ISRAEL GOES GAZA, SIT IT OUT

USED TO BE HUMAN
©Don Brennan

When did ennui lope from the audience onto center stage, become the lynch pin for human affection, replace the heart with a faulty blood pump, grind stones into knife points for lust’s consummation?

When did we invent “those people”, the ones who don’t deserve to live, and when did slavery become a good idea, a pathway to comfort and wealth, to a higher standard of exploitation?

When did we learn to betray the trust of ancestors, to scorn our children’s fate, to delight in universal pain, to take pride in the enemy’s body count?

When did we learn to displace our humanity and to fill the consequent void with shame?


SIT OUT
©Don Brennan

Guess I’d like to sit a while, turn my thoughts to places beyond the moon, to places beneath the brain’s membranes

Where the powerful are less ugly, where blood flows to nourish life not eliminate it

Someplace outside the lunar circle where Gaza’s screams are finding their way through the void

As though the nebulae might know of other ways to define compassion

I’d like to sit this out a while

Out in the streets in the center of rush hour traffic would be good, nebulous thought lost in irate blaring horns, screeching brakes

Anything to drown out Gaza screaming, Congo tears, Iraqi rage, Afghanistan gasping for her final breath,

Sit it out in the streets, no more marching, just sit, hands joined, all of us humanists engaged in a global sit out.

POST MODERN NATURE WALK

THE CLEARING
©Don Brennan

One comes upon them often
opening the canopy

making way for daylight
to dance upon rocks, for

deer and mice to poke noses
out of tree trunk shelter,

allowing rabbits to cavort,
fawns to celebrate their youth.

Mothers anxiously hesitate as
eagles circle downward
preparing to dive.

This particular clearing in a
forest under attack is pocked

by stumps and piles of bare
bulldozed tire tracked earth

The doe hangs back in shadow
keeping, her fawn at her side.

Daylight’s dance is lethargic, the
eagle remains high.

Rabbits, even mice, stay away.




three poems by deborah wenzel




the flower


tearing it apart

leaf by

leaf


i look for

the answer



and discover


it isn't


there.




untitled


in so many ways, i feel a fool to the world.

but, at the same time, i feel i could help.

how does one reconcile?

there is so much i feel i could do.




perfume



only the perfume from this flower

lingers in the air.

i am a buddha sitting in the cool shade

of this hidden garden.

my circles ripple out,

they are sleeping in the sun.







© deborah wenzel

Mark Twain's War Prayer

WAR PRAYER (excerpt) by Mark Twain, 1904, during the war against The Phillipines.

O Lord our Father, our young patriots, idols of our hearts, go forth to battle -- be Thou near them! With them -- in spirit -- we also go forth from the sweet peace of our beloved firesides to smite the foe. O Lord our God, help us to tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it -- for our sakes who adore Thee, Lord, blast their hopes, blight their lives, protract their bitter pilgrimage, make heavy their steps, water their way with their tears, stain the white snow with the blood of their wounded feet! We ask it, in the spirit of love, of Him Who is the Source of Love, and Who is the ever-faithful refuge and friend of all that are sore beset and seek His aid with humble and contrite hearts. Amen.

FRAGMENT FROM
THE MEXICO CITY
ZOCALO
© Don Brennan

nameless shaman
burning sage up

unnamed
nasal highways

into what remains
of brains

left too long away
from flirting sunlight

fleeting twilight
sage and midnight

left too long needing
soft desert winds

the whiff of sage scent
on a soul search

swirling peace
understanding

sacred smoke
on a mission

a healing mission
seducing demons

convincing evil
to be kind

to curl up as in
the womb again

convincing evil to
let go of itself

seducing demons
to rise with the smoke

to rise towards
compassion.


DALAI LAMA, half-Marxist
Quoted from the Wikipedia article: The Fourteenth Dalai Lama (under the heading, “Economics”):


“Of all the modern economic theories, the economic system of Marxism is founded on moral principles, while capitalism is concerned only with gain and profitability. Marxism is concerned with the distribution of wealth on an equal basis and the equitable utilization of the means of production. It is also concerned with the fate of the working classes—that is, the majority—as well as with the fate of those who are underprivileged and in need, and Marxism cares about the victims of minority-imposed exploitation. For those reasons the system appeals to me, and it seems fair. I just recently read an article in a paper where His Holiness the Pope also pointed out some positive aspects of Marxism.

“As for the failure of the Marxist regimes, first of all I do not consider the former USSR, or China, or even Vietnam, to have been true Marxist regimes, for they were far more concerned with their narrow national interests than with the Workers' International; this is why there were conflicts, for example, between China and the USSR, or between China and Vietnam. If those three regimes had truly been based upon Marxist principles, those conflicts would never have occurred.

