Not Your Rabbit

The urban forest in winter is a sublime

landscape of serenity, a peaceful escape

where woodland trails invite and entrance

the casual and the committed to nature's wild

side. Its mind-calming atmosphere a treasure

and a reprieve from all that bedevils any

community engrossed in living day by day

in a world of unrelenting aggravation. Yet

it also offers up reminders of the travails of

existence; of nature red in tooth and claw in

occasional macabre and chilling pastiches of

unmistakable agony. A passage on the forest

floor steeped in snow and ice suddenly become

a morgue; on its surface bright red blood and

nearby tufts of skin and tawny hair and entrails

signs of struggle and defeat. You shrink in

dismay at the spectacle of hunter and hunted.

Breathing a sigh of relieve when dusk hurries

into night and there he is, your daily winter

visitor nibbling the offerings on schedule.

On This Winter Day

 

When a wide blue sky towers over

a winter day extreme cold prevails

irrespective of the beaming sun's

filtered fingers illuminating the forest

canopy finding its way through the

network of naked branches to glance

piercingly off snow packed on the

forest floor, as opposed to the relative

mildness that prevails on a pewter sky 

day, shielding the sun. On this day

the sun shone, casting long shadows

in mid-afternoon. On such days even

a slight breeze lifts and turns paper-thin

foliage stubbornly clinging on those

immature oak, beech and hornbeam

standing their place among the fir

pine and hemlock in this woodland

where days of snow events are

punctuated with freezing rain tamping

down the snowpack to a hard crust.

Down in the valley of the forested

ravine migration-averse robins alight

by the steadily streaming creek in

their search for food, and somewhere

above, chatter chickadees and a lone

nuthatch, birds of the boreal forest.

 

“Because the Jews ruined Christmas”

 

Oh, look! A class of third-grade children taught 

a history lesson by their teacher and just in time for 

Christmas. A re-enactment of the Holocaust, no less

an object lesson in a people's unforgivable sin against 

a Jewish prophet disbelieving his claim to a godhead 

and just as womanhood is haunted by Pandora's box

escapees, so too are Jews shunned in perpetuity as the 

original deicidal plot earning the undying enmity of 

the spirit of existence and all humanity of divine faith. 

Here, Yiddele, you play Hitler and here, little boys 

and girls -- dig graves, shoot Jews for they must be 

punished for ruining Christmas. The children wailed 

and grieved as they died in gas chambers, their pleas 

for mercy unanswered as transport trains kept on

delivering them to their deserved punishment so that 

children playing Jews would fully know the extreme 

gravity of Jewish sin deserving obliteration. How

fitting their teacher was Black and thus entitled to her

mission to expand children's view of the world by

recalling history to show that some lives really and

truly do not matter. Hers the legacy of malicious hate.

 

 

Perspective

In a ritual as ancient as deep time the choreograph 

is endlessly replayed reflecting nature's ritualistic 

genetic endowment of all living creatures struggling 

to fulfill their portion of the imperative of survival 

long after the vestigial deep-rooted urge has served 

its purpose. An indigenous inheritance claimed

through right of settlement by an invading tribe 

recalling primal antagonisms. In the current replay 

claimants ululate in unadulterated joy at the sight of

mutilated corpses of the despised brought to death 

by their defenders for whom rape, pillage and slaughter 

speak of the depth of their will to destroy their

despised opposition. Those they slate for death and 

slake their bloodlust with predictably respond with 

like resolution setting out to destroy all who would 

destroy them. Soon the celebratory admirers of the

death-cult discover that they themselves must pay

the consequences of the evil that excited them to joy 

and suddenly their role as willing sacrifices wherein 

they must die in defense of their defenders' right to 

annihilate others loses its lustre when they are 

deprived of life's necessities and life itself to enable 

their chiefs' exultant glory amid heroic plaudits.

 

We . Shall . Never . Forget

Serious business must be given serious

attention. Much depends on the details 

scrupulously considered and written into law.

Action of such sweep and breadth must be

accompanied by a broad range of instructions

along with the therapeutic discriminatory use

of facsimiles readily digestible in the minds

of the public to adhere to the premise and intent

of the undertaking. It must be understood

that the decision represents a solution to a

grievous situation requiring remedy. Once

the audience is dedicated to the master plan

the authorities may proceed with confidence.

