Category: current affairs

Relevance of Story

Stories have power. Parents, teachers, public speakers, and therapists understand that the secret to engaging an audience or connecting with others is through illustration: storytelling.

I see it in the eyes of the my grandchildren, who love to hear tales of family