Ties That Bind

 

No consanguinity? No matter.

No tribal, ethnic, religious links?

No problem. Geography, culture?

None? Not to worry. There are values

and emotions intrinsic to human nature

admittedly not shared by all yet common

to us all in the great blueprint after

which flesh and blood were fashioned.

None among us hold death in great

personal esteem and when that Angel

strikes a blow to extinguish not one

nor two or even four lives but two score

and more the departed souls' absence

strikes the hearts of those of gentle

passion for the ties that bind us to life

are sacred. Those who exult at this

misfortune citing tribal enmity represent

the blueprint mutation replacing tender

care for others with spiteful character

corrosion, souls dark with putrid hate.

 

 

My Muse

Robins were conceitedly singing this morning

and I was certain I heard May knock at

April's door. In the garden the slightest

of breezes wafted the fragrance of warm

earth as my spade dug into the moist friable

soil. Tulips were blooming and grape

hyacinths and scilla too. The clematis vines

and climbing roses are filling out. The sun

spring rain and warming temperatures

have coaxed the winter-weary garden to

spread the news: time for all perennials to

surface and they are.  Yesterday's rain

has produced miracles of new growth and

today's vibrant sun that warms my back

has promised a spectacular summer of 

luxuriant plant growth. I am planting 

Dahlias in the moistly receptive garden

soil, Asiatic and toad lilies and gladiolas

envisioning my pleasure when they grow

and bloom. My little dogs nuzzle me as I

dig to just the right depth; they are puzzled

to see me doing what they often do. This is 

a perfect spring day, summer not far behind.

But wait: there was no sun today, it has been

heavily overcast, humidity hanging heavily

in the air; I merely embellished an otherwise

perfect day thanks to the imp that's my muse.

The Wakening Forest

The roof of the sky this day is dark

and brooding saturating the

atmosphere with a humid warmth

like a restrained dip in a 

southern ocean on an idyllic tropical

island. There where exotic

flora has its own customized

rainforest and brilliant greens

throb and vibrate with life in all

seasons. Here in a northern continent

spring forests are exhausted from

their struggle for survival

assailed by ferocious icy winds and

vicious snowstorms as they slowly

recover from a lifeless hiatus

amidst nature's blandishments of

sunlight, caressing breezes and soft 

rains nursing the forest and its soil-

submerged vegetation bit by bit

restored to life, awaiting summer.

Oh Ye of Little Faith

Is there any other enterprise on Earth viewed 

with equal measure of respect and disdain beyond 

Big Pharma whose bottom line is the goal its 

brilliant science vibrates to for happy shareholders 

drive the machine that produces life-saving drugs 

the world is so deeply attached to. Challenged to 

solve the riddle of a deadly pathogen biomedical

engineers tasked with the urgency of mounting

deaths created a miracle bringing deliverance

to a threatened world population, heralded

for their genius, blessed for their supreme

science, congratulated on their beating time

at its own game, they were enthroned as

saviours as the world responded with an

anxious uptake of a COVID-evading vaccine.

Perfidy, thy name is humanity, no longer

enamoured with the romance of deliverance

resentful of lagging production and shortfalls

state governments fume as their populations cast

blame upon their inept performance as they

cast about for a political lifeboat and soon

enters the prospect of lawsuits to punish the

arrogance of Big Pharma, this time for utterly

inexcusable drug component shortages, national

border restrictions and production complications.

Interesting Times

It takes a sagacious sense of wry humour

to emit a curse that sounds like a blessing

and to impute its origins as an ancient Chinese

imprecation yet it seems a fitting enough origin

though false reflecting the temper of these times

where humanity has been cursed by a chimeric

pathogen that broke the bounds nature invested

it with as a primordial evil essence burrowing

its way from animal to animal across the species 

barrier in China where the human animal is

wont to see table delicacies in other species

caging and slaughtering the wild, inviting the

lost free spirits of the animal kingdom to return

with a vengeance wreaking death and destruction.