This is where social democracy has its authority

for the people by the people. A plan so vast

questions are irrelevant and duty is paramount.

Success requires optimum efficiency and of

course meticulous record-keeping. For those who

allow themselves to be driven by hate to execute

on their own, unauthorized actions will be held as

obstacles and suffer the consequences. Rules

are to be scrupulously observed and it is only

within the directives that cool heads prevail to

exact the greatest possible number of executions

by all means feasible to rid the world of Jews. A

gift from the Third Reich to an oblivious world.

 

 

Remembering ... Repetition

This, the most solemn of memorials

attests to the raw nature of humanity at

its hollow depths. Few commemorations

of world events are as starkly bereft of

humanity and of hope for humanity. An

event of gravely consequential failure in

the commission of a state-planned and

-executed annihilation of millions of 

children, women and men whose very

age-old existence drew contempt and hate

culminating in the meticulously organized

elimination of those whose existential

plight drew little interest from the global

community of nations, none of which 

ventured to involve themselves in rescue

much less an alliance of defenders to put

a halt to the grinding mechanism of death.

Eager to condemn once conflict ceased and

the full volume of extermination fully on

display, eager to declare 'never again' would

such a blot on the world conscience be

ignored. And yet again that same world 

readily alienates itself from that declaration

instead condemning Jews for defending 

their existence from another source equally

determined as the former to annihilation.

Its Very Existence

The elite global club of nations wholly

dedicated to amicable relations between

its members where each pledges to uphold

human rights and all value sovereignty

holding freedom, liberty and security as their 

highest achievements in the goal of safeguarding 

and enriching the human experience are all 

members in good standing free to approach 

a podium to expound on their sterling records 

in the aforementioned fields and to boast 

among themselves that each is equal in quality 

and respect to the other. One outstanding outlier 

betrays the lack of complete unity with its 

bystander status for its very presence is deemed 

to be the root of disequilibrium and cause

for strife and so, not quite a collegial member

but one continually singled out for its sins

insisting it has the right to sovereign authority

security and freedom of its population from

the malign intentions of nation-critics accusing 

it of the cardinal sin of its very existence. 

Putin, the Devil's Jester

Just so hard to tell with psychopathic

megalomaniacs. So is this sadist merely

playing a cat-and-mouse game trifling with

a world audience looking in on his war crimes

committed in Ukraine, adamant that he will

not lift his 'special military operation' that

has killed thousands, wrought ruin on a

peaceful country, occupied a fifth of that

sovereign country's territory proclaiming it

Russian territory henceforth, destroyed

hospitals and schools, left towns and villages

smouldering in rubble, abducted children

to isolate them from their heritage -- teasing

or taunting when he demands the withdrawal

of a military tasked to secure the safety of 

inhabitants of Israel after a foul, predatory

attack by a neighbour which shares so many

characteristics of the Putin dictatorship in

its deadly atrocities committed against the

innocent. Or is he, true to form as a pariah

supreme, enjoying his own sick humour

where there is none to be found in the bleak

black fog of war -- this man with his foul 

bellicosity that threatens a continent?  

The Who vs The What

 

 

It is a dilemma and it must be faced.

One is a who the other a sublime

mechanism whereby one can be

transported outside oneself. Both are

 valued, the who as a warm and living

organism complementing our lives

while the what is a devoted byproduct

of humanity's capacity to communicate.

Put the two together and the dilemma

surfaces. A mischievous little dog

who believes it is perfectly normal to

peruse the bindings of books not to

find fascinating promise within their

pages, but to gnaw that binding as an

irresistible draw. To separate the who

and the what is not a simple undertaking.

Books abound in this household and are

everywhere to be found, many at a level

approachable by an enterprising dog.

And that small dog is also everywhere

in the house that values the presence of

reading material. It is not a question

actually of what holds greater appeal

and value to those who respond to the

endearing qualities of a small hairy

creature living among them, as opposed

to the printed word and the elegant grace

of language. So which to favour and

how to balance the scale of devotion

requires rational debate beyond the

discipline required of a puzzled little

dog for whom love cannot be withheld.

