POETIC JUSTICE: humanity

Showing posts with label humanity. Show all posts

AVOIDABLE

We are all walking these streets
Under our own abysmal verdict.
Frequently we hear that we’re faced
by avoidable contamination. We’ve heard it before,
that we must breed our skin apart from those others
until our masks are solid and chaste,
irremovable, useless. Force the skin’s hue down,
imprison our colors on the nomadic streets.

We need be single-minded to form our face
into the perfect color of a perverted truth;
this evolution is ugliest now,
storming its infection across the world.

We’re walking the streets, the roads,
the twisting spheres bending away; humanity
begging we refuse this council, this deception. One
stride on this earth, one long, delightful use of man;
animal, dying now, ready to live. Our fuel’s the blood
Under our skin, our reckless mind, the contagion.

Understand this; our progression has long commenced.
We cannot forgo its breathing revolution.
We cannot, from its rise, ourselves remove.
O! It will thrash our sticks and stones,
and turn its heaven away from our brutality,
away from our bigotry, our war, our contempt of evolution,
until we dissolve our masks and flee our unbending dreams!

O we need make our pulse in the unknown.
We are the pollen that dropped from the same flower,
eyeless and frightened.
Our worthless dread,
motionless souls,
splintered hearts,
cagey minds,
thrashed hopes,
derelict empathy,
throttled voices,
parading our death
over scorched noises.

Maybe we’re not walking the streets and roads...
maybe we’re being carried by the wind?

Rolling along "J"...
Jade Gate
Jakester Express
Jesus Was Not a Republican
Jonestown - Joshing Politics
Journeys with Jood
June Revolution
Just Ain't Right

LAST LOOK

(A Poetic Justice Photomontage)

BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- The images in the Basra police file are nauseating: Page after page of women killed in brutal fashion -- some strangled to death, their faces disfigured; others beheaded. All bear signs of torture.

The women are killed, police say, because they failed to wear a headscarf or because they ignored other "rules" that secretive fundamentalist groups want to enforce.

"Fear, fear is always there," says 30-year-old Safana, an artist and university professor. "We don't know who to be afraid of. Maybe it's a friend or a student you teach. There is no break, no security. I don't know who to be afraid of."

Her fear is justified. Iraq's second-largest city, Basra, is a stronghold of conservative Shia groups. As many as 133 women were killed in Basra last year -- 79 for violation of "Islamic teachings" and 47 for so-called honor killings, according to IRIN, the news branch of the U.N.'s Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs.

"When I came to Basra a year ago," he says, "two women were killed in front of their kids. Their blood was flowing in front of their kids, they were crying. Another woman was killed in front of her 6-year-old son, another in front of her 11-year-old child, and yet another who was pregnant."...

...After the fall of Saddam Hussein in 2003, Sawsan says, the situation was "the best." But now, she says, it's "the worst."
"We thought there would be freedom and democracy and women would have their rights. But all the things we were promised have not come true. There is only fear and horror."

LAST LOOK
a poem by thepoetryman

They scatter me over the solemn ground.
They wipe my death on the walls before my child’s eyes.
My body is lifted from me and never returned.
My eyes move to my child as the soil swallows my limbs.

This; my death, pays no tribute,
Serves no purpose,
Only brings my child to hatred.
Maybe that’s it-
Teach children to kill; vengeance;
One tormentor spent, sold for oil;
This won’t wash away to befall something better.

I descend with a last look at my child,
Eyes swathed in dread following me down,
An ashen face and vacant eyes pleading
As I pass beneath the surface
Observing the insipid reach of hatred.

I know war only honors the things of beasts
As I am grown in the ground like a seed for tomorrow.

...Violations of 'Islamic teachings' take deadly toll on Iraqi women

Iraqi Women in Constant Fear - Moxie Girl

Baghdad Burning - Girl Blog From Iraq

Liberating the Women of Iraq - The Crone Speaks

AlterNet - Wave of Violence on Women of Iraq

SPLINTERED HOST

What is Christmas to you and me?
The holidays to the oppressed?
To the splintered soul?
The hosts of such grief
Whose ember desire wracks the flesh?

What is Christmas to you and me?
(Humanity's meaning, not the redeemer,
in these days of crucifying.)