 

The Courage of Rejecting Hatred

 

He is safe now, a professor of clinical psychology 

at a university in the West informed at an early age 

that as a Jew in Lebanon his safety was a tenuous 

affair, but free now to speak of the pathogenic 

disease of infectious hatred triumphing over critical

thought and reality, robbing minds of the capacity 

of logic, endowing them with the fuel of deeply

viral ethnic, tribal, sectarian antipathies streaming 

them toward a lifetime of psychoses befitting 

psychopaths, as he describes Middle East conflicts 

as 'the standard by which the butchery of all

other civil wars is gauged'. But there in those vile

intemperate given-to-violence communities 

courage also lives as when one steeped deep since 

childhood in hatred of Jews, taught to fear and

to scorn them, encouraged to commit deadly 

violence, now looks back and wonders why as he 

forges friendships among them. And another

writing publicly in Arabic questioning why it is 

Islam has its holy sites as does Christianity yet

is the City of David, al Quds disputed as the City 

of Jews, the site holding the most sacred symbol 

of Judaism's lost Temples. These critical thinkers

applying the wisdom of common sense  and careful

thought to overturn millennia of Koranic spite upon

a people unwilling to bow to any god but their

own, in so doing inviting a fatwah on their heads. 

Ignoramus, Reveal Yourself

Best to say nothing than to reveal that you 

know nothing. The compulsion to speak

to situations you have but a smattering of

knowledge of, to leave the impression you know 

more than you do will come back to haunt you 

when someone who does know more than you

quietly comments correcting your immature 

observations guided by an impression held dear 

that your words are wise, imaging a thoughtful

reflective mind capable of discerning when to 

reveal what it knows, when to maintain silence. 

Instead you chose the conceit of instant comment

led by vanity imperiously thrusting caution to the 

sidelines. The favourable impression you aimed 

to elicit shattered of your impulsive volition. 

You Say Vance, I say Vunce

The hard currency of deception and coercion 

remain the hallmark of the unprincipled yet 

these appear to be distinguishing qualities of 

leadership recognized and awarded in the belief

that none of these traits blemish the record of 

those sufficiently clever to cover their tracks

manipulate their underlings and advantage 

themselves through the influence of position in 

the conceit that no one will challenge them and

risk harm to their own reputations. Thus a 

first-world democracy heralding itself as the very 

example of rigorous and exemplary stewardship 

of the public weal appoints an egotist whose 

manner reeks of entitlement to unscrupled and

deviant behaviour in the certainty that those 

beholden to his favour will hold their tongues 

and in so doing reflect the very characteristics 

of the high-placed government executives who 

chose to appoint him while parading themselves

as superior judges of human values whose reign 

is replete with ill-chosen avenues while lauding 

themselves for their sterling vision for the nation's 

future so very secure in their capable hands. 

Genocidal Future World Impact

 

Perhaps the true measure of the success of a bold

new enterprise in population control otherwise known 

as genocide, can be captured in a snapshot of its

future impact. Removing the lives of millions from the

roster of existence with the world a living laboratory 

of experimentation through a unique formula of precision 

planning to the very last detail in a country whose 

bureaucracy was celebrated for attention to formulation 

and implementation in concise and determined steps

where it might not have been surprising at the success

of an architecture of mass annihilation, all the more so

with the enthused aid of many helping hands all in fervent

agreement that the presence of Jewish life was quite simply

intolerable; a 'race' of greedy sub-human manipulators

whose ultimate goal was and remains world domination.

The plug of uneasy co-existence removed all the souls

that could be flushed through to eternal damnation in 

outstanding success. To the extent that near a century

forward in time their recovery has never achieved parity 

with pre-Holocaust numbers prior to Jew-cleansing. 

Oh, Frail Humanity!

There is much truth to the pithy old adage

that we get what we pay for, even in the

instances where the legendary moral is turned 

around and we pay for what we get after the great

unwashed cast their ballot of assent to be

governed by ignoramuses who are charlatans

posing as intelligent beings whose principles

and attachment to the social weal identify

them as suitable to govern. In our mass

delusion we believe campaign promises and

naively await their implementation meant to

benefit a population of diverse souls sharing

a geographic home, all the while the executive

branch of government congratulates itself on

its acumen in diverting public attention from 

its inept decisions all geared to buying future

votes when the goal is not to govern well but to

return to government well-seasoned in the art

of ineptitude and hallucinatory deception. The

draught of oblivion to public disservice highly

dependent on the imbecility of a smug public.