 

 

 

Nature's Winter Cathedral

The mid-January sky of this new year is a

dome of silver shimmering with the promise

of snow. Soon cascading diaphanous veils

of silvery-white frozen crystals descend on

the waiting panorama already deep in

acquired layers of a winter season's lavish

snowfalls that have laid the forest floor thick

and deep in a comforter laying the forest to

sleep until spring's arrival. The forest glows

with its luminescent layers overlaid with the

fresh offerings from the clouds so uniform the

entire sky has become one widespread cloud

relieving itself of its starry burden. Muffed

radiantly yet the atmosphere an embroidery

of snow tumbled here and there by the wind

billows and hollows on the forest hillsides 

echo no sound in the serene silence of the

forest. Its still-running creek makes no sound

nor do the birds nestling within conifers whose

branches hang low with the accumulating fuzz

of white draperies in a landscape of deciduous

trunks like dark sentries in the white cathedral.

The Deadly Islamic Resistance Movement: Hamas

Even within the consciousness of an

inbred population with more than its share of

psychopaths there must exist some elements

of normalcy unless complete emotional

detachment from the most elemental of 

human emotions cannot flourish even

vestigially overtaken by a warped DNA

steeped in a cultural stew of resentment

anger and hate to produce an animal whose

visage resembles that of humanity contorted

with malice, a pathological psychosis so

prevalent its primitive conditioning shared

by an entire tribe for whom the suffering

imposed upon others in deliberate violence

to satisfy bloodlust impelled by sadistic

savagery produces pleasure and pride as

though mutilating and killing the helpless

represents the fulfillment of a sacred accord.

Not the bewildered fear of a child, nor the

confused inchoate expressions of the elderly

the stark terror on women's faces destined

for vicious rape and dismemberment evokes

the merest shadow of compassion for them.

Intimate Partner Gift

 

Her photo is on the back page of the local

paper. She is a young, attractive woman

a mother of four, the caption adds. Beside her 

another woman, her best friend. On the front page 

a headline: Killing domestic in nature: Police. 

And the quote that it is only a "homicide incident 

domestic in nature". Nothing to see here, a life 

snuffed out. But the public need not be overly 

concerned is the message; no general threat looms. 

No word of the arrested, the live-in boyfriend 

who might or might not have fathered any of those 

children. Testimonial from tearful friend how 

cheerful and good-natured, a perfect mother she 

was. A crowd-funding campaign will go forward.

Nothing to see here, a life snuffed out. An event

so common anywhere in the world, the reader

sighs, turns the page, pours another cup of coffee.

 

 

Anniversary of a Life Well Lived

He was the baby I learned to diaper when 

I turned into my teen years. The infant I 

carried about and tended to, took long walks 

in a public park with where I had arranged an

assignation with the boy my parents warned 

me against seeing who has been my husband 

for 69 years. That baby grew and flourished as 

he entered his own teen years and our own

three babies were born in quick succession

their uncle a rare presence in their lives for 

fortune, opportunity and career took him 

a fair distance. The teen he once was who 

delighted in maintaining a menagerie of reptiles 

and a pet raccoon who ran the household 

turned instead to teaching botany. A professor 

of environmental studies whose passion was 

bird counts and natural gardens, energetic squash 

games and primitive collectables. His widely 

varied interests as vast as his energy and time 

permitted. Until his retirement with a life of 

leisure that stretched before him to travel far and 

wide exhausting the globe's encyclopedic bird

species until a sneak attack by inoperable cancer.

The Social Caustic of the Day

 

Under a tidal wave of a suddenly emergent virus

the world community focused its attention and fear 

on a respiratory illness of varied dimensions 

capable of destroying the lives of millions worldwide 

as those spared quivered and shrank in the dread of

becoming one of the victims of a malady so little 

understood and so malignant science itself quaked 

and quivered in helpless dismay. None seemed to 

realize that another pathogen sought entry to make 

headway where the previous one laid humankind low. 

With the speed of a geyser unleashed, the world 

became suffused with the virus of hate, where the

purported victims were the oppressors courtesy of a

new ideology in the pantheon of humanity's

psychosocial 'corrections' over the ages where

groups arose to avenge past indignities cursing and 

killing in tribalism's primitive impetus to destroy 

and to pillage. A modern equivalent has infiltrated 

broader social interests, conspiring to bring low 

those identified as overlords to have them cower and 

cringe under a religious banner of woke critical race 

theory heralding diversity, equity and inclusion geared 

to the illusionary concept of justice for those whose 

grievances must be addressed through twisting the 

social order to benefit those hitherto considered fringe.

