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.