Tag Archives: peace
The Man From Tomorrow, a short story
When the next big war started, Grandpa grew grave. There can be only one captain of a ship, he said. He’d been in the Navy, and I knew by ship he meant only himself. He may have steered the outside of my life, but inside of myself, inside my body, I knew I alone was in charge. I had heard all the stories about him, figuring some of them were true, some of them not.
Always remember the patriarchy was designed to raise the population, Grandpa said. Control of human bodies was wealth, before common currency. Before title, before paper, before symbols, he said. Who were human beings, before symbols? First, we drew, he said. We took sticks & pushed them through the sand, making shapes our eyes had seen. We planted our handprints wherever we felt most moved, most compelled. We drew our prey; we drew our predators, he said.
More importantly, we drew each other: the eye first. The eye contains the soul. Truth is in the eye. It is a living, breathing process, Grandpa said. Up from the roots, up through the trunk, and up into the sky. Then truth comes back again, around & around in an infinite loop. You are its center… but only for yourself, Grandpa said. In every dimension, mathematically speaking, each human being must define their own truth he said. So much science; so much language; so much sound, he said.
He had never uttered the letters C-I-A. in his life. Listen to everyone around you, Grandpa said. Whomever you decide is most trustworthy in the room, Grandpa said? Listen to them! All liars have tells, he said. Staying patient, staying calm at a molecular level is an acquired skill & takes much time to develop. And then, he wept.
Filed under acceptance, courage, grief, history, hope, human beings, humanity, mysterious, parenting, personal responsibility, politics, short stories, war
War, a very short story
The woman thought of God a hundred times a day. A thousand. An infinite number of times. Consciousness on the quantum level. And each day, she grew unhappier. More discouraged. Bleaker. Uglier. Sadder. More uncertain. In the trenches. Wanting to know for sure, and be done with it. The big picture… could anyone see it… could anyone imagine it… could she, or anyone she knew, ever have a clue to its subject… its matter. Most people seem strong until something goes wrong. Could time really heal?
Her belly grew heavy and cold, a dizzying pit of endless space. Would she ever be able to see it through to the end? Where was the end? When was it reasonable to stop trying. When was it the right time to stop trying… too hard. Where were people when you needed them. Bullets never did any body any good. The first human-killing weapons led to more, and more deadly, machinery for war… cannons and tanks and bombers. Land mines. Napalm. Nukes. Propaganda. Poison. Secrecy. It all boiled down into the same rotten thing, in the end.
Terror. The dog barked and barked and yelped and whined and barked some more. He was single-minded; his existence that moment was all about the cat, the cat behind the sofa. She refused to be ruled by terror. She growled and hissed back. She sat just outside his reach and baited him. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it backfired. Sometimes the dog came so close to her, his mouth closed in on the long, silky fluff of her tail. He bore a complex pattern of red scratches on his black and white snout. The man wanted the cat gone in the morning. What if he insisted? The man, or the cat? She preferred the cat tonight. No telling about tomorrow.
Filed under anger, courage, death, fear, fiction, grief, heart, hope, human beings, humanity, loss, love, mourning, murder, peace, personal responsibility, prose poetry, relationships, short stories, soul, spirit, united states of america, war, wish
Scatter Peace And Love, a prayer
Now a day man is impatience in the earth. We have no sympathy to others. Though we need to be kind as a greatest creature in nature. Because we are not beast. But lot of our activity is as like as animal. We are same blood colored human. Whereas we need to bond strong […]
Filed under anthem, appeals, beauty, birth, civil rights, compassion, courage, development, dream, earth, enlightenment, eternity, evolution, forgiveness, good, heart, human beings, humanity, justice, kindness, law, love, manifesto, peace, soul, spirit, spring, transcendence, truth, universe, wish, world
Notes From The Unconscious, a poem
Notes From The Unconscious
Run me languid over a rusty road,
and you behind, laughing to pursue…
Take only my smooth love chain,
kiss me softly, without injury.
I am essential and lusty…
I will drive through it for her leg diamonds,
and use him at those bare places.
To sea and gone were the sweet peach thousand.
The blood goddess is frantic…
She knows how hard loving is.
All delicate language has arms of iron, so
sing elaborate love from your tongue.
How have I dreamed sordid roses?
Rob them of a tiny pink eternity….