 

The Humanitarian Red Cross

There is laudable nobility of purpose in those within 

any society for whom humanitarian work comprises 

the essence of their enterprise in tending to the needs 

of those suffering deprivation and the fear of violence 

and homelessness as the outcome of natural disasters

and the horrors visited upon civilian populations during 

conflict. Among humanitarian groups and individuals 

feted and gratefully admired for their dedication to the 

affairs of international and national aid none can claim 

more popular, thankful support than that estimable old 

organization, the Red Cross. Moreover the International 

Committee of the Red Cross has reason, in popular opinion

to bask in satisfaction that it has achieved that universal 

recognition. Behind the beneficent facade, however, lies a 

different story for those seen less entitled to its generosity 

of purposeful spirit and dedication to humane relief when 

desperately required. A not-so-distant history of failing

to exert their capacity for aid to victims of the Holocaust

along with the group's documented assistance given to

Nazi notables escaping justice. But more recent events

as well highlighted for those whose torment has been 

ignored, that the Red Cross made no effort to succour

the tribulations of Israeli victims of Islamist violence.

Much less delivery of life-saving medications to Jews

held as disposable pawns, choosing to delegate delivery 

of life-saving drugs to elderly and infirm victims to 

the kindly auspices of the very terrorist group that 

captured, tortured and imprisoned them, preferring to

withhold the drugs before slaughtering their victims.

 

 

Tarnishing a Nation

The people have spoken, exercising their

democratic free agency at the ballot box to

destroy the country they love for one bearing

no resemblance to the heritage, the culture

the values and pride exemplifying a nation

once content to be itself, compellingly driven

to become what it now has become as a vehicle

for a sociopath's fantasy of a post-national

entity that detests itself in its regard for a 

culture of colonialist, racist, injustice attributed

by virtue of European settlement among the

Indigenous in its efforts to forge a unity of

dissimilar people augmented by immigrant

floods of integrated, grateful new Canadians 

whose contributions gave boundless wealth to

a nation until latterly the incursion of those

strikingly unwilling and incapable of viewing

others as equal and entitled assembled in numbers

sufficient to overwhelm tradition and heritage

bringing their own along with cultural issues

of hate and persecution to embark on a slow and

steady infiltration geared ultimately to conquer

and divide, the very agenda of the country's

leader revelling in his narcissistic role as nation

and ethics destroyer giving free reign to chaos

and abandonment of a national role in world

affairs as Canada becomes what it has never been.

 

The Peanut Fairy

 

We've come prepared, to dole out
the day's offerings, tucking them
into the crevices in tree bark,
atop branched ledges and jagged
stumps, everywhere our furry fan
club has long been accustomed to
finding them miraculously placed.

Though a chill wind blasts the
air, drifting the early morning's
snow flurries, the sun has lashed
its rays through bright partitions
in the pewter-clouded sky, and
hook-winged crows circle above
the woods, while nuthatches flit
through snow-dusted branches.

Some furtively, others robustly
unafraid and entitled, emerge in
their numbers of red, black and grey,
searching out the treats, our homage
to the small creatures who manage
to weather dire winter that storms
their hushed woodland retreat.

 

 

Canadian Adventure, British Columbia-Style

 

While I was rolling the sleeping bags, I saw two people cresting the mountain. The breathless young woman mentioned last night’s storm. I said the storm was exciting, but at 58, I’d found the climb exhausting. She laughed, said she was 37 and hadn’t thought she would make it, said she couldn’t imagine her mother even attempting the climb.

We’d left Vancouver for the three-hour drive to Long Peak. Travelling the narrow coastal highway I felt nervous seeing signs warning of falling rocks from the steel-netted cliff face.

On the winding, narrow logging road I worried about squeezing past hell-bent logging trucks. When we finally parked the car dusk was falling in the shadow of the mountain. We camped on the shale beach beside the lake, cooked dinner, admired the clear night sky, and went to bed.

Early next morning we began the drive to the trailhead. The car struggled up the steep rock-strewn road and we soon realized we weren’t about to get much closer. We shouldered our backpacks and began the hike to the forest. Either side of the road grew pearl everlasting and other floral offerings in abundance, and we continually heard the sharp squeaks of pica darting for cover.