“I think the major flaw of the Marxist regimes is that they have placed too much emphasis on the need to destroy the ruling class, on class struggle, and this causes them to encourage hatred and to neglect compassion. Although their initial aim might have been to serve the cause of the majority, when they try to implement it all their energy is deflected into destructive activities. Once the revolution is over and the ruling class is destroyed, there is not much left to offer the people; at this point the entire country is impoverished and unfortunately it is almost as if the initial aim were to become poor. I think that this is due to the lack of human solidarity and compassion. The principal disadvantage of such a regime is the insistence placed on hatred to the detriment of compassion.

“The failure of the regime in the former Soviet Union was, for me, not the failure of Marxism but the failure of totalitarianism. For this reason I still think of myself as half-Marxist, half-Buddhist.”

IRAQ, AFGHANISTAN, PAKISTAN, PALESTINE ...

CAUGHT PRAYING
© Don Brennan

Now you’ve caught me
in the thistle patch
listening at your church’s
door to your dead hearts’
thumping rage against those
whom you say trespass
against you.

Caught you offering innocence
to a violent God, take, eat these
infidel blown-apart children
whom we chew up in your holy
name, spitting out the pieces at
the Almighty’s stinking feet.

Prayers? Mere orgasmic shadows
rising from shameful altars in
cluster bomb clouds
blood lust and greed,
bigotry and hate,

Our enemy’s bodies piling up
to Heaven, halleluiah
in the names of the
In-God-We-Trust-USA.

BAIL OUT THIS

POINTED QUESTIONS FOR WALL STREET
© Don Brennan

When did you become anxiety’s answer to every question, a deity in bare feet, no rings, waiting to be kissed on your hairy knuckle?

When did you rise upon your toes shaking inflamed eye-sockets, hands pushed down in our pockets demanding retribution?

Flesh will do as well as chicken wings or a pound of cash dripping grease from crippled hearts struggling to pump their last bits of blood in your direction.

Just when did you mistake your crumbling liver for a death’s head’s bleached bone, the empty infested hole where your nose used to be for power over me?

So your greed has forever been my nemesis born of breath’s contractions, since we were born together at time’s beginning.

But we both know time has no beginnings, has never had to sniff down hound dog trails looking for purposes and ends, we both know.

But you alone know why you need to lie, need your dose to get high, why you need to remain insane, not I.

Inaugural Jitters

AIN’T BEEN THIS HAPPY
© Don Brennan

Now I know why
the greater good
has been keeping me
alive all these years so

I’d be here to see
Obama win that thing

Be here to hear a
political speech by a
Democrat that
I’ve been able to
believe since Bobby
Kennedy George
McGovern and Jesse
Jackson were sealed off

Ain’t we so tired of
liars and cowards, ain’t
we happy now for
intelligence, compassion
and courage for a
change in a nation’s
history.

A change in a nation’s
direction into the four
directions, slouching
towards democracy.



BORDER PATROL
© Don Brennan

A few unnoticed kids
playing beside a dusty road

A couple of men in jeans and
work boots amble by, talk loud
about the God damned Mexicans

Some stuff how they keep coming
take jobs and welfare, God damn.

Two girls and three boys playing
on a back road a few miles
north of the border

Two light skinned, three dark
laughing, acting silly as
eight or nine or ten year olds
left to themselves

Scratching and digging at dry dirt
with sticks outside a small house
while somebody’s mother
fixes lunch.

God damned unnoticed
children all hearing clearly
the curse of the passersby.




DON’T RELAX
© Don Brennan

don’t relax and let your
sadness die, curl up
in your heart like
something familiar

a Pakistani child
too exhausted from
loss of blood
to ever smile again

an Afgani family
blown apart by drone

remote trigger
brain splattered remains

too exhausted by death
to run for cover

Iraqi civilians
shot down every day
for being
Iraqi civilians

don’t relax
don’t let your sadness
die

to putrefy inside
the heart that is
your mind.

THE SECOND COMING by W.B. YEATS

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

POEMS FOR THE NEW PREZ

AS WE CONTINUE

we who work
lifetime after lifetime

who learn poverty
learn daily struggle
generation after
generation

we who love ourselves
and our descendants
as our ancestors loved us

slaving in rich men’s
fields, taking their beatings
our beatings

taking their exile
our exile

we who work to survive
will be ready

when our children are
again allowed to play

to return home

for we continue to refuse
to be exiled
lifetime after lifetime
from the Earth.

-DON BRENNAN


MINING THE WRECKAGE 092608

Each day we search the rubble, picking away at
dusty bricks, broken boards, our work gloves
long since shredded, our hands too calloused now
for shallow bleeding.

We are the world’s working classes mining what
hope we are able to find among the wreckage
delivered daily in explosions from heavy guns
mounted by maniacs on top of armored trucks.

Each day we throw aside the broken and useless
bits that have been ripped from our lives, and
from the pieces left intact we put together what
will work for the future, for a future when the
fools’ empires have finally collapsed.

© Don Brennan