As bees nuzzle, so shall I dive into you,
and sniff your scent like a mama bear.
A man I used to know lives less than anyone
under wool suits. He rips up rocks
as meat, then he must finger petals.
He has no idea this is happening.
For years, I floated bitter in a black lake…
I said, please, no beating,
leave out the ugly juice,
don’t make me drink any more.
No one listened. My eyes turned
red like woman vision…
I am still weaker & falling,
after death, beauty may ache raw & blue.
He let a void crush what we incubated….
Did it in my white bed.
One milk moan from an infants’
fresh red lips, haunting me forever.
Boil away the mist with lick power.
Heave away or use an apparatus….
Near the TV, these fiddles cry for feet
to dance and obliterate pain.
Our sad summer was like a repulsive
shadow of fluff. I floated like a dandelion seed.
But winter could recall a sweet day chant
with cool water, trips to the country like lazy sun…
Did the purple smear on the wall show size?
Why can the mad beautiful boy shake?
I watch a friend produce a luscious lie.
None trudge after me, but time will swim easy…
Blow your smoky symphony,
my green cloud angel,
and put the sacred blaze against a woman,
melting her like caramel.
Dirt will come and time bring ice,
so heal your broken voice, shed the marble
surrounding you like a deep bone prison,
while I bleed champagne.
Ask your heart to squirm, remember
the ship of spring, seek air blue kisses,
pierce the morning, know the color of liquid
magic, speak in a velvet stream, and love me.
Filed under beauty, birth, blood, buddhist, compassion, courage, development, dream, dreams, eternal, evolution, forgiveness, hope, human beings, humanity, identity, karma, kindness, life, logic, loss, love, manifesto, maturity, mitochondria, mortality, mother, mothers, mysterious, nature, passion, peace, poetry, relationships, science, soul, spirit, spiritual, spirituality, transcendence, transitions, travel, tribute, truth, universe, warmth, wish, world, youth
Surveyor in New England, a prose poem
Surveyor in New England, a prose poem
And so, since there were no detailed official maps, he named small lakes after himself, solitary hills, even shy, dusty lanes marked only by the great thumping hooves of his horse — a patient, taciturn beast, dun-colored, remarkable mainly for the seven white spots on its flank, arranged like the constellation Ursa Major.
Back then, a hundred years ago, electrical-survey men like him sweated gracefully during summer, their cheeks burnt into dark Scotch grain, their hairlines preserved white as milk under the dimpled felt of U.S.-issue hats. Though he was the youngest of the crew, his moustache grew enviably broad and full, waxed close at the tips, bowed under his classical nose like the extended wings of a pigeon.
Reining to a stop, as he slid down, he pulled from the saddle-bags yet another wooden stake flagged with a length of wrinkled red muslin, kneeling to pound it into the rocky Vermont ground, leaving it there for eternity.
As he rode on farther north — past the tall flowering weeds around Lovell Pond, the drunken bees bouncing off his boots — continuing along the route he’d laid out for the electric poles to follow, he thought of his mother: the way her fierce blue eyes glittered on foggy mornings, the way his father caressed her wrist at the dinner table, and, above all, how skillfully she ironed, gripping the rag-wrapped handle, fluttering the heavy, blunt-nosed tool over the damp white cotton of his shirts in rhythms as comforting and certain and lovely as the slow tick of a butterfly’s wings as it feeds from the bright center of a blossom.
Pretzels & Chocolate, a poem
PRETZELS & CHOCOLATE
(rented room, cigarettes)
I am eating pretzels
and they are hard
but splinter into salty crumbs
with the merest bite
they only satisfy
part of my tongue
(rented room, cigarettes)
so I pick up the chocolate
greedy for it to melt
against my palate
sucking the firm square
feeling it mold to me
the way I imagine
my body molds to yours
(rented room, cigarettes)
retaining the character of sweetness
to complement the salt
to balance my mouth
I am eating chocolate
thinking of us
together
(rented room, cigarettes)
Filed under acceptance, adolescence, adult children of alcoholics, ancient history, apology, appeals, artistic failures, assholes, beauty, birth, black, blood, Catholic, child abuse, child neglect, childbirth, childhood, children of alcoholics, christian, compassion, con man, daughter, death, development, divorce, dream, dreams, enlightenment, eternal, eternity, faith, family, father, fatherhood, fathers, fear, fiction, for children, forgiveness, friendship, funeral, gay marriage, god, grief, he, health, Uncategorized
How Art Thou Received? (a prayer for refugees)
How Art Thou Received? (a prayer for refugees)
Imagine: suddenly, without warning (because that is how war arrives) you are a war refugee! Simply running away from being murdered. And how are you received when you can finally stop running, when you are out of range of the guns, the bombs, the blood? No countries to take you. No one to feed you. You are a skeletal pawn in a skeletal game.