At the trailhead the pitch was considerably intensified as we climbed the steep path. At times the scree was so loose, the path so narrow I experienced vertigo observing the valley below. Our son, a biologist, was in his element; my husband was in no distress. Their backpacks were far weightier than mine, but my legs were turning to stone, and my lungs felt like bursting.

Our son had been there before and said we’d soon be reaching the Gates of Shangri-La, a widespread rockfall over which we clambered. The rocks were huge, the area wide, and it took quite a bit of effort to find our way through it. The views, too, were spectacular, looking across from where we slowly wound our way through rocks each as large as a car, a small shed.

Another milestone; a mountain hut and around it, a vertical green meadow dissected by a narrow trail. We peered into the hut and stepped inside. A big old stove, a long table, some chairs, and upstairs a sleeping loft. There was a visitor's book, signed by people who obviously slept over, intent on a longer hike than ours, presumably. A number of the messages noted the appearance of packrats, swifting away with anything not nailed down. Not far from the hut stood a reliable and stout out-house, of which several of our party made use.

“Not long now, Mom!” shouted our son encouragingly. As I struggled up and upward following a well-worn, but quite narrow pathway up the green meadow. Finally, it appeared that he was right; we were approaching what appeared to be another landscape entirely.

A marmot greeted us as we forded a stream shooting over the mountain from a blue-green glacial lake. Above the lake, after our 8-hour climb, we pitched our tent. On a bit of a shelf in the rock. A 'bit of a shelf' is the operative word here. The floor of the tent slanted downward slightly, toward to the lake. At the far end of the lake was the dominating presence of the glacier that fed it, roaring as it melted, for this was late August.

On day-trips ascending from our camp we discovered other, smaller glacial lakes and glaciers, some blooming with red algae. We crossed other rockfalls and accessed crests where we ate lunch and gazed over unending peaks across the Stein Valley.

On one of these excursions clear skies turned suddenly dark; a thunderhead began its journey toward us. We scrambled to descend. Thunder, lightening, great gusts of wind, sleet and rain pummelled our little tent, with us huddling inside, as the temperature plummeted, but it stood fast.

When the storm finally subsided, we began to think about something approximating an evening meal. Everything around us was completely drenched. And it was, by then, quite dark. Suddenly, we saw what looked like a flare across the valley, on another mountain top, opposite to where we sat. And as the flare grew, and we understood it to be someone's camp fire, we set up a loud cheer. Obviously heard on the other side, since we heard a faint response of a cheer from them.

(Made me wonder if in their distant proximity, I was as private as I thought myself to be, squatting over a fissure in the rockface, half-hidden behind a knobbly shrub.)

We slept soundly that night, though waking occasionally. I kept thinking we were going to roll off the side of the mountain. In fact, I shifted myself sometimes, with the feeling that the slant was compelling me in a direction I had no wish to go in. And when we awoke, it was to the rushing sound of the melting glacier, at the end of that fabulous blue-green lake below us.

The clear skies of the day before, that had made yesterday such an adventure, had given way, when we awoke, to a completely overcast, bruised sky, threatening to dump once again. We made another morning excursion after a good hefty breakfast of pancakes and tea, and mandarine oranges, scrambling over the rockface to find yet another rosy-crusted glacier. Returning to our camp site, with the threat of rain undiminished, we decided to break camp and descend.

As we descended the valley I felt good and brave and happy post-adventure, yet anxious anticipating the car-sized rocks at Shangri-La, the steep, narrow defile through the forest. The extent of my surprise (and deflation) cannot possibly be imagined as, halfway through Shangri-la we passed a young man with a paniered Labrador, then a family with two young children making their way up the mountain, happy in their enterprise.

How Canadian can you get?

Holding the Victim to Account for the Aggressor

Unity of mind is a reflection of primitive tribalism.

Episodes of human history rife with baldly profane 

acts of human moral indecency intrude on the public

consciousness that somewhere in the world

an atrocity has taken place of such undisguised

savagery that emerging details shock and disgust

even those with little sympathy for the victims

or the aggressors. The very evidence of sadistic

cruelty unsurpassed by the most warped mind in

barbaric rituals of mutilation, rape and butchery.

A matter of pride and jubilation to those exacting

terror and bloodshed who carefully record their

blood-curdling depravity in proof of their sworn

dedication to deliver death in any form and with

any tortuous embellishments to innocent people

whom vicious psychopaths deem fit for death.

