The Night of the Shooting Star

In this mid August night
Enrobed in wool
Wholly surrendered to gravity against the earth
I watch in the dark sky
Shooting stars coming alive
Each meteor begging for attention
One I follow from birth to extinction
Says to me:
"I am but a speck of light
in the vast expanse of your vision.
Why do you pay attention to me?"

I cling to the uniqueness of my star
As others display equal if not superior spectacle
To the underdog of pyrotechnics
And I make a wish that

You, the unlucky winner of fewer summers
in the lottery of life

You, who take an uneasy step every day
on a fallen staircase

You, beautiful one, robbed of your youth
be my star. Let me try to pass you

The olympic torch and hope that
one day you will run and illuminate
the sky.

Until then I replay the memory of
The night of the shooting stars in mid August.

Thoughts on the Anniversary of Hiroshima

note: I read this at an open mic and it started a controversy about the justification of the bombing on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. So I failed to raise our consciousness to the level of what it means to be human and at either end of weapons. My personal opinion is that all weapon manufacturing, small and large, should be stopped and made illegal by all countries. Take that for a controversy. I'm sure many men will scoff at the idea, as they usually do, since they've been brainwashed from birth that one should have more weapons than the neighbors in case they used theirs. What happened to talking about our differences? What happened to trying to understand events under a different light?

Peace,
Guy

Thoughts on the Anniversary of Hiroshima

On August 6, 1945, this child’s sixth birthday
Never happened, erased from all memory
Records pulverized by a gigantic mushroom
The fungus on humanity’s foot
As it continues trampling on
Principles, teachings, evolution
As it continues spreading the seeds
Of hatred under engineered flowers
So pretty, so noble, so smart.

Sixty years later it is history
Lessons not learned
Our daily sufferings far superior
To that of others
We play God and establish dominion
We pronounce final judgment
We rehearse the end of the world
And expect a daily prayer
From those in the shadow
Where gigantic mushrooms can grow.

What Will We Do About It?

They say we replay forever in our minds
The rules learned in the first six years of our lives
The mother of all mantras, like a broken record
Images of your first fears
Seen through your first tears
Adults standing by
Deciding whether you will love or hate
Be selfish or generous
Withdrawn or outgoing
A poet or a politician
Observing chaos or causing it
An innocent bystander or a perpetrator.

Now we sit on the edge of chaos
And the voices say, “do nothing, you cannot do anything about chaos, you don’t know how to deal with chaos.”
Do we stand up, or submit?

Crafty discourse rides on the mother of all mantras, expecting complacency and extinguishing all growth of conscience, as if we were six years old.

This could be our collective age
A society unable to learn
Stuck in its fears and instincts
What will we do about it?