In The Line of Duty

Once it would have been unknown but

this is a different era and it is everywhere

known. No longer does a badge and a uniform

guarantee that close scrutiny is impossible

for now there are no dark streets of crime

that cannot be illuminated, no acts of perverse

violence that can go unseen. The dark lion

whose size and potency inspired fear and a

perceived need to be tamed to the very point

of unconsciousness though manacled in a nod

to history and a current electrifying a dark

community to memory on its knee was turned

inside out when a knee transported the meme

to a deviant purpose and death claimed the

struggling king of the jungle. But wait; the

world privy to the sinister drama screamed its

outrage and in the end, judged the uniform

and the shadow of the lion roared tonight.

 

He Rants and He Raves Steeped Deep in Hate

Oh look, the hyena is gnashing

his teeth again, bored with the pretense

that he will no longer furnish the

world with the hysteria of his

bellicose threats against others in

the jungle he inhabits. He has gnawed

the old bones of past accusations and

slanders to their stinking marrow

and now restored to his authentic

position as the origin of spiteful malice

he again names those whom he accuses

of causing strife, plotting slaughter

looting the possessions of others

useful as a screen while he goes about

his business of planning massacres and rapes 

to satiate the blood-lust of his 

faithful followers, himself the torch

that lights the fire of sectarian, tribal, ethnic

conflict from the embers of racist bigotry

smouldering in the vile hearts of savages

posing as followers of a monotheistic spirit.

The Social Revolutionary Family Dynasty

If they don't perish in the theatre

of conflict honour-bonded to

God, king and country! old soldiers 

just gently fade away. Not

however, old war-horses firm and

steadfast in the ideology of anti-

Imperialism devoted to the

higher moral ground of sacrifice

in the name of social equality whose

deep allegiance to poverty and

universal service keeps them in

the race firmly harnessed to 

ensuring the misery of those they

insist must be part of their revolutionary

spirit. They hand over the reins of

power only when death's knell

is imminent secure in the knowledge

that their legacy  is firmly established

the title of social warrior unparalleled

theirs forevermore worshipped.

 

 

A Raccoon

 

A plenitude of gifts privileged us today 

and all from one sublime supreme source 

when in the morning the sun began drying 

days of rain and a cardinal sang its praise 

from aloft the crown of a tree bare this

spring day of foliage, the air vibrating with 

new life inching out of warming soil. On 

our tramp through the forest trails

the red blossoms of maples scattered

on the forest floor, with trilliums and

lilies-of-the-valley, trout lilies and coltsfoot

punctuating the wan landscape with their

promise. Scattering compost born of

kitchen waste aged for years upon my

garden, the comfort of being of and

with the Earth, our home. And there in

broad daylight heedless of all but the

offerings on the porch for neighbourhood birds 

and squirrels, taking its share, a raccoon.

Death's Accomplice

And so you conclude that what sits before you

is the mind-impoverished account of a story lacking 

the substance of human attributes of empathy for others 

the substance of a yarn wormed out of the mind of 

a misanthrope fixed in the mindset of expecting 

nothing less than the details writ large of human failure

and the frailty of justice and nothing more than a destiny 

whose beginning was lost in the mists of time still  

unfolding, rancid and pulsating with hatred. 

The sketch outlining an event in the City of Lights

where lived an elderly woman and nearby a young man

given to snarling sinister threats against another dweller

of an apartment complex. She shrinking in fear

expressing doubts of her security to police until

one fateful day the man stormed her home, tortured 

his victim then threw her from her balcony to 

the welcoming arms of the Angel of Death. Perhaps 

the author of this tale is merely misunderstood

there is sympathy after all and no punishment for 

murder to be meted out by the state finding no 

responsibility for murder after all for under the influence 

of narcotics he knew not what he did, and the evil 

that gnawed at his grieving soul of unbiased faith

was rage against that universal symbol of suspicion

in the guise of a frail old woman of Jewish birth.

He merely, said the court "voluntarily ended the life"

of the defenceless woman ... Allahu Akbar! A most

unfortunate affair of drug-induced "acute delirium".

 

 

Star of the RMS Titanic

A century ago a  massive ocean liner set sail on a

trans-Atlantic journey with a population on board 

rivalling the size of a village to high acclaim for 

what technology and modern design could accomplish. 

Like a village there was a wealthy contingent

alongside the presence of a more populous modestly 

financially endowed group and a governing body to

oversee the voyage and give service to its passengers. 

