and the vale, and of the springs and all their kings (Joshua 10:40)
• 31 kings and inhabitants of their countries, and south country, and the land of Goshen, and the valley, and the plain, and the mountain of Israel, & the valley of the same from Mt. Halak to Mt. Hermon (Joshua 11:12, 16, 17, 12:24)
• 10,000 Moabites (Judges 3:29)
• 10,000 Perizzites and Canaanites (Judges 1:4)
• 600 Phillistines (Judges 3:31)
• All from Sisera (Judges 4:16)
• 120,000 Midianites (Judges 8:10)
• 25,100 Benjaminites (Judges 20:35)
• 50,070 from Bethshemesh (I Samuel 6:19)
• The Amalekites (I Samuel 15:3, 7)
• The armies & the 5 kings of the Amorites (Amos 3:2)
• The Moabites, plus 22,000 Syrians (II Samuel 8:2, 5, 6, 14)
• 40,000 Syrian horsemen (II Samuel 10:18)
• 100,000 Syrian footmen, plus by 27,000 who are all crushed by a wall (I Kings 20:28, 29, 30)
• 42 children, (god sends a bear to eat them)(II Kings 2:23, 24)
• 185,000 Assyrians killed by an angel (II Kings 19:35)
• 10,000 Edomites, followed by 10,000 more whose killers threw them from a rock so they were broken in pieces (II Chronicles 28)
• 120,000 Judeans (II Chronicles 28)
• 75,000 Persians (Esther 9:16)

Enough said.

Seasonal song for the disposed, persecuted or foreclosed

To me, The Coventry Carol is not a religious song, but a song about a momentous and tragic day when a government, a king turned on the poor and helpless, slaughtering an entire generation of children rather than let a future rival escape. It's sadness is that of families suffering loss, and becoming refugees, living in hiding. It's sadness lies also in the realization of the depth of savagery the powerful can visit on the helpless.

Though this is with guitar the singing is "legit" style rather than belt.

Dedicated to the refugee, the transient, the persecuted, the rejected, the foreclosed, and ALL PERSONS BORN OR LIVING UNDER: power mad bullies, kings, despots, ruling parties, war lords, rogue presidents, vice presidents and their minions, certain priests & clerics (of ANY & ALL faiths) who spread hatred and intolerance for those with different beliefs, or political Machiavellis who shepherd maliciousness and mistrust.

Blood Brothers from Inverse Origami

The poem Blood Brothers was included in Inverse Origami (1998) and also in From We Shijin Book I" 2004, from Hanover Press
    

Hemoglobin shovels O2
into the furnace of this flesh,
Mt. St. Helena hot in the veins,
the blinding burn of this mortal mess:

Volcanic Serb and Croat erupting
Christian, Muslim, Jew, Tutsi
Hutu spew fire and ash, Skinhead
Treader of the Shinning Path, smoke
and vent like Irish Catholic and Protestant
pro-life bombers, policemen with plungers
unemployed militiamen with
fertilizer and fuel oil.

We all wear the white hat and
god is always on our side as
hungry and hissing we blister
to flame ---- and blood flows always
just as red as the time before.

Whatever cause we cite, there is another   
and we avert our eyes --- In each generation
the ancient animal wakes anew, the sleeping
mountain rumbles, metaphysicians mumble
incantations, the people bring their offerings to the craters rim:
.....learning and law
.....compassion and tolerance
.....forbearance and forgiveness.
These spread their opium salve and the   
Blood-beast dozes a while
under a gilding of grace.

Pick the scab of blessedness
and blood roils forth once more.
Some new Pompeii is burned or buried
smothered in sulfur, an ocean boils
but the mountain does not care

for blood has no age of consent
no theology nor dogma   
blood holds no point of view
no nationality, no vote
no academic certification
no credit rating, no latex condom.

And the blood dries to a crust,
of ugly smudges down the pages
of every sacred text.

Cain and Abel were brothers
blood-brothers.   
O blood without end --

Ah men.

---

from Inverse Origami - the art of unfolding
--- Mar (Mistryel) Walker, © 1998
Puzzled Dragon Press

/

Sept 11, Can't help but remember

I was sitting safely in my Northville apartment, making toast. I had just been hired for a new job and was feeling quite positive about the course of life.

Then the phone rang. It was dear old mom. ”Turn on your television set, right now,” she said. ”A plane just hit the World Trade Center.” I turned the set on, then spent the rest of the day in stunned silence as events unfolded, as a plane hit the second tower, and later as both towers crumbled to dust on live TV.

It seems incredible now, all these years later, that in response we attacked the wrong country and have now spent $550 billion plus on that spurious activity. It won’t bring back our dead. More deaths and more debt won’t make the path right.

Weep for the Dead

On this 4th of July weekend - that celebrates the birthday of a nation who's present government violently pursues its agenda at the expense of ethics, decency and common sense  - I offer this oil pastel/watercolor called Weep for the Dead.

We have taken our freedom and our equality and turned it into a crass, egotistical culture that values Blackwater, Halliburton and their like and lets the poor drown in a flood. That believes valor can be bought.

We are like the British empire of old, we are in decline. Selah.

Military cheating soldiers out of rightful help

Nation Magazine has estimated that the Military is saving around $8 billion dollars. You might think that they are economizing by getting a deal on equipment. NOT. They are cheating soldiers who have served them well. They are discharging long term soldiers for so called pre-existing mental disorders - disorders not discovered until after ten or twelve years of service. Ten or twelve years that included repeated mental health screenings that found nothing wrong. If not for mental defect, these men are discharged for misconduct when they fall apart with untreated Post Traumatic Stress Syndrome or for Traumatic Brain Injury. Once they are discharged not only do they not get the help they need for treatment - THEY ARE FORCED TO PAYBACK RE-ENLISTMENT BONUSES somethings over $10,000 dollars. Many of these soldiers asked for help, but their requests were denied.

What kind of country have we become? We ask men to give their lives to a trumped up war, then throw them away like used cars when maintenance costs loom.

http://www.pbs.org/now/shows/424/soldiers-ptsd.html

Another Christmas, Another Religious War

It's Christmas morning and a new religious war is afoot between Christians in Ethiopia and Muslims in Somalia. Religion all around seems more a cause of war than a source of comfort. This photo is one not used for a story I did recently on Hanukah. A Reformed Congregation Rabbi, a warm and caring person and a great interviewe, is reflecting on and reflected in a display-case of seasonal items. Hanukah celebrates the 're-taking' and re-dedication of the Temple by the Maccabees -- who mounted what this Rabbi called 'guerrilla warfare' to do so. Is there any religion with a truly peaceful history? I doubt it, since religion is the invention of mankind, and man is a dangerous and aggressive animal. (Women I do not exclude you here....) We are an animal species full of loving kindness and also full of savage craft. Selah.