Just yesterday, an airline lost almost a billion dollars in share value after it beat up a paying passenger because he refused to leave a seat he'd already paid for to make room for spare airline employees. Then, Eric Trump, the inconvenient, inadvertent truth-teller in a family of pathological liars, told a reporter that the President of the United States sent 59 missiles flying into a Syrian airbase because Ivanka, his much-too-beloved daughter, felt sadness over photos of dead children and told him to do something--and, Eric added, this should prove that his dad, the President, is not beholden to Russia. And finally, on this first full day of Passover, Sean Spicer, the presidential press secretary, said Hitler never used chemical weapons--at least, not against his own people--well, against innocent people--no, he meant against his own innocent people in their homes because he took them off to Holocaust Centers to gas them.
And yesterday was a light day in the dark news department, compared to what has happened lately. Oh, I almost forget in the press of the other dumpster fires, also yesterday, we saw for the first time the FISA warrant obtained against Carter Page, foreign policy adviser to Donald Trump's campaign, stating that the FBI had reasons that the FISA court found credible to believe Page was a Russian spy.
When we have possible Russian spies running our government, determined efforts to destroy said democratic government, and a President who wants to become an actual dictator and is rapidly stripping away our rights and protections against that, we live in dark, dark times. In the words of beloved children's book author, Susan Cooper, "The dark is rising." We have never needed National Poetry Month more. So here is a poem for the dark times.
BLESSING
FOR THE DARK TIMES
Creator
reminds us daily
through
the fragrant winds,
the
re-leafing trees,
the
dark-of-morning bird chorus,
the
taste of rain on upheld faces,
that
this world was built in beauty,
made
for harmony and wholeness.
We
must remember
it
is we humans
who
break what is shining and whole.
It
is our species that creates dark times.
We
must learn to live
in
tune with creation once more. We must sing
balance
back into this bountiful earth.
As
we work together
to
mend the broken world—
against
the forces among our own kind
choosing
destruction over grace—
may
we keep in our imaginations
the
ancestral memory
of
this world as it was created to be.
May
we will it into existence
again.
May we move always toward healing
and
wholeness. May we never forget
the
force of willed action
and
words of power.
May
we create a blessed light
in
these dark times in which we find ourselves.
May
we know
deep
inside our bones
that,
no matter how broken,
our
world is always
worth
the labor of mending.
©
Linda Rodriguez 2017
Thank you for the poem, Linda. It gives me hope. I want to print it out and read it as a prayer whenever I feel overwhelmed by the news of the day. We each CAN make a difference.
ReplyDeleteDeb Romano
DebRo, I'm a big believer in hope. And yes, the news tends to be overwhelming anymore. So we need that hope even more. xoxoxo
ReplyDelete