Among children in steerage 54 died of exposure

when their ship capsized whereas one child perished 

out of first class accommodation. One privileged 

child of six beheld the stars and marvelled at the 

absence of a fabled elf in the frozen northern waters. 

A child whose adventurous life ended three years 

after his salvation when he ran out onto a road after

a ball and became the first lethal casualty of the

newfangled vehicles starting to appear on the

roads and byways of North America in 1914.

Nature's Blueprint

On a windy, overcast spring afternoon the 

forest interior's light-mute atmosphere speaks 

compellingly of rain yet rain is withheld. On 

the banks of the stream settled within the forested 

ravine grow  the earliest of spring wildflowers

coltsfoot, their brilliant yellow flowerheads 

stubbornly closed for lack of sun. In the forest 

understory the stalks of honeysuckle and dogwood 

boast bright green foliage and from the still-damp 

soil of the forest floor trilliums are abandoning 

the stifling darkness of the winter months. In the

stream, a Mallard drake leisurely paddles, dips

for algae and moves on, never straying too far 

from the site where its mate has settled to nest.

In his inherent  loyalty lies nature's formula of 

survival where her creatures breed and bear young

nurture and protect them to carry on the endless 

cycle of birth and death obeying the seasons

and the inherited reasons for primal existence.

If Your Name Is Israel

The formula to self-respect is a simple one. Hold 

yourself to the standard that makes you feel personal 

pride and expect nothing from anyone else. No exterior 

influence should move you from that standard. Be 

what you feel identifies you with principled morality 

and you stand on solid metaphysical ground. That 

idealism becomes your banner. A trait to be inherited 

by all those who follow in your line. Anticipate no

acknowledgement from the outside world. Above all 

to yourself, your life mission, your heritage and the

future of your descendants, be true. When attacked

reciprocate in kind as a message that such abuse will 

no longer be tolerated. Remember the past so that 

you can face the future with wide open eyes. And 

if your name is Israel, flaunt it. Flex the muscles 

of your deterrence but be fair and be just. Bear in 

mind that the ancient standard you bear has been 

entrusted to you. And while taking comfort that your

standards express the rationale of your existence 

in their height unmatched by other nations, smile 

with resignation when they demand: !!higher!!

 

 

 

Slaughtering The Peace

In the still solitude of the winter
woods a hush hangs on the landscape
of dark tree trunks standing like
sentry posts amid great pine forest
giants anchored firmly by an
accumulated snow pack sifted
generously with fresh-fallen snow.

The sky, too, hovers, a mirror
image of the ground billowed with
snow, shimmering pearl-grey,
silver, white. The silence suddenly
broken by a coarse, hoarse racket
of deafening dimensions. A murder
of crows slaughtering the peace.

They shift and shuffle around the
prickly, lofty spires of two-masted
pines whose size bespeak their
majesty, dignity offended by the
rudeness of the invading horde;
cackling, croaking, lifting their
black wings outspread like phantoms
circling the landscape of the sky.

 

Migration

There has never been a time when life forms

were complacently static for within all that lives 

lurks the compulsion to move. To greener

pastures as that hoary old adage acknowledges.

Humanity in its primitive search for survival

moving with the seasons in search of roving

prey whose seasonal call to pasture elsewhere

led the hunters toward the hunted. Survival

takes many forms; escape from regional conflict

from oppression and from searing poverty

from violent crime and the corruption of politics 

or the vicious threats of gangs. Where those who

stray from their places of birth envision other

places of promise for a vastly improved future.

The urge to roam, to migrate in the search for

something different is not restricted to humankind.

Behold, on the forest floor cultivated treasures 

escaping their cultured prisons of urban lawns

their seeds floating on the wind toward the fertile

pastures of a forest floor where organic matter

simmers and seethes with life welcoming the

presence of a modestly beautiful plant to become 

naturalized from pulmonaria to simple lungwort.

 

 

Monopolizing The News

 Anyone with a fetish for reading obituaries

will discover a gold mine of entertainment

in the newspapers of late with the number

of pages devoted to the dearly departed

bearing little resemblance to those of only

a year before. Anyone doubting that the 

novel coronavirus is a real pathogenic threat

to the survival of those vulnerable to its

predations need only explain to themselves

where all these 'excess death' memorials

emanate from. The newspapers print fewer and

fewer pages of news, and what is published

is monopolized by global news of the chaos

wrought by SARS-CoV-2, its mutations and

rising levels of contagion and lethality for there

is scant room available for news reports on any

other events barring volcanic eruptions, regional

conflicts and a royal approaching his 100th year

succumbing to the weariness of life as an amoeba.