Even so, as outcasts from civilizational norms the

greater community with whom they share bloodlines

stand foursquare in support of these proto-human

outcasts, flinging aside their own facades of civil

order and homage to human rights in a display of

mutual tribal loyalties while holding the victims

guilty of overreach in their existential response.

Revealing the raw reality of the thin veneer of

societal justice inherent in civilized communities.

The Radiant Light Post-Storm

For all her lofty indifference to the violent

cataclysms her unruly elements impose

on this planet Earth and their dire effects

in consequence to all living things there

are compensatory comforts that the Queen

of Creation offers to her offspring within

her raw realm of priceless surroundings

where peace and tranquility can be found

in the aftermath of a savage winter storm

where entire landscapes are softly muffed

and frozen in a tableau of incandescent beauty

inspiring awe and admiration for the calming

after the tempest in a serene choreography

of scintillating ethereal loveliness viewed

as transformative light where dark prevailed.

Desperately Seeking Rehabilitation

Primitive humanity launched a search through their

minds for a higher creative and moral intelligence 

that might lead them to an understanding of their place 

in creation. For surely a higher order of primary creation

was responsible for the mysterious beauty and threats 

that surrounded humanity as it strove to surmount the 

threats and appreciate the abundance that nature set 

before them inviting its use and enjoyment as humanity 

endured its long pathway to civilized existence. This 

is a story. It is not a fairy tale, nor a myth despite

the undying love and fascination the human mind

has for stories that elevate, educate and entertain. 

Stories that ideally, while winding their way through

the millennia of human existence promise a happy

ending. This story is in the throes of an undoing

with few prospects of a happy ending. It is a story

of a once-great nation comprised of its First Nations

and all those who arrived incrementally over time

to share its bounty and beauty. The inestimable

wonders of the nature of Nature's mountains and

prairies, woodlands and lakes, rivers and forests

of unsurpassed breadth and girth. One day, goes

our story, a mediocre presence of a sociopathic

narcissist who hated the country was elevated t o

its leadership and the once tranquil and placid

populace was transformed for among them newly

arrived malcontents brought a festering fire of hate

disrupting its cultural, political and social ethos 

from a disposition of tolerance and respect one for

the other, to a rancid, riotous realm of suspicious

intolerance, disruption and desecration of moral

and ethical values in a campaign of civil decay.

 

 

The Fullness of Time

When all else seems lost 

in the push and tug of time

the ebb and flow of our lives

there is left to us memory

and there are those treasured

albums not only in our minds

but those we so carefully

arrange chronologically as

photographs, an accounting

of joy and happiness when

fortune smiled and all was well.

Once young and vibrant

expectant and hopeful

living and loving our days

and finally arriving at the future

to discover the new reality

of deprivation when life turns

to loss and grief seeks proof

that happiness and the comfort

 of expanding time once

sweetly housed our dreams.

 

January Thaw

 

The Sky has rained frozen tears
for days, mourning the passage
of yet another year, bringing
us closer to old agedness.
How peculiar its empathy, for
we feel no such sorrow.

As we move through the woods
they too weep, but their grief
expresses their loss of twigs,
branches, limbs brought to
the snow-cushioned ground
with weight of snow and ice.

Tree trunks are glassed with ice
swaddling. The day mild enough
so droplets of melt move under
the ice sheathing like dark bugs
crawling down the trunk.

Finger-thick ice has brought
green boughs to utter decline
littering the forest floor. Above,
silently cruises the dark form
of a lonely crow. No wind, but
damp air and vanishing ice fog.

The sky, a bright pewter awning
has relented, halted its freezing
assault, and presents slivers of blue,
and there, the struggling sun. The
weeks-long frozen creek has
won its reprieve, runs free, burbling.

 

 

What If ... Really!

 

It has the status of being lodged in the minds

of those whose full faculty of cerebral function

has always been in doubt, so classify it as the

merest germ of a viral suspicion that a cabal

governing the greatest population on Earth, one

whose heritage and traditions reflect superior

facility in any and all indices of human innovation

where meritorious advance in the public sphere

recognized native intelligence, where the singular

art of superb craftsmanship has rarely been

equalled, all now harnessed to the ambition of

achieving power and influence at a global level

where the seated position of supreme unilateral

universal power lies in the comfortable possession

of a rival whom no ordinary efforts at unseating

can prevail. Why then, unleash the simple formula

of nature's insatiable silent and hidden threat of a

parasitic pestilence so intrusively dangerous and 

hungrily invasive it becomes a vector for  triumph 

through utter chaotic destabilization leading that 

sole power to vacate its throne and since nature 

abhors a vacuum it crooks its finger in beckoning

 the adversary to occupy the abandoned seat of 

power and influence it has so odiously earned.

