901

***** Kahlil Gibran on Death *****

You would know the secret of death.
But how shall you find it unless you seek it in the heart of life?
The owl whose night-bound eyes are blind unto the day cannot unveil the mystery of light.
If you would indeed behold the spirit of death, open your heart wide unto the body of life.
For life and death are one, even as the river and the sea are one.

In the depth of your hopes and desires lies your silent knowledge of the beyond;
And like seeds dreaming beneath the snow your heart dreams of spring.
Trust the dreams, for in them is hidden the gate to eternity.
Your fear of death is but the trembling of the shepherd when he stands before the king whose hand is to be laid upon him in honour.
Is the shepherd not joyful beneath his trembling, that he shall wear the mark of the king?
Yet is he not more mindful of his trembling?

For what is it to die but to stand naked in the wind and to melt into the sun?
And what is it to cease breathing, but to free the breath from its restless tides, that it may rise and expand and seek God unencumbered?

Only when you drink from the river of silence shall you indeed sing.
And when you have reached the mountain top, then you shall begin to climb.
And when the earth shall claim your limbs, then shall you truly dance.

***** Where is God? *****

The Prophet here in arousing words sublime,
On life and death, in truth, unitedly are one,
May yield one needy consolation in our time,
All over Earth with Corona's terrible run.

But human suffering, a never-ending threat,
The genocide and crimes against humanity,
The myriads of dead throughout all times, man has met,
Violent terrors that prevail with brutality.

Mass killings here; The Holocaust where Jews were gassed.
And Red Mao Tse-tung's. Then Pol Pot's with his Khmer Rouge.
Tyrant Stalin's, then more amassed.
Lost life in innumerous millions has been huge.

With infinite dead in days gone by, Black Death's too!
History, filled with unrelenting death, death, death,
The killed of WW I, then the Spanish Flu!
You suffer! The filth of battle! The blood! The depth!

The extent of offence, in bye bye bye bye bye!
Oh! A dark fouled Earth. The cemetery fields! No end!
The push-button H-bomb! The wounded! View of blood!
Oh! The added knotty life-end want! Oh! No end!
The filthy knotty stuff of horror! Oh! Shudder!
Think of it! Unbounded bad knotty Hell! Rubbish!
The Dead! Oh! Shudder! Oh! Puke! You suffer, no end.

One now may ask in all this pain; If there *is* a God,
One Deity being, then where *is* He?
One can so herein wonder that He has no eyes?
To see the Earth in all its death and misery?

902

If.

If they were not English tongued
If their strength was slight
If they had no dollars or guns
We would not fear their might.

Ties of tongue would bind us not
Our tongues untied would be
Then what tongues we would find we had
To set our brothers free

Our new duty's to be furious
To show the future's in our hands
The White House git is nefarious
And all's not well in the land

George Floyd - murdered with no thought.
Get base stuff right; it went wrong.
If we don't, he died for nought.
We will need to be strong.

903

From a distance, the world looks blue and green,
And the snow-capped mountains white.
From a distance the ocean meets the stream,
And the eagle takes to flight.

From a distance, there is harmony,
And it echoes through the land.
It's the voice of hope, it's the voice of peace,
It's the voice of every man.

From here, I watched my mother pass of cancer;
If I phoned, she was too sick to answer.
From here, I needed to be attentive,
Thoughtful, pleasant and meditative.

From here, I sought to send love
To change the agony thereof.
COVID kept me held at a social distance;
Hence, it meant no health assistance.

904

***** The Window *****

Sometimes I sit and stare out my window,
when life is in despair.
I go to that window when I feel depressed,
but no one is aware.
Everyday, I stare at the trees and the birds and the sky,
to escape from a world of unhappiness.
I press my forehead against the glass and sigh,
"Why does life have to be like this?"
I gaze out the window at the twinkling stars,
all is far away.
I wish I could be up there with them,
but instead, I'm stuck here everyday,
with nothing but my window.

***** The Widow *****

I'm a minute shy widow within four walls,
and here, no one calls.
I eat breakfast with two pieces of bread,
tea, and a hard boiled egg.
With the Coronavirus this year, things might be worse,
to end up in a hearse.
Widowed at eighty, it wasn't fun,
with many tasks yet to be done.
Up dozy I wash, I dress, I may hum, sew and knit,
Unfussy, I try to keep fit.
When my time's over and I die, dressed in white,
I'll go to hereafter's blessed sleep rest,
As that happiest widow in Heaven's light.

905

Best Ten John F. Kennedy Quotes:

* My fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.
* The goal of education is the advancement of knowledge and the dissemination of truth.
* Let the word go forth from this time and place, to friend and foe alike, that the torch has been passed to a new generation of Americans - born in this century, tempered by war, disciplined by a hard and bitter peace.
* The greater our knowledge increases the more our ignorance unfolds.
* The great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie, deliberate, contrived and dishonest, but the myth, persistent, persuasive and unrealistic.
* Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable.
* Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe to assure the survival and the success of liberty.
* There are risks and costs to action. But they are far less than the long range risks of comfortable inaction.
* Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.
* Tolerance implies no lack of commitment to one's own beliefs. Rather it condemns the oppression or persecution of others.

Ten known, authentic past remarks focused on color and oneness as offered upon occasion by an outspoken contemporary of Kennedy, Martin Luther King - one fearless, loud, powerful, if peaceful, preacher.

The prayerful churchman was persistently threatened, then soon senselessly taken out, fatally assassinated by one shot at a Memphis motel (pro-conspiracy and rather kooky counter-conspiracy theories are out there, but I say seek proof):

* In the End, we will remember not the words of our enemies, but the silence of our friends.
* I have decided to stick with love. Hate is too great a burden to bear.
* We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools.
* We may have all come on different ships, but we're in the same boat now.
* Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?'
* Love is the only force capable of transforming an enemy into a friend.
* I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.
* The time is always right to do what is right.
* Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
* We must accept finite disappointment, but never lose infinite hope.

