Ecclesiastes and the calendar now placed by the atomic clock and good astronomy precisely
at the juncture of shades crossing the earth’s slight tilt.
Even Psychology, the poor cousin, is included with the genomics of disease spread and another
pseudo-science – Economics, plays its pawn’s role to the power grab while
patient justice wrings her hands waiting for the wind to die down so she can
calibrate her scales to our day.

Let the paper on line take up the rest, spur us with only an individual here and there
spending important time on her pillow.

The never sleeping buzz of computers winning at chess and competition.
Bring on the silicon soul with its perfect spelling and gypsy blindness to bias
taking in the meter of all the old songs and tabbing every utterance for a distinctive stutter.
The udder milk of me.
The ethical step child of philosophy raised on bloodshed and conquest now
full of unsettled remorse.
Not the dead only or the stress of homeless decline and mental health
mapped as meditation in the MRI.
Medical healer with 15 minute visits and the cosmos on its turn,
the approach of Andromeda, mighty galaxy, bending the eye of the young
with the promise of civilizations out shining, punishing, the short sites of our own.
How recognize our common humanity, all born of mother with language,
the mute and deaf spelling out the beautiful signs like Hellen Keller with her rushing water.
How not call out the despot, the slave trader and ideologue?
The mind subject to strange and deep social afflictions harbored by each of us
as a kind of shame, a kind of pride.
A restitution for the years of poverty and lies.

See how the sun lies moving on the grass, each child glad with moments-
dreams to be alive.
Such dream, you captive poet for the stage embodying,
you kindergarten teacher on a run of good luck at the craps table,
putting meager salary on the turning number- red black and green as
the holiday glitz on a Christmas TV.

The deep bruising, licking her animal wound.
We all need a few days to recover but the show must go on up the ladder,
through the false plateaus of classification and the kingdoms of animal species.
Poverty of us in the richness of life’s bacteria and the single cell monopoly
with virus taking over our machinery, polluting our politics, giving to the many
a bland one, dumb as axes, as felled trees, as the heart of ourselves,
bleeding in sympathy.

By Rolf Stavig
12-21-2020