O! Our portrayal defies expression!
Our darkened pathway!
Our giving, our charity,
O! It needs light upon it!

It needs shine bright upon reality.
As a tree so ornamented.
We love.

Copyright © 2006 mrp / thepoetryman

BEFORE VALOR

(A Poetic Justice Photomontage)

Before valor fades or a soldier’s honorably lain;
Before shrapnel and horrors stand forward;
Before the screech of missiles, snap of breath;
Before the water chokes, the marine howls;
Before the steady drum and bugle sound;
Before the sidewalks are washed of the event;
Before shivering flesh and darkness ignite;
Before food, clothing and shelter;
Before the whispered birth of wayward night;
Before all else; were we alive?

Did we sense humanity’s plea;
Grasp this; our solemn relationship;
Fortunate to have been born at all,
To breathe where breath is free;
That the world exhales next to us,
Eats, drinks, prays, dies alongside our death…

O is there no truth that lives,
That wrestles deceit to its knees;
Living that scowls at hopeless war
Whose breath stinks beyond our living?

When spirits fade and innocence slain,
Lowered to their private defeat,
With each, a world’s breath, mislaid.

TYRANNY

(A Poetic Justice Photomontage)

Nothing at present is foreseen.
Everything now is looming.

Within this; our heartrending time,
the stars crawl on hands and knees
from end to end,
inching toward the sun of man.
This arrangement of emptiness mouths
silent consonants in search of vowels
to fill empty words the size of the ocean.

The angels scour the floor of our living,
touching their wings against the waters,
their silence louder than tyranny.

It will be at the liquid birth of God
that the reverberations spring forth,
seeping across a new humanity.

© 2007 mrp/thepoetryman

WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?

READ THE POEM +/-

Al-Maliki plans Baghdad crackdown
The Iraqi government plans to bring in reinforcements to take part in a major security plan for Baghdad but a US general has said the key to success would be a balanced approach rather than sheer force.
Nuri al-Maliki, Iraq's prime minister, announced the plan on Saturday, vowing to crush armed groups "regardless of sect or politics".
His plans suggested that he may be ready to tackle forces loyal to his fellow Shia, as demanded by Washington and the Sunni population.
Al-Maliki's proposed plan was not welcomed by the head of the largest Sunni group in Iraq, saying, the proposal will lead to civil war if implemented.

Nine killed in Iraq violence
Continued violence in Iraq has claimed at least nine more lives, including that of two US soldiers. Among those killed were three Sunni Muslim shopkeepers in a mixed neighbourhood of the Iraqi capital, the police said. The shopkeepers died on being fired from two cars in Baghdad's southwestern Baya district.

Iraqi TV: 30 dead in Baghdad battle
Bleak Darfur Assessment
Kidnapped Iraqis found murdered
Salvadorian Prison Riot Claims 21
5 More U.S. Soldiers Killed in Iraq

Israel is Suspected of Planning an Attack on Iran

Two Women and Two Babies Killed in Afghan Blast

Hide and Seek - Imogen Heap (4:13) (CAUTION strong images.)

All this quiet far-reaching through the galaxy

above us on the edge of heaven,
over the noise of counting

the night’s soft curves,

legs, arms and hands.
You come to me and hold my hand

and we walk along the river’s edge.
You speak to me of the world’s formation

and explosion and radiance
over the noise of counting

the night’s soft curves,

legs, arms and hands.
You look to me for answers to a riddle;

“What the hell is going on here;

all this quiet far-reaching through the galaxy

above you on the edge of heaven

over the noise of counting

the night’s soft curves,

legs, arms and hands?”

I look at her uncomfortably,

“I do not know... I do not know who you are.”

She stops walking and lets go my hand.

I can hear her quietly weeping.

“Is this a dream?” I ask.

"All this quiet far-reaching through the galaxy

above us on the edge of heaven?”

“No.”, she whispers.

"I am the daughter of God

and you are mortal man.”

She faces me now,

naked and crying.

Her hand tenderly touches my cheek.

“We haven’t much time.

I have something I must reveal to you tonight

over the noise of counting

the night’s soft curves,

legs, arms and hands.”

Lifting her divine head she gazes at the stars.

It is then, in her eyes reflection,
That she reveals unto me a distant,

immeasurable and magnificent world.

“What world have you shown me?

