Be Open

 

Be Open

We’re driven not by reason but

By instincts and by feelings, yet

Our reason helps us on our way

And guards us from the snare and net.

And how can instincts, feelings work

When hearts have hardened or are dead,

And eyes and ears are closed to all

Except the comfort-views we're fed?

******

And how can caring, justice thrive

When hatred makes us deaf and blind,

Ignoring pleas, believing lies,

And shutting down the heart and mind?

Question, question what you know,

And turn away from comfort-news.

Resist the laziness of mind.

Be open, yes, to facts and views.

******

Beware the call, resist the urge

To demonize or deify—

To make supreme a god, a race,

A culture or to glorify

A nation or a class, or lift 

On high religion, custom, creed, 

A system of economy,

Or justify the wars of greed.

******

Do recognize what evil is.

Resist the call to turn to hate,

To cast the others down, despise,

Subdue, oppress, exterminate.

No god needs help from humans and

No creed needs other views suppressed,

Except the god or creed that fears

What might, by humans, be expressed.

******

We tend to worship those “above”

And spit upon the ones “below”.

Beware the virus that infects 

And leads to thoughts of “high” and “low”.

Beware of leaders! Be not led

Except by sanity of head

And purity of heart. Be open.

Live, until you're truly dead.

2024 March 14th, Thu.

Berkeley, California

Barking Dogs

 
Barking Dogs

We’ve bred our dogs to bark, so they
Alert us; trained them to obey.
But this has made some infantile.
And humans too, we’ve made this way.

How many might the layers be
That form the full reality!
Impatiently, we skim—and judge. 
What lies beneath, we rarely see.

How easy, then, with swift surmise,
To demonize—and heroize!
Ignoring all that's intertwined
Has led us long on paths unwise.

******

There is, around us, misery—
That’s plain enough for all to see—
That’s caused by being in a rush—
Not taking time to pause—and be.

For if we did, we’d realize,
Perhaps at first with some surprise,
Our “demons” and our “heroes”, both,
Are naught but us—when stripped of lies.

We need not take the gangster’s side,
Nor cast the victim’s pleas aside.
We each should act, with full resolve,
Yet know there’s more than just a side.

****** 

To better see then, in the round,
What other ways have seers found?
I cannot say. Some delve within;
Some harken to the softest sound.

In times of peril, beings act—
But even then, there’s still the fact
That guidance comes from sight—and not 
From blind obedience to a tract.

The calls of prophets, ideologues—
Are somewhat like the calls of frogs.
So music too can touch the soul—
And yet be used to rouse the dogs.

2023 March 25th, Sat.
Berkeley, California

The Darkness of Noon

The Darkness of Noon

Bow to the ones who are rich, my friends!
Kneel for the ones who have goons on call.
These are the gods of our times, my friends.
Toil at the feet of our Pharaohs tall.

The human race is a servile one,
For those who had pride are dead and gone,
Except for the ones who have clearly won.
They straddle the land that we are on.

******

Gone are the ones who had striven and died.
Lost are the causes for which they fought.
Rich are the ones who had stolen and lied.
Poor are the sons of the men who rot.

The mothers had wailed and the daughters had wept,
But who can remember the reason they did?
The truths are forgotten, the falsehoods are left.
The darkness has gathered, the moon has been hid.

******

When will the clouds and the dark be dispersed?
Where is the courage and where is the truth?
Where is the learning with which we were versed?
When will the trodden be rid of the boot?

The ones who are workers can gather and rise,
And bring down the ones who have risen on high,
But first they should strive to be wary and wise,
To sift what is left of the truth from the lie.

******

Strive then, oh worker, to question and learn!
Learn to distinguish the fine from the dross.
Then you will see that your sense will return.
Then there’s a chance you’ll recover your loss.

You never will bow then to those who are rich.
Your knee will not bend for the lord or his goon.
The humble will smile, as you know which is which.
The Pharaohs will see then the darkness of noon.

2018 May 19th, Sat.
Brooklyn, New York
 

A Space Exists

A Space Exists
 
Between the push and pull of fear, desire,
A space exists for wisdom, peace and love.
And in this space the waves of grief and joy
And all emotions, thoughts can come and go.

And yet, beneath those surface waves, there still
Remains a zone that's calm and unperturbed—
For currents strong may roil below the waves,
But there are depths in which we still are free.

But when we try to hold, preserve, maintain
The transient joys, entrapped by fear, desire,
We bring then woes upon our heads and those
Of others, losing sense and sanity.

And see—we’ve built ourselves a monstrous world
That runs on fear and greed, and so is fraught
With all the evils that the two, conjoined,
Engender, wreaking madness, mayhem, woe.

The vices that have long been recognized
Are seen as virtues, virtue viewed as vice.
Until such views reverse, we won’t regain
That space in which to breathe and see again.

We cannot know what happens far away,
Or even in our city or next door,
Except from what we’re fed—that filtered feed
That’s then polluted by the feeders’ views.

And so we each are more and more entrapped.
We’re caught, conditioned; then, as zombied slaves,
We race upon the tracks that power the mills
Of Mammon that are grinding all to dust.
 
And though the tools exist, for some at least,
To see beyond the bounds of space and time,
So many still are blinkered in their views,
As goads, incitements work to steer the herds.
 
What hope exists, except that each can still
Attempt to shed these strong constraints of view?
No liberator comes; no hope exists
Except from what we each can try to do.