 

The Depraved Savagery of a Death-Cult

Agony and anguish. Can those who joyfully perpetrate

brutal suffering on others disinherit themselves from 

the human race? Are they a breed apart where the drive 

to torment those whom they hate is bred in the bone 

and passed from one generation to the next of a people 

so proud of afflicting others with obscene levels of 

physical harm they delight in documenting the sadism

they excel at, savaging the  helpless, pridefully

demonstrating their singular skills in the rape of

girls and women while mutilating them before death 

rescues them, of torching homes with entire families 

charred unrecognizably, hacking off heads and body 

parts in a celebration of mass psychopathy while 

parading before a global audience the depravity of 

their social compact to destroy and annihilate. Crimes 

so extreme they happily exclude themselves from basic

civilized mores for the pleasure they take in their raw

exhibitionism of barbarism so intensely ravening

they make the case for the wronged to implacably

hunt them wherever they hide from well earned justice.

Palestinian Psychopathy in Our Midst

 

It's an old adage, but remains as true today

as it ever was since it is an introspection of

human nature that 'misery loves company'.

And these are certainly miserable people to 

be sure. Simpletons in a sense as simple and

single-focused entitled to their resentment as

victims as they do their very best to ensure that

everyone and anyone who shares their space

becomes a victim, too. Where complacency

and joy exist they enter in their noisy hordes

to disrupt and to rant and to threaten, these guests

who have installed, insinuated themselves and

infiltrated a generously courteous society that

hardly knows how to respond to their raucous

ill-mannered maliciousness. Their sheer numbers

within a society so unlike their own baffle the

very authorities that permitted their entry to a

peaceful country in the misbegotten belief they

would integrate and use newfound freedom to

improve their lot, not infect their host with hatred

and dissension, flouting laws and flaunting their

lawlessness, and so they remain at large, ugly

in disparaging all that is of value to the social 

compact while threatening and committing violent

acts of arson against symbols they associate with

their victimhood, the wider public bemused yet

not amused, slow to rouse to anger at this pollution

that celebrates terror while enacting its own with

impunity that would never be tolerated by the

very totalitarian regimes they parted company with.

Enraging the Lion of Judah

A normal society, one not steeped in a culture 

of victimhood and vengeance living a hostile 

fantasy creation of restoring to themselves a 

heritage that was never theirs, would have shrunk 

back in horror on hearing of the 'victory' their 

rulers imposed over another civilian population 

that became the object of a surprise invasion 

resulting in mass rapes, torture and mutilation

the incineration of entire families in their homes

innocents implacably shot to death as they ran in

terrified panic from armed marauders, but not they.

They cheered and jeered and lashed frightened

and wounded hostages bound like cords of wood

destined to be held as trading stock with a nation 

in shock and mourning for their dead and missing. 

Never did it occur to these vicious predators to

predict the wrath of judgement they brought upon

themselves when the nation they targeted for

death and ransom, hit back with a fury meant to

destroy potential for a repeat of sadistic savagery

leaving the once-exultant masses that chose to

heap praise on the barbarians pledged to kill

without end in mourning themselves at the loss

of their own security, their homes, their hopes.

 

Faux/Foul Palestinians

They are the very exemplar of a culture among

groups of humanity, negatively exceptional in

their ferocious identity as victims who despite that

victimhood expend inordinate energy on the 

malice that accompanies hatred on a scale seen

nowhere else. It is a transportable emotion of

failed humanity, for in their migration taking up

residence wherever they may they become the

scourge of any decent civilized society, a snarling

mass of displaced humanity yearning to reclaim

what they insist is rightfully theirs; perhaps not

so much an attachment to a heritage but a heritage

of spewing venomous slander and violent threats

toward the true inheritors of an ancient land by

an ancient people who will endure this noxious

threat as they have done others through the ages.

The Evil Among Us

Hope springs eternal, but then so too does hate.