COVID-19 is news; all else mere commentary.

 

Bitter Betrayal

Hope springs eternal even when experience

informs the seasoned intelligence that

the expected has a habit of ingraining itself

to the point of no return. The enemy of

one's enemy on occasion turns a Janus

face to view one's enemy as an entity with

whom the business of realpolitik can proceed.

That this emboldens one's enemy to believe

the avenue has opened wide whereby one's 

downfall can be quietly plotted and carried

through with no repercussions other than your

very own existential resistance spells out firmly

what should have been acknowledged but was

set aside in the expectation that friendship

would endure in the face of malign pressure

while neglecting to take into account the

predictable, that material gains supersede any

manner of promise to which there is a cost.

 

 

Nazi War Criminals

Perhaps, then, if we reworded the troubling question

as example: How could they not know and be aware

that their actions aided in the deliberately untimely

death of thousands of children, women and men?

Ah, that argument that they were young, conscripted

to perform a national duty and had no other option

but to follow prescribed orders such that their very

youth alone must forgive their trespass on that most

basic of human rights ... existence. Needless to say

their age-peers who fought on a deliberate principle

of upholding freedom and the sacredness of human

life chose that course in loyalty to their conscience

needing no orders or prompting to fight the evil these

now-elderly moral criminals represented. They who

gave little thought to enabling the mass murder of

Jews who were, after all, Jews. Who would not go on

to litter the world with their offspring to exploit world

order to their gratification. Elderly, feeble, ill or not

justice has not been well served in their preservation.

 

Why Do You Hate Me?

 

And how am I not like you? For I laugh

with pleasure, cry in pain, I have eyes to

see and ears to hear, a mouth to express my

anguish when you ridicule and debase me.

I know love, to receive and to give. I hug

my children as you do yours. I long to live.

I want a future for my children. I weep with

fear and incomprehension. Why do you hate me?

Why did the world see nothing, hear nothing

know nothing of my fate, fail to intervene to

act on behalf of the humanity that we represent.

I know why my fellow Jews mourn my death

and that of six million who like me were viewed

as human trash to be obliterated. But I still do

not know why we are so reviled. What I do

know is how I am different from you. What

you did to me I never would have done to you.

Hope Forevermore

Nature continues to resign herself to insatiable

human curiosity. An insolence she brooks for it 

emanates, after all, from her very own exquisite 

design faculties, the architect of all that exists as 

when she gifted humankind with cerebral functioning 

enabling endless discoveries. There are secrets of 

the universe that are revealed and others that tantalize 

but remain out of bounds of revelation though 

astrophysicists and their ilk probe endlessly. Take 

black holes as an example or turn your attention to 

time-space warps or microscopic lifeforms somehow

flourishing in the most intemperate geologies and 

oceanic depths on Earth. Mysteries within mysteries 

and nor is nature willing to surrender what she holds

close. Close to the emotions of humanity there are 

other enigmas as when ships or airplanes send urgent

messages of desperate anguish in the tempests of her

elements and are forever gone, each soul aboard no

longer exists. All those who love them know, on

the other hand and wish to believe they have found

safe harbour on a mysteriously isolated remote shore.

 

 

 

The Generosity of Expendable Labour

 

The vast intelligence of the human race cannot

be denied as evidenced by the richness of history

that instructs the present as humankind explored

and tamed the environment to suit the needs of

people who exploited what nature offered and in

the process made astounding discoveries all of which

built on one another to produce a technological

marvel of servicing human interests. But not

without some massive missteps on the way to

success. The brilliant minds thousands of year ago

who visualized the universe, of the building blocks

of all matter, who spoke of atoms even while they

worshipped a multitude of gods also believed in

the incontrovertible reality of free men and slaves.

That slaves were ordained by birth to be just that

puzzling in its certainty and accepted even by the

philosophers among them. Inexplicable reasoning

that more recent times dispensed with in the stark

assumption that the socially and technologically

advanced were superior, all others subparhumanity

to be used and abused, taken hostage to the ambitions

of development and wealth derived from slave hand-

labour. Just ask: had the mechanization of labour

through the industrial revolution not occurred would

civilized nations have decided to abolish slavery?

