Leaven

A simple meditation on the reality that evil appears to be everywhere in our world and good is also everywhere, but the good is fainting, fragile and susceptible to infection from all the evil that exists.


Leaven

I have seen it well, the jewel of Earth suspended
in a vacuous black ocean…

sublime beauty growing among the weeds…

bountiful vacant horizons interrupted by
exceptional peaks and the solitary oasis,
filled to overcrowded with those
hungry for beauty and those simply hungry…

sleek bodies fashionably adorned to obscure
the imperceptible daily marks of decay…

music, dancing, wild laughter in the foreground;
wailing, funeral dirges, moaning for bread
in the background…

an unattractive, unpopular prophet provides a constant
stream of divine revelation while the oblivious mob
tramples over every gentle, fragile, beautiful thing
on their way to the orgy of the superficial…

it is little more than a circus din of pleasure,
followed by yawning, clutter, stilted speech,
callousness, distance from everything,
and flickering forgetfulness as days
loudly and lustily lived simply slip gently into the shadows…

transfixed lovers gaze at each other, drawn
powerlessly into a vortex of passion,
while every day Jews who love kill Muslims who love,
and Muslims who love kill Jews who love,
and they slaughter because they love…
their gods…
their families…
their things…
their promised holy dirt…

There is no good in the world because any good remaining in it
is infected by all this damned leaven!


September, 2004