No revolution can succeed until
We see the wheel that each is turning too.
No evolution towards a saner world
Can be, without that pivot each must do.
 
A space exists between the push and pull
Of fear, desire, in which our vision clears.
To clear that space of snares and clutter, we
Can labor, with our grants of strengths and years.

We each can try, in small and humble ways,
To change the world that all of us have built.
It isn’t god or nature that dictates
What humans do. Our minds are snared and trained.
 
Without the promise that we will succeed,
Without the premise that the work is light,
We each can labor, breathing deeply, while
We work from darkness towards the hope of light.

There is the outer world and that within,
And each affects the other in its turn.
There is a little sphere that pens us each—
But in ourselves the bounds are ours to reach.

We can’t control what happens in this world,
We can’t foresee the future, yet we each
Can still enjoy, within ourselves, that peace
Residing in that space that each can clear.

No matter what tomorrow takes or gives,
No matter what the past has done or been,
There’s still the moment that we’re granted now
In which to turn towards dark or towards the light.

2016 August 25th, Thu.
Brooklyn, New York
  

Slowing Can’t Be Right

 
Slowing Can’t Be Right 

How much of all our suffering is due
To speeding when we should be going slow?
We work and eat and couple now at speed
And rarely notice all the harm we do.

So some can thrive, with sense and conscience stilled,
While others suffer from their actions or
Perceive the things that go unheeded while
We're busy rushing through our hectic lives.

******
 
We live our lives of loneliness and fear
And seek our consolations where we can.
The sun may rise, the little birds may sing
And yet we sleep or go to work in dread.

We live in isolation, torn apart
By all the tempests blowing through our lives:
The storms of Nature and the works of Man—
What others do and what we do ourselves.

We’ve lost the arts of tolerance and fun.
We turn away from relatives and friends
And seek our entertainment and our worth
In things and places distant from our earths.

We learn to race, forgetting how to slow.
We spend our lives acquiring knowledge, things—
While losing wisdom and that freedom true
Of living like the ones still human do.

You’ll find them in the forests and the hills,
In regions far removed, on arctic ice
And in the places of the scorching sun,
Beleaguered now as they are pushed to die.

They do as belly and as conscience bids.
They live and die in goodly company.
They have no money. Their possessions, they
Can carry on their backs as lightest weight.

They pay no rent to landlords or to banks.
They answer to no bosses, being free.
There is, among them, neither “high” nor “low”.
They’re born, they smile and weep, and then they go.

And some might say that I romanticize
The lives of those that dwell in poverty.
But I reply, “What wealth could ever buy
The gems of love and of sincerity?”

And others still might say, “We disagree.
We would not trade our lives for such as these.
Besides, there isn’t room, upon this Earth,
To live as once we did, in misery.”

So each may view the grass that’s distant as
Of greener hue or less than that beneath.
And we might say, “The world is changing, so
We cannot now remain as once we were.”
 
But should we then surrender to the flow
That takes us where some others want us to?
Or should we say, “We still are beings free,
Who choose our lives to be as they could be?”

******

The one that halts, when all around stampede,
Might well be trampled on—and even die.
But when the wiser start to slow and turn,
We slowly could return to clarity.

The question is, “Will sanity prevail
Before our madness breeds catastrophe?
And some might say, “We’re told that’s happened, yet
We do not slow, for slowing can’t be right.”

2015 August 30th, Sun., 3:28 pm
(first two stanzas added Sep. 2nd, Wed.)
Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York
   

On Human Nature

On Human Nature  (Draft)
  
  

Human Evolution
http://philosophicaldisquisitions.blogspot.com/2011/10/is-there-connection-between-human.html

If we would praise our species’ virtues, then
we can’t be silent on its vices.  Those
who’re blind to one or other might portray
the human race as one of angels or
of devils—yet the truth is in between.

We’ve made our gods in human likeness and
our demons too are modeled on ourselves.
Perhaps these are in all that lives, and yet
we see them clearest in our closest tribe—
the one that’s human, touched by grace and sin.

We even die for others. So do ants.
But humans can transcend the bounds of kin
and even species—much as dogs might do.
We’re not unique—and yet this quality
of sacrifice of self’s a sainted thing.

And yet we murder, pillage, torture, rape—
as other species do, except we’ve moved
to make these things our hallmarks. We will kill
for no good reason, using devilish means.
We’ve laid to waste a planet, with a shrug.

So—gods or devils?  Sainted angels or
a demon's spawn of scoundrels? We are both.
Though surely what’s in us must be, in part,
in other species too, our qualities
of evil, unrestrained, are perilous.

It’s said that humans reason. Yet our hearts
are swayed too easily by passions and
our heads are addled by assumptions false.
We rarely question those we follow, as
we move in mobs and ape our conquerors.

And yet our human nature still remains
the thing we have to work with. That is all.
No theory that exalts a class or race
above another or assigns it blame
will hold if we inspect its basic claims.

And those who say that we should educate,
uplift the masses—they forget that they
are often as misled or more than those
they seek to “raise”.  Let other beings be.
Look to yourself, if you would dare to see.
 
2015 August 19th, Wed., 10:55 pm
Bensonhurst, Brooklyn, New York 
    

Fun
http://authordebliv.authorsxpress.com/2012/06/01/human-nature-life-connection/