Covenant

Surely, from some other place
a world never imagined, they
came across the endless ocean
to see and covet this land of our
ancestors. They are powerful,
their armies surpass our warriors
in weapons and strategies unknown
to us. They bring gifts to show their
peaceful intentions, yet when we
spurn them, their faces are grim
and the sticks they carry threaten.
Their King sends his greetings.
Such proclamations are explained
to our chiefs and our elders, in
assurance of how they honour us
and wish to live alongside us on
the land, without strife. They wish
to farm our traditional hunting
grounds, and to log our forests and
to mine the land. They assure us
that care will be taken to allocate
reserves of land - our land - only to
us alone, where no white man may
intrude. We have only to sign here,
with a mark, and it is done. Yes,
they avow recognition of our first
place here, for this is our land, and
we will freely agree to share this land.
Some among us whisper the white
man speaks with a crooked tongue,
even the King who says he will give
us money and good health and
educate our young in his ways.
Some say the white man conspires
to trick us and take our land.

Growing Up

There's that emotional conflict
when a grandmother is confronted
with her grandchild's inexorable
loss of childhood. The infant she
helped raise is now indisputably
growing into adulthood. One
knows that to be so, for she has
announced that when she visits
she would like her hair professionally
cut and styled, and a visit to La Senza
is also in the works for bras to
be properly fitted to her size.
But the child is not yet gone.

For, she asks, please, to have her baby
blankie, please, please, mended. And
when it is recommended she mend it
herself she says she cannot, and this
time she would be pleased to thread
the needle, grandma, so ... please?
After it's washed, then, growls the
grandmother to the child's undisguised
horror, for washing the threadbare
memento of childhood would most
certainly cause total, irrevocable
disintegration. Grandma, please!

There Be Dragons

Once, upon a time when the
Earth was flat, and the horizon
led to a dangerous tipping point
where sailing vessels ran the risk
of slipping over the edge of the
known world into a vast dark
fearful vacuum of nothingness
to be forever lost, dropping past
an eternity into the unrelenting
void, it was common knowledge
that dragons, you know, lingered
here, and there, where human
settlement was not known to
exist. Those dragons, so to speak
- and we shall - are there, still -
and are here, as well, lurking,
biding their ancient time. The
Earth, we may feel, we now have
settled, and know full well, in its
rotund geology, but its companions,
nature and time, remain mysterious
forces humankind's curiosity and
ingenuity have yet still not managed
to accurately decipher. Those
dragons, in the guise of conflict,
pestilence, natural upheavals, and
climate catastrophes remain,
untamed, threatening, forbidding;
lethally shunning futile pacification.

Lonely Planet

Life is a heavy burden, a tired
succession of heart stops on
the journey to despair for too
many who began their passage
believing it would be otherwise.
They recognized at various
bends in the road a challenge,
an opportunity and rose, they
felt, to the occasion. Sometimes
the occasion slipped right by,
leaving the disbelievingly
incredulous survivor adrift.

They struggled forward, ever
determined to grasp new promises,
but those too, fate grasped from
their eager fingers. Yet the bereaved
hand remained an open appeal,
pleading with the spirit not to
surrender. We see these weary souls
around us, mechanical smile, blank,
uncomprehending eyes, faces
creased in the desperation of
empty existence, hungry for notice.

Their need so raw it cannot
be a mystery. There is little to be
done for no one can unravel a life
lived without joy. But little will
also herald the brief relief that
acknowledgement brings, with
inclusiveness. A welcome, however
brief and mere facade will still
reassure, found in a greeting of
genuine gladness, a sincere smile,
a lingering conversation, and an
acquaintance's fond hug, whether
physical or inherently implied.

Familiar Voices

The hills are alive with the
flash of small furry creatures
in action; black, in reflection
of the forest of tree trunks
darkly gleaming after freezing
rain; grey, refracting the dense
pewter of the winter sky, and
rufous, resembling the pine
needle-strewn trails they
excitedly converge upon.

This shortest day of the year,
calendar onset of the Winter
Solstice, demands they make the
most this shortest day of the year,
of scant daylight hours and frigid
snowy-filled weather yet to come.
And they, hearing familiar voices,
respond with alacrity to quotidian
opportunity carried along for
dispersal in predetermined cache
spots of select, delectable peanuts.

Holiday Cheer

It is a heritage tradition so richly
splendid, embroidered by faith
in the divine, sacrifice in the
embrace of all humanity, a tapestry
of exquisitely psalmodic chant and the
sumptuous colour and architectural
design of nature's green festooned
with gold and silver, velvet maroons
and brilliant lights, rivalling the
glorious sparkle of the firmament.

Children are entranced by the
bewitching glitter, sparkle and sound;
in their millions, soft voices raised in
familiar yearly refrains, awaiting the
presence of a familiar, kindly stranger,
just visiting, leaving behind for their
discovery symbols of his sweet regard.

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Repeated ad infinitum over the
millennia, the tradition remains ever
new, a true excitement of the senses,
and for many a joyous affirmation
of belief in the miracle of life and
happiness, if but for the space of
that short, scintillating season.

Yet hope, like nature's timeless
returns of the seasons, does spring
eternal. And when life seems bleakly
and uncompromisingly miserable,
the days short and dark and inclement,
to some, comfort is born. Belief has
that saving aptitude to blot despair.

The season's brief grace, however,
it is well to acknowledge, plunges
those without recourse to sharing
belief, friends and family, just a
trifle deeper into their lonely lives
of fortitude and endurance. Until such
time as the will no longer endures.

The Ethos of Jihad

A masked Hamas militant kisses freed Palestinian prisoner Mahawish al Qadi, left, who was involved in organizing the abduction of Israeli soldier Gilad Schalit, in Rafah, southern Gaza Strip, Wednesday, Oct. 19, 2011. Tens of thousands of flag-waving Palestinians celebrated the homecoming of hundreds of prisoners exchanged for an Israeli soldier on Tuesday, with the crowd and a freed Hamas leader exhorting militants to seize more soldiers for future swaps. Photo: Tara Todras-Whitehill / AP

Truly, the profound mysteries
of the human mind can be
dreadfully confounding
with little basis in rational
consideration. For, consider
the awful declaration of
some among the hordes of
humanity of death-adoration.

These strange minds insist
on the ineffable value in death
for by this device may they
achieve their soul's desire;
martyrdom. In martyrdom
there is immortality for, they
imagine to live forever adored
by nubile angels in paradise.

Martyrdom, they reason
unreasonably, achievable only
by sacrificing other lives to
their deathly ambitions, who
happen, not by chance, not to
share the illusions of the death
appeal. Death, to the assassins
in-the-name-of-the-divine, is
sweeter than life to them.

Just as life is dearer than
death to those hapless victims
the jihadists select for mutually
jubilant annihilation. And another
conundrum raises its profoundly
odd and querulous head in the
enigma of those exalted clerics
who urge death upon martyrs.

Who stand above the bloody fray
themselves while interpreting the
holy word writ by God's hand alone
yet remain themselves strangely
invested with the will to defy death's
personal invitation; struggling to
fend off its generously fulsome,
morbidly unwelcome overtures.