It’s five days in.
We can make it.
This year is so long.
Until it is gone too fast.

I wonder what is waiting for us?
Is waiting the same is wondering?
Does wondering have the same
time slowing magic?

How come we don’t ask why?
Or maybe we do, and
don’t like the bloody
obvious answers?

Let’s let time fly like a bird
we release from our hand,
and then it seems to have
nowhere to go, and it just sits.

Then be bold enough to
ask it to sit for a bit longer,
and it will fly away as
if it is being chased.

Yes, it’s five days in,
and we’ve got so much
time left for wherefores
and whynots, and more.

Let’s sit back and take it all in.
The poetry of life!

It is of course, an arbitrary demarcation, everybody knows
but as a new year approaches and this one draws to a close.
it is a time of reflection, and time of for taking stock of the year
and realize more good than bad did occur and we are still here.
There are new births of life, new advancements in love and career
there are accomplishments, as well as, tears in any given year.
And then there is the opportunity, even if only in our mind
to start out anew, to be refocused, to accomplish, to be kind.
And in this arbitrary demarcation everyone must know
that we are remembered most, by the love we did show.

I pray this new year brings us a world with more peacefulness
with a bit more reasoned and compassionate thoughtfulness.
I pray we are guided by our better angels toward the higher values,
of equality, opportunity, democracy and freedom of the news.
And that we find a renewed faith in core ideals which make us great
those of freedom and fairness, as we repudiate the politics of hate.
Yes, this arbitrary demarcation, is a good time for reflection
with honesty and without blame and avoidance of deflection.
For we must understand and really know who we are
and aspire to become in our next journey around our star.

Oh
angel
spreading wings
over this Christmas
tree listen to supplications
of our love and hope for everyone
for this to be the beginning of another
time when we can truly say that we have
become what the child born for all of us would have
us be, in joy and happiness a kinder more forgiving world
so that peace will reign and forever remain like this evergreen
and
this
child
within us!

They tell us who they are,
by telling us who we are …

Then they are annoyed
when we refuse the label…

For it means they might
not be who they think they are.

I don’t know what caused the altercation, maybe it was nothing.
Maybe a bumping of shopping carts, or something simpler, as I can imagine, it doesn’t take much in the crowded shopping exit of a Costco on a mid-December Saturday.
But the elderly white man clearly was saying you should be deported… the Hispanic man, yelling that he was not an illegal, and he has rights… the white man answering, well you look like it and so it went… the anger, the self-righteousness, and the responding demand for respect of rights… but the chaos made me think of how we are near a tipping point like we’ve not seen for 86 years… since maybe Germany’s Kristallnacht.

Unser Eigenes Kristallnacht*

Righteousness is killing us
the cruelty is purposeful
the gradual normalization of hate
was always intended to get to this point.
The language of otherization is vermin,
rapist, criminals and this is purposeful
as is the cruelty of separation, of division,
and worse.

Yes, take criminals off the street
but we need no special laws or actions
except enforcement of current law.
We need a path toward compassion
and fairness, without mindless mob
action by the righteous and
morally compromised.

Tipping points are never quite
clear until we are seeing it with
the eyes of history, in the analysis
of the past we find we are no
better than those who came before,
we who think we are better
may someday witness “our own
night of broken glass”.

The light filters through the trees
from the closest star we know,
feeding fauna, deer, birds and bees.

We stroll through using faint paths
worn by others for there is nowhere
untrodden and no undiscovered maths.

For we are merely the next, in a long line
of discoverers of universal truths
leaving bread-crumbs as a sign.

For those who will follow us into the past
and who will occupy this future life-space,
for nothing of us and of this is meant to last.

And some poet, someday, may for a bit think
about us as a continuum of thought from
forever ago to forever to come as a link.

And then the faint path we’ve left for those
who come next and those who come after
will give a bit of wisdom, if well we chose.

Where are we on the subject of empathy?
Oh yeah, we don’t care for it nor for sympathy
or so I’ve been told for they are the others
while we are the first, we and our brothers.

Others are not us, so it has become perfectly okay
to separate families once again, and deny them a way
to a better future, the one we feel is our birthright
and for this we will cast the others to the night.

The night of horrors, roundups, and detentions
the night of deportations, and rights suspensions
as separations will resume, and children will be lost
as families who are not us, are into the night tossed.

But what do we care?  We who so quickly forget,
we who have no empathy and no feeling of regret.
We are okay, we are Americans and we are first,
and we no longer think of hunger and thirst.

We no longer think of oppression and threats
of violence, we’ve protected our precious benefits,
our prices and our borders, from imagined horrors
as we gave up on our love of God and human morals.

The Washington Post reports that there are 1400 children still not reunited with families from the policies of Donald Trump’s first term and the chaos by which they were separated from families at the border.  Imagine, what will happen at the border and throughout the country as the roundups begin, especially as he promised them to be violent. 

When you light the candles
in numbered wishes of happiness,
we give homage to our ancestors,
who sat aglow around fires of warmth
and laughed and sang in unison to the
songs of birth, and songs of life.

We sing in unison to life’s
shared  values, creating wishes
of play and of health too,
the wealth of family, the
fellowship of friends, in the
songs of birth and long-life wishes.

And when we are well celebrated
of birth,  we shall sing our songs
of accomplishments and joys,
in the fortune of family and friends,
and of storied-lessons in the
songs of birth and life’s legacy.