In a world where history repeats itself endlessly

hate twinned with racism emerge together in

a bond of willing predators set to hunt and to

haunt those who have attracted malevolence

and the threats that accompany that malice

on its way to surging into an unstoppable tide

of lethal violence. Yet despite adversities and

dreadful loss the targets live on, hoping against

hope and experience that the tide will turn and the

deeply submerged yet readily emerged hate will

one day wear itself into oblivion allowing sanity to

prevail bringing an end to persecution of the other

the emotion-exhausting virulence of reviling

others' perceived differences replaced by a calm

of tolerant acceptance  transforming humanity

from the lower order of beasts, closer to the angels.

The Holocaust Years

In the Holocaust years when genocide was the

planned fate of Europe's Jews eradicated from the

face of the Earth with industrialized precision

the world turned away disinterested and quite

simply bored with Jews portraying themselves

as endlessly victimized throughout human

history. This eradication would fix the problem.

No Jews, no victims. And though desperate

refugees from impending death pleaded with the

world to save them from predatory death that

aura of detached disinterest remained intact 

in the reality that nowhere were they welcome.

Those who spoke earnestly, desperately favouring

saving orphaned Jewish children in transports

to safety were heard, and then unheard. In the

diaspora community of dispersed Jews fear

arose that if they were to appear too aggressive

in their anguish at the fate of Europe's Jews

they risked their tenuous acceptance elsewhere

as a matter of life-and-death on an unimaginable

scale commenced while they quietly went about a

campaign appealing to humanity residing smugly

within the population they were permitted to

live amongst that would do nothing in response.

The Sole Master Gardener

The gardens, muted of colour
form, texture, fragrance
are now a collapsed
architecture, delighting us
no longer as fall deepens
into garden-bleak winter.

Gone the thriving, brilliant
choreography, the boundless
exuberance of bulbs and tubers
bursting into flower, the shrubs
and fruit trees showering petals
transformed into luscious fruit.

The garden now is pallid,
exhausted, its summer audition
long past, the chorus of blooms
extinguished, no encores as the
final departure of leafy canopy
has descended echoing dismay.

The curtain is prepared now to fall.
The last bow and curtsy executed
as nature asserts sovereignty.
Casually deflects assumptions our
efforts reflected ownership
of carefully plotted, nurtured
triumphant gardenscapes.

There is no perpetuity here, merely
the gardener's eccentricity in believing
they exerted control over the order of
their gardening efforts. A brief, illusory
delusion, a borrowed vision, a hallowed
trust now returned to nature
and winter's ascendancy.

 

A Tale of Two Walls

Unexpectedly, spectacular in its bitter resolve
to remain there, squatting mercilessly
as the symbol of irreconcilability
it suddenly, miraculously imploded on itself
collapsing, leaving a host of dazzled,
confused, triumphant prisoners
to emerge, the light of freedom realized
settling into consciousness like the
heavens themselves revealed. Free at last.

Echoes of another, earlier release
from brutal bondage barely recognized,
memories of the living dead released
from death camps. How precise is this irony
that the murderously irenic-averse
population complicit with the annihilation
of the pestilential Jews among them
suffered themselves a dim shadow of the
relentlessly mortal agony of official genocide.

The cleansing of the community,
the nation, the continent and ultimately
the world, of the existence of predatory
power-assertive, controlling Jews.
Shakespeare would have thrilled to
this moral dilemma, the bleak humour,
the black destiny, the upheaval
and the clever disposal of so many
throwaway lives, from infants to
three-legged doddering babblers.

Yet another anniversary; that which presaged
the cruel turmoil, the incessant slaughter
signified by shards of gleaming glass, goes
yet unacknowledged. There are the usual
preliminary dark clouds gathering on the
endless horizon of man's inhumanity to its own.
Another Kristallnacht abetted by the demonic
slander that soils the atmosphere. Perish
the very thought! But all the symptoms, the
signposts point unerringly there.

The dissenters - all those whose livid hatred
of surviving world Jewry become now citizens
of their very own land, their sovereign country -
speak of their own truth; their resurgent bigotry
has found its very own theme to augment
The Protocols, with another wall of desperation.
This one separating not a single nation with
polarizing ideologies, but two separate nations
one of which designs to obliterate the other
while proclaiming itself the sad victim, the
other the evil damned-by-acclamation occupier.