 

 

Pastorale

 

The remote forest interior lies deep in twilight

dreaming of summer and so it will remain until 

that time of approaching evening when dusk

makes its brief entrance before the dark cloak 

of night falls and birds no longer rustle restlessly 

awaiting the nocturnal hours when night-hunters

alert to sound and movement strike. The day's 

atmospheric resignation to continual dimmed light 

relieved but briefly even on such days when the sun 

penetrates spring's leaf-barren forest canopy 

to send light-beams to burnish the trunks of 

awakening trees. A solitary figure walks slowly 

along a trail deep in mindful contemplation this 

Easter Sunday in a world briefly held in peace.

The Miracle of Survival

The sequence of a miracle begins with a mere

moment's inattention followed by panic

then despair and finally the joy of relief when

a child is reunited with its parents for small

humans harbour deep within an urgent curiosity

about all things mysterious and to a three-year-old

child everything is mysterious in dire need of

exploration and discovery. Unplanned but

inevitable the child will espy a challenge to

be countered and obey his instinct to follow

wherever it leads and lead it does further and

further from safety and security until nowhere

in the wilderness of the boreal forest in that interval

between winter and spring is anything anymore

familiar to a child wearied of wandering and

wondering where his mother is when he so badly

needs a hug and a warm mug of milk and as the

days pass he misses his bed and his bath, the

hugs and the scolds until finally he rests, eyes

glazed with fatigued wonder before they slowly

close. An unfamiliar voice, faces of men who scoop

him into their arms, weeping with gratitude. Will

that child be haunted deep within his subconscious

by fear of the unknown, or will he one day stride

into the known world with the confidence of a

seasoned, confident spirit searching adventure?

 

 

Lost in Space and Time

 

Most assuredly there is intelligent life up there.

Wondering why there is none down here. It is quite 

within the realm of possibility you may some day 

be accosted by one of those intelligent life forms 

enquiring of you as an example of one of the strange 

species populating this planet whose presence is

perplexing to that intelligent life form in uncertainty

over what it is that compels Earthlings to conflict 

against one another. And you may respond that this 

misfortune is what nature herself has made of us. An 

answer that will of its very nature assure that intelligent 

being that since so much energy is placed by humanity

in venomous hatred of one another placated only by 

succeeding in strewing their dead across countless 

battlefields, sapping the potential for enlightenment

bypassing responsibility to self and others that the 

likelihood of travel in outer space to communicate to 

extraterrestrials the pathogen infecting humankind is 

diminished such that intelligent beings may relax their 

concerned vigilance for fear of one day experiencing a

human accosting an intelligent being on their very own

planet affirming the wisdom of bypassing human efforts

to send out radio-telescope communications in hope of

making contact with those spurning such opportunities.

Have You Heard?

Have you heard of the brilliant new show-and-tell 

coming to a mission near you? We've heard that 

The People's Republic has launched a new speaking 

tour in a kindly effort to re-educate the ignorant who

persist in telling nasty tales of Beijing's collaborative 

union with its manifold populations to bring them 

into the family of harmony, all honouring Xi Jinping 

as the most impressive leader on this planet, a man 

whose wisdom and far-reaching plans for humanity's 

evolution toward a higher plane of existence will lift 

China to its deserved pedestal as Universal Global 

Director in tardy recognition of its undertaking  to

place a combined listening device/video surveillance

camera in every home, the better to tend to the needs 

of every individual in the most humanely advanced 

program the world has ever imagined. Just take care 

not to offend those powers that will become overlords 

for in the interim the lesson is as follows: "The Chinese 

government is firmly determined to safeguard its 

national sovereignty, security and development interests

and urges the relevant parties to clearly understand 

the situation and redress their mistakes. They must stop 

political manipulation on Xinjiang-related issues, stop 

interfering in China's internal affairs in any form and 

refrain from going further down the wrong path. 

Otherwise, they will get their fingers burnt." DO NOT

leave the lecture crestfallen and subdued, rather consider

the lesson to have been proffered with your very best 

interests in mind. For everyone's sake sincere harmony 

and regret for past mistakes are much preferred to war.