Is it beyond our reach?

Is it heaven?”

“No.” She says.

“Then where is this marvelous and peaceful world?”

She has vanished.

“No!

Where is this world you’ve revealed to me?

Please! I must know!

What the hell's going on?

Where's all this quiet far-reaching

through the galaxy above us on the edge of heaven

over the noise of counting

the night’s soft curves,

legs, arms and hands?”

Silence.

"You are there" echoes a voice from the dark.

I begin to weep.

Copyright © 2007 mrp / thepoetryman

HIDE AND SEEK - Imogen Heap (4:13)

Previous Post - DEAD MAN MARCHING

BAGHDAD BURNING... OUR THROATS

READ THE POEM +/-

This morning while responding to a Crooks and Liars post I found myself swept into a poem… The post was regarding a new play by Riverbend , a 25-year-old Iraqi woman living in Baghdad prior, during and after the invasion. It is dramatised by a cast of five young American actors. ( More of the review…)

My comment-
A play worth watching and remembering sounds like to me... Being a theatrical person I can say that the bit about history is more than just self-obsession...in most cases it is the way it is. Poetry, theatre, film, music, prose...somehow, some way, it all trickles down and into an artist's hands... Pompous sounding on the surface, but of what I have seen in my lifetime, it is the voice that at large would be unspoken, for, in many an instance, the words won't come out due to fear, pain, or intimidation... To hell with "patriotism" and all its foibles!

____________________

BAGHDAD BURNING...OUR THROATS

In the shading of your persistent speechless death
We cannot help be unsettled by your passion.
Now, just as the world boils, increased in suffering
Do we begin to sense brittle-boned-humanity.

A drama worth its ink, recoiled, unfolds inside us,
Leaping in our throats, coursing through our veins,
Diving deep, like a jilted lover’s plea, it swims through.
Wounded and yelping it tosses inside our existence
Telling us things we’d never tell ourselves...

The drama says, bring forth your lies
For they'll not penetrate truth.
Bring forth thy warmongering spirit
For it shall not dance.
It will flounder here... dreadfully.
Treading upon the boards, characterized as horrific,
Slumping; a dreadful creature, writhing, sweating
`neath the canopy of light.

The drama says,
Look! Look!
There you are, lumbering in final breath!
You coward!
You defiled wretch!
Bedraggled death!

Your countenance now but a shadow
As the lights begin to fade.
You may come cloaked in dream
But you’ve been seen
And we’ve felt your sodden breath upon our soul
From a city where no-one knows
If they will see another day.

Copyright © 2006 mrp / thepoetryman
________________________

Baghdad Burning On Stage C&L

Riverbend Blogspot

BBC News Review of Play

Tell ABC to Tell the Truth About 9/11

Poetic Justice Theatre

MARCH BANG BOMB

READ THE POEM +/-

march march march
bomb bomb bomb
work work work
bang bang bang
enslave yourself
to mankind’s bane
march march march
onward now
in rhythmic chains
stepping now
forward once
then twice back
bomb bomb bomb
truth now split
hope gone flat
march march march
toward the tower
toward your god
work work work
this; our drum,
it must not stop!
bang bang bang
bomb bomb bomb
march march march
march march march
march march march...

THE ANIMAL WE WANT

READ THE POEM +/-

When the animal we wanted to be
Hasn't come forth,
Couldn't climb into this world
Through spaces vast window,
And we hear a distant hum,
As if it is weeping a million miles away
At not having the courage to even try,
And we feel its loss inside of us
And we conjure what might have been,
Perhaps we should simply rise up
And not sit so far away from life
And stop this, our incessant dreaming
Of new ways to conquer and destroy.

When the animal we wanted to be
Hasn’t reared its beautiful head,
Perhaps it is afraid it might be the uglier
Or fearful it will fail us
And we’d drop our bombs
And blast a hole clean through imagination...
Or, perhaps it has no desire to draw closer;
It hears our weeping a million miles away,
And heeds our mournful whimper
At not having the courage to end
Our warring and wholesale butchery,
And it feels our loss deep inside
And sees what it might have been.

