Stolpersteine

by George Bilgere 

Here in Berlin they have these interesting
little brass plaques maybe four by four inches
embedded in the sidewalk in front of
various buildings thousands of them
around the city called Stolpersteine
or “stumbling blocks” handy little
reminders and now and then you glance
down and maybe there’s three of them
together a little family Jacob
and Leah and Elsa Aberman arrested
on this spot March 7 1942
murdered in Auschwitz the plaques
like punctuation like brass periods
where the sentence fragment
of a life ended here and here and here
and it’s interesting because
back home the language is heating up
the elected leader is shouting to the crowds
send them back where they came from them
being Muslims and Latinos and so forth
and the crowds love it they’re shouting it back
giving voice to something locked up in them
for so long and it just feels so good
to shout it out nakedly under the heavens
and I guess what’s interesting from over here
is that certain people keep saying hey
this kind of reminds me of Hitler and certain
others say no way read your history this
is nothing like Hitler not even close
and I look down at those little plaques
with their scuffed muted Jacobs and Leahs
and Elsas and the chants grow louder and
louder I mean you can hear them
all the way over here.

 (Originally published here on George Bilgere's website)

Time Travelers

by Brian Seiler

Time is wilderness
this we have learned out here pulling threads of the universe
marking the years in the bark of the gingko
laughing, calling Look, hieroglyphs! at old scrawls from our own hand

We gather on occasion, this band of brooding scar dust
for the unfinished business of bewildered new arrivals
so surprised as lifelong propaganda clears from the eyes
They have waded broken and barefoot up swollen November rivers

Pleasantries and then we spill into the peeling and weathered skiff
with a deck sunk into the funk of the forest floor
still minding shins on the bent hull
old habits
old artists
who lobbed pleas aflame into the
ticking abyss with no response but a faint shrug

Poets blind and dead lightly row

Time is wilderness
this we have learned
out here, having shed circadian rhythms
to trace, for easy centuries, names etched in the hull to the final cursive loop

On shore, our Victorian, the walking cloud of graphite, wheezes a joke about his teeth
made from the crust of a long forgotten moon

Time is wilderness
this we have learned
slogging through the fens of memory and hailing the crows who know us
and know our joy—a migratory bird who splashes color into the drab hedge

As the twilight and time travelers
exhale a unified sigh, you ask are we a graveyard
No—we are, of a sort, comet trails

left callously behind but intent on riding gravity
to safe harbors

For now we traverse this land for which

there are no metaphors

only held moments—
as in years ago when the grid failed
and we stayed in while the world melted
enjoying the rustling of the sheets, the shadows, the sycamore

Now the new arrivals recall their final nights in the quiet dark—
we hear of straw peasant beds on the winter solstice
bubbling kettles in a drafty pioneer cabin
a boy freezing to death in the woods on his seventh birthday

Time is wilderness

this we have learned

And then it is finished and all depart
unceremoniously from the clearing
as the lanterns float into the distance
for the long period
as comets intent on the Oort


***

Religion's Faustian Bargain with Capitalism

Brian McClaren in Life After Doom lays out an uncomfortable reality about the dangers of prevalent conservative theology...

Simply put, the theology so many of us inherited was perfectly designed to render us obedient drones, doing our part to extract natural resources, put them through industrial processes, and produce two things: waste and profit... We didn't ask questions about the long-term consequences of how we made a living. We didn't raise ethical objections when we heard the cries of the earth and the cries of the poor. Instead we let our theology conveniently turn our attention to what happened after we died...

Our descendants will have to ask why over 8 billion of us were willing to let a tiny group of oligarchs make 100 trillion dollars for themselves at the expense of... Everyone and everything on Earth present and future. When were we organizing a worldwide strike? When were we laying our bodies down in the driveways of oil company headquarters? The only rational explanation for our inaction, future historians will conclude, was that we were all victims of brainwashing, a combination of religious and economic brainwashing.

We have been inducted into a religious money cult, a civilizational death cult. We have become consumers who would rather die than disrupt the economy.

Let me say it is plainly as I can: capitalism tells a story no less alluring and destructive than the chart of the ages [an evangelical church prop that depicts the so-called periods of god's plan]. And in its current form this story will destroy the Earth just as certainly as the story told by conventional religious fundamentalism will... Working together, religious and economic fundamentalism will push us over the ledge, singing a hymn and counting corporate profits as we go.

Complex Societies Collapse when...[ finish this sentence].

Thought for the Day:

Our global civilization as currently structured is unstable and unsustainable.... But with economic growth we intensify and hasten ecological collapse.
---
In simplest terms complex societies collapse when their key institutions can no longer solve the civilization's problems.

                                                                    --Author Brian McClaren in Life After Doom