Embalmed corpses declare war on the living and fight for their “territory” against other embalmed corpses using armies of young people; embalmed corpses feeding on fresh, young blood.
I know something is very wrong, somewhere. It must be addressed, and addressed properly. Our prayer, our incantation, our spell to heal, must be more powerfully crafted, more distilled, more essential, than was the horrid spell we are trying to break: a tradition of might over right, strong but wrong, a spell of ignorance which has caused so much harm, and is trying to do more… powered by the love of power, the love of control over people.
The scarred parts of the heart can be replenished; the broken parts, glued; the weak parts, strengthened; the fear assuaged, the pain relieved. But the desire to change, to truly alchemize oneself, spin that straw into gold… the gold of the sun… the silver of the stars… the red planet… the North Star… primal navigation by looking not at the ground, but by looking up, to the sky… that kind of desire doesn’t visit often.
If you want to know where you are going, be sure your map is accurate, or at least doesn’t kill you. Migrating birds know this. Power & Liberation. Slave & free. Joy & Suffering. High & low.
Craving slaves, some are trying to roll us back to serfdom, only they can use our own science & technology to rape us! Serfdom: tied by birth to land. You are a pawn, a source of income; in thrall to your Lord and Master. Freeing serfs is always a struggle. Brute force arm-wrestles the human race, and brute force often pins people to the mat, but… you cannot keep people down for long. The oppressed will continue to spring up and defend their inalienable human rights. All people are created equal: including our ancestors, who existed long before the self-anointed first “private property” owners. Human beings are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights, yes? The earth cannot belong to any one of us. Period. We own this planet. All of us.
Filed under acceptance, amerka, ancient history, anger, anthem, anthropology, apologia, apology, appeals, assholes, baha'i, beauty, bible, birth, black, blood, born again, buddhist, Catholic, charity, child abuse, child neglect, christian, civil rights, compassion, con man, con men, corporate states of amerka, courage, criminal, criminal behavior, criminals, daughter, daughters, death, development, dream, dreams, earth, easter, emperor, empire, enlightenment, eternal, eternity, eve, everything, evil, evolution, faith, family, father, fatherhood, fathers, fear, fish, flowers, for children, forgiveness, friendship, funeral, gay marriage, girls, god, good, grief, health, heart, hindu, history, hope, human beings, humanity, hypocrisy, identity, idiots, ignorance, jesus, jewish, judiciary, justice, karma, kindness, law, legal system, legal writing, letters, lgbt, life, logic, loss, love, mama, man, manhood, manifesto, marble, marriage, matricide, maturity, mea culpa, men, mitochondria, mortality, mother, mothers, mourning, murder, muslim, mysterious, nature, notes, parenting, passion, peace, personal responsibility, pope francis, pregnancy, rant, rastafarian, regret, relationships, religion, rome, Saint Teresa, science, sex, sisters, soul, spirit, spiritual, spirituality, spring, star spangled banner, tea party mad hatters, teenagers, transcendence, transitions, travel, tribute, truth, ultra right wing loons, Uncategorized, united states of america, universe, users, veterans, war, warmth, wish, woman, women, wood, world, youth, zoroastrian
Meet Nana Awere Damoah: The Ghanaian Voice of Objectivity and Reason
A great interview, an interesting dialogue, a thought provoking interviewer! Hallelujah!
Filed under anthem, beauty, black, courage, development, dream, dreams, earth, enlightenment, eternal, everything, faith, family, friendship, god, good, heart, history, hope, human beings, humanity, identity, justice, life, logic, love, maturity, nonfiction, passion, peace, recommended reblogs, sisters, soul, spirit, spiritual, spirituality, transcendence, transitions, travel, tribute, truth, universe, warmth, wish, world
Kimberly Townsend Palmer 