Copyright © 2006 mrp / thepoetryman

TERROR'S HAND

READ THE POEM +/-

The Real Terrorism Plot
By Ramzy Baroud
Al-Jazeerah, August 24, 2006

And yet another menacing terror plot was thwarted 10 August, with the arrest of 24 suspects, all British Muslims. It was an ominous conspiracy aimed at committing "mass murder" on an "unimaginable" scale, British authorities quickly concluded. US authorities hastily joined the action, too claiming a decisive victory over the plotters, thanks in part to the quick thinking of and awesome coordination between US security and intelligence branches. Britain congratulated the US; the US thanked Britain; both saluted Pakistan and its ever-loyal leadership, itself conducting a brutal war against undefined, shadowy groups that emerge and vanish, all too conveniently, and too neatly.
Moments after the shocking announcement, as security threat levels reached their peak in the US and Britain, the debate commenced and it relentlessly continues: Why would a British Muslim choose such a destructive path while living in a democratic society, where change, at least theoretically, is possible through peaceful means?
The media also sprung into action. Ready-to-serve answers were deftly provided by all the usual experts, instantly infusing more conventional wisdom upon a vulnerable public. Attempts to contextualise terrorism within a political milieu were decidedly torpedoed. Despite years of war that seem to have achieved nothing but "mass murder" on an "unimaginable" scale, no one should dare explain the true roots of terrorism; one may explain why poor neighbourhoods in America yield greater crime rates than others, or why abused children become abusers themselves, or even why US soldiers in Iraq often "snap" and massacre entire families, but terrorism that involves Muslims should not in any way be discussed outside its useful parameters of a misguided generation with a radical interpretation of religion: the Islam that produces "Muslim fascists" as President George W Bush termed it. (More…)

Terror’s immense unbent machine rumbles
From end to end of the blast-crested streets
Of civilized man like a freshly-filed talon to flesh;
And the screeching recoils against the red sky
And the plagued ocean smolders.
Terror’s depth is roused
By lies and the spineless realm
Of authority
Pointing eastward with a westward hand.

We, insensible spectator, stand open-mouthed
To the eagle’s rasp upon our human face;
And the snap of the shudder, too slow,
Find terror rooted shoulder to shoulder,
Glossy eyed, draped in ruin,
Panting to soar heavenward
And spatter the face of God.
.....We can no more this
.....Than return to the womb.

Copyright © 2006 mrp / thepoetryman

WHY DOTH... SO SLOWLY

READ THE POEM +/-

"Why doth Humanity so slowly progress?"

This is us upon boiling backdrop;
Lands dry, steeped in sorrow,
Children licking empty bowl,
Feet jutting out cardboard home.

Women battered on savage streets
Spreading limbs in painful masquerade.

Boys beautiful lips bleeding in alleyway,
Girls heeled and bare to a reluctant ache,
Powerful men grunting over them
Piercing green souls in undone rage.

Shattered lands against blackened horizon,
Terror-stamped freedom fighters
Gored, mutilated, tortured and bombed.

Godless gods dropping god awful weight
Over helpless, fleeing, shrieking shapes.

Unimaginable sun torching the sky
Melting mammoth ice and burning tree
Dying beasts scourged by machinery.

Humankind upon scorching canvas;
...The future doesn’t need us.

WE CANNOT LIVE TO SEE IT ALL

TUTU: It’s an extraordinary idea and, it fills one with a great deal of excitement and exhilaration, and it sounds crazy, but then I think it was crazy when Gandhi said we’re going to work so that eventually India is free. It must have been crazy when Martin Luther King Jr. also said we’re going to make civil rights a real issue in the United States, and maybe when Nelson Mandela and others said one day apartheid will be no more, that we need those like yourselves who dream dreams and say, “It is possible. It is possible for people to know that war is not natural.”
...People have been able to live peacefully together, but if they live peacefully together after war, why should they have war first before they can realize that it is a great deal better. War is not nice to children, it’s not nice to people, it’s not nice to the environment.
...And so I say go for it. This is marvellous. Go for it and really be crazy and say, one day we’ll ask, “Why were we so stupid for so long because of something so obvious?” Saying let us put our massive investment that we are putting right now in instruments of death and destruction, let us put them into something that is creative, that is life-enhancing teaching kids that there are ways of resolving differences that don’t need to be violent. You can sit down and ultimately say, “You know, actually, an enemy is a friend waiting to be made.”

