Sunday Sonnet: Shadows

Tags

cooperation, Democracy, leadership, poem, poetry, politics, truth, unity, USA

I took my Sadie for a Sunday stroll

And noticed shadows twitter on the ground

A nearby fountain’s splashing water sound

Attracts the thirsty birds from all around.

My lack of sleep begins to take its toll

And I see shadows deep and long and wide

The shadow fingers knit our deep divide.

For lacking math & tech, our web so wide

Is not. Denying truth is suicide.

The cost of gratitude is small indeed.

The attitude of arrogance? A seed

Of lethal cancer’s ugly ego creed.

“It’s all for me and none for thee” will be

Destruction of our sweet Democracy.

————-

Poetic Commentary: I’m trying Sonnets and variations on Sonnets on Sunday. Here, I used the traditional iambic pentameter but slightly changed up the Shakespearean rhyme scheme ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG to ABBB, ACCC, CDDD, EE The idea of rhyming lines one and five is to reflect some unity among those five which deal with fairly direct perception of the here and now. In line six, I begin to move into “conceptual” shadows. Line nine rhymes with the previous three because this is meant to unify those lines more. But line 10 begins a contrasting thought. Though the couplet introduces a new rhyme, it is also a restatement of lines 10, 11, & 12 so the long “e” is kept and repeated internally as well (“me”, “thee”, “De-“, “sweet”, “de-“).

Political Commentary: In the photo above, you will see shadows of leaves and shadows of birds, though without movement, it may hard to tell which is which. But birds and olive trees are not the only shadows here. We are here at this particular spot partly because of our puppy Sadie. But how did Sadie come to be? Dogs were bred over thousands of years and while Sadie is still a puppy and very uncivilized as yet, she’s learning and a lot easier to deal with than her wolf ancestors. It isn’t just our training that helps Sadie live with us. It also depends on thousands of our ancestors taking the time to train and breed dogs to be our companions. There is a slab of concrete. Where did that come from? When did people invent that and perfect it? There is also a railroad tie. Railroad? Without early scientists and engineers and mathematicians, how would that have happened? And, of course, there are the builders who put this here and did not “cheat” so that the concrete was improperly made. Some other hundreds of folks arranged systems of commerce and government so that all this was possible. And how did you come to be looking at this photo and reading these words? Wait did I mention reading? You & I can read or write because someone took the time to teach us. And seeing it across time and space? Taking a picture with my iPhone? These depend on millions of people working in tech. But how could people spend so much time working on tech unless farmers made the food and truckers brought the food to a convenient place? But none of that system would work without government and police and armed services.

There are many shadows here and most of them are thousands of years old. The truth is that we are vastly interconnected. We have what we have and can achieve what we achieve because of countless others alive and long dead. Setting citizen against citizen is a ploy so that a very small number of people can end up controlling everyone. It’s an old, old cancer of society, but that makes it no less deadly.

We’re all in it together.

Those who would tear us all apart do not admit to their outsized greed. Instead, they wear camouflage of “patriotism” or “religion” to try to fool others into helping them steal. The plane hijackers who wreaked destruction were convinced they were doing it for “God” not for their pocketbooks. To be radicalized into killing others is to be blinded. At first, people are told to tell a little lie for the good of God. And, a little later, they are taught to believe a slightly bigger lie. Until, in the end, they are willing to kill hundreds of innocent people and give up their own life as well. It’s all based on lies. One way you can tell they are lies is that the lies must never be questioned. Not to believe the lie is to be punished or even kicked out of the club.