Labor Day Parable
Charcoal Puller, ©Alan Pogue) 1996, Port au Prince
Deconstruction: A Parable
We stand head to head with the lion that eats itself,
from flowing mane to delicious tail,
while in the presence such awesome, fearsome hunger
the world asks — what is going on?
Pundits count hairs and toe nails, as if an anti-lion
would re-form in a parallel dimension to fix the problem.
Violent drama drives the story whose first chapter is:
If you don’t want to pay labor
you don’t need public education
in which we dumb down, forget to read The Prince
by Niccolo Machiavell who
in the 1500’s said the fastest way
for a Prince to come to power
is to scare the population senseless and then lie,
the bigger the lie, the more likely people will believe it.
In this chapter we send our children to prison
or to war instead of school. Another chapter is:
Bad government is good for business
in which Haliburton, for instance,
manufactures mass destruction which we pay them to fix —
only who can fix atrocity which drives itself
like a fractal?
Another chapter is: Weak governments can’t control corporations.
Another: God is on our side in which the lion eats its heart, then brags.
And somewhere, today or five hundred years ago another
kind of culture aches and stretches for life —
More like a parade, or carnival than a giant capital event,
it swirls to mind. Millions of people hit the streets to begin
the essential work of our time which is to deconstruct
the lion that eats itself, to end these mindless cycles of retaliation
before they deconstruct the people of the earth,
and the shining planet on which we stand.
©Susan Bright, 2005
Susan Bright is the author of nineteen books of poetry. She is the editor of Plain View Press which since 1975 has published one-hundred-and-ninety books. Her work as a poet, publisher, activist and educator has taken her all over the United States and abroad. Her most recent book, The Layers of Our Seeing, is a collection of poetry, photographs and essays about peace done in collaboration with photographer Alan Pogue and Middle Eastern journalist, Muna Hamzeh.
Announcement: The Plain View Press e-store is online.
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posted by SB @ 11:11 AM
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