Someone once said “we cannot live to see it all”.
There is no relief in that merry knowledge,
Witnessing the vacant waving of flags
And apple polisher’s parade toward destruction.

Is it an eternal conscience, our tumbledown end?
Might we by careening with our fate suffer less?
Along the way may we not beckon of resistance?

We, in this, be not alone, but one with humanity.
Is it not then hopeful?
Is it not then merry
Our seeking to ebb the world’s headlong calamity?

If it be so, then cease your foolish exaggeration,
End all of your fanatical cries of evil and terror!
Err on the side of our freshly burning world,
And unite in the hunt for harmony’s gate.

O! Not the shrill and hasty clout of national anthems!
We shall soon enough have cause for none;
Instead we should, we must, parade as one.
Let us live to see it all prepared for our children.

Copyright © 2006 mrp

The Peace Alliance

Peace Kids

HONORABLE THIRST

"Of the nearly 150,000 Coalition Forces presently in Iraq, 99.9 percent of them perform their jobs magnificently every day," Chiarelli said. Of those troops, about 130,000 are from the United States. "They do their duty with honor under difficult circumstances. They exhibit sound judgment, honesty and integrity. They display patience, professionalism and restraint in the face of a treacherous enemy. And they do the right thing even when no one is watching," Chiarelli said. He added, however, that "unfortunately, there are a few individuals who sometimes choose the wrong path."

O! Bring your beautiful shores and thy hope’s beacon,
Shine light down on them equally, a white hotness!
You are thirsty; laden with the soul’s strained lumber
And filled with dread and death soaked in the ache of living.

O! Cry out rain of fortune! Cry out from thy staggered torrent
And pitiable veil of bereavement! I am thy mourning cradle!
I am thy tongueless teacher pacing the cave of thy day
And wrestling thy fragile soul in your hours of darkness!

O! Bring thy beautiful shores and thy hope’s guiding light
Douse them with the flame of thy shelled out yearning!
Be thy hungry? Feast upon the bomb-wrapped soul of thy enemy
Nurture thy pangs with the blood of fellow man in a gentle manner.

Soak your tears upon the moist cloth of mankind.
Wrap thy arms around her and carry her to your bed
Where thou can dream of perfection and stained expectation
Only to be shaken wide-eyed by thy dreams of slaughter
And finally see that, indeed, both cravings, both aspirations
Might so effortlessly stroke one another in madness.

The Ravings of a Semi-sane Madwoman

O! ORIGINAL EARTH!

In this land of twenty million years and Ishango Bone;
The root of man in his original life,
In his foremost loss, from the barren drums of home
To the brimming terms of literacy, Egypt, Carthage,
the Nubian Kingdom, the Great Zimbabwe, Sahel,
Hutu and Tutsi now both so scorched in grief!

Malawi, Kenya and of Livingston’s Victoria Falls,
Lake Victoria; the Nile, its soggy trough beseech!

O! Original land, you shall not go!

Stay your spirit’s dancing in splendid hope's refrain!

O! Children come!

Stand upon on the back of eternity and pray for rain!

mrp

SET UPON THE ROAD

We are set upon a road
And that road is mankind
It is dangerous
It is loathsome
It is beautiful
Perhaps you have seen its path
In paintings most stunning
In the pirouette of night
In the openhanded gesture
Or glanced in the sleeping child

We are set upon this road
And that road is mankind
Try as we might
We cannot take another
It is this one we’ve been granted
This one we’ve oft smiled upon
This is the path of our founding
We may decorate it with laughter
And desecrate it, sully it, with dread
But we may not absolve its occasion
When wars conjure the spirit’s bed

We are set upon this road
And that road is mankind
A shower of stars cannot tap it
The impoverishment of man's good
May slim chance alter living’s course
It is this chance, this aperture
Of which we must seize, grasp of
Shilly-shallying of this anointed gift
Would be man’s greatest sin
Grasp and hold dear friends
Take hold of this and begin again

THE DEAD SEA

Fill her many trenches with the guilty
and
you'll exonerate the earth of humanity

Fill her with your oft dead ideals
and
all your hubris entangled goodness

Fill her with your overjoyed love
and
you cleanse the world of civilization

Watch the Dead Sea go empty and arid
and she'll
have no human to weep o`er her...