906

THE TIMES THEY ARE A-CHANGIN'
A Song by Bob Dylan

Come gather 'round, people
Wherever you roam
And admit that the waters
Around you have grown
And accept it that soon
You'll be drenched to the bone
If your time to you is worth savin'
And you better start swimmin'
Or you'll sink like a stone
For the times they are a-changin'

Come writers and critics
Who prophesize with your pen
And keep your eyes wide
The chance won't come again
And don't speak too soon
For the wheel's still in spin
And there's no tellin' who
That it's namin'
For the loser now
Will be later to win
For the times they are a-changin'

Come senators, congressmen
Please heed the call
Don't stand in the doorway
Don't block up the hall
For he that gets hurt
Will be he who has stalled
The battle outside ragin'
Will soon shake your windows
And rattle your walls
For the times they are a-changin'

Come mothers and fathers
Throughout the land
And don't criticize
What you can't understand
Your sons and your daughters
Are beyond your command
Your old road is rapidly agin'
Please get out of the new one
If you can't lend your hand
For the times they are a-changin'

The line it is drawn
The curse it is cast
The slow one now
Will later be fast
As the present now
Will later be past
The order is rapidly fadin'
And the first one now
Will later be last
For the times they are a-changin'

TIME MARCHES ON
A hymn to a lost tradition

They yell: "Come you brothers,
We'll all hit the town,
And in the name of black lives
Tear the old statues down.
Those statues of racist,
White-privileged clowns
Will soon crash loud to the pavin',
And you'd better wake up to
What's soon comin' round,
Wake up, for the times are changin!"

I do not hold with
Their frenzied outrage,
You can't alter the past,
You can't turn back the page,
We are tolerant now,
That was another age,
There are different
Laws now pertainin',
Most for the better
And some for the worse,
But, the bad old days are changin'.

They march against racism,
And for gay rights,
They warn of the climate
Some turn up to fight,
Despite all of that,
Whether you're black or white,
There's a bothersome pandemic ragin',
With deaths in the thousands,
And they may die too,
Don't they see it's they who need changin'?

The world has turned crazy,
The genders are blurred,
We don't call women 'she'
Or men 'he', how absurd,
If this all continues,
Soon books'll be burned,
The lunatics will end up reignin',
We'll lose all free speech
And they'll censor our words,
Sayin' only: "Times are changin'."

Oppression in China
And Iran is dire,
Yet no one here protests,
At all, oddly, why?
In tolerant England
It's easy as pie,
You do what you want, no restrainin',
No loyalty is owed
To your home country, oh I
Fear today times are a-changin'

907

[Shakespeare's relevant Sonnet 127 is anagrammed into another sonnet inspired by recent events that discusses prejudice - and also contains a provisional visual constraint:]

In the old age black was not counted fair,
Or if it were, it bore not beauty's name;
But now is black beauty's successive heir,
And beauty slandered with a bastard shame:
For since each hand hath put on nature's power,
Fairing the foul with art's false borrow'd face,
Sweet beauty hath no name, no holy bower,
But is profaned, if not lives in disgrace.
Therefore my mistress' brows are raven black,
Her eyes so suited, and they mourners seem
At such who, not born fair, no beauty lack,
Slandering creation with a false esteem:
Yet so they mourn, becoming of their woe,
That every tongue says beauty should look so.

The Sin of the Forbidden Voice Within

You'd hear the fierce cop was "the only one",
But they don't know you got no other choice.
The mob could echo "I can't breathe", but none
Will think about one inner, awful voice:
It burns as bad as brine; as sly as fleas
In beds at dawn, an urge as crude as rum;
It nips at serfs as well as snobs at ease
Who look at men as bright as you as "dumb".
Yeah, even after screams of angry mothers
Reverberate and beg: "Please act, try more",
We don't look at your faces as our brothers -
But rather fume at crimes as if they're yours.
If we want bliss, alerting is the key
To how we'd redefine humanity.

[The apparent constraint becomes visible once every word beginning with 'a' is highlighted and the image of a pair of handcuffs appears:]

The Sin of the Forbidden Voice Within

You'd hear the fierce cop was "the only one",
But they don't know you got no other choice.
The mob could echo "I can't breathe", but none
Will think about one inner, awful voice:
It burns as bad as brine; as sly as fleas
In beds at dawn, an urge as crude as rum;
It nips at serfs as well as snobs at ease
Who look as men as bright as you as "dumb".
Yeah, even after screams of angry mothers
Reverberate and beg: "Please act, try more",
We don't look at your faces as our brothers -
But rather fume at crimes as if they're yours.
If we want bliss, alerting is the key
To how we'd redefine humanity.

[However, something still seems off about the poem's message... A better word in its penultimate line might improve it without changing the anagram - and it will also break from the constraint, thus breaking the chains:]

The Sin of the Forbidden Voice Within

You'd hear the fierce cop was "the only one",
But they don't know you got no other choice.
The mob could echo "I can't breathe", but none
Will think about one inner, awful voice:
It burns as bad as brine; as sly as fleas
In beds at dawn, an urge as crude as rum;
It nips at serfs as well as snobs at ease
Who look as men as bright as you as "dumb".
Yeah, even after screams of angry mothers
Reverberate and beg: "Please act, try more",
We don't look at your faces as our brothers -
But rather fume at crimes as if they're yours.
If we want bliss, relating is the key
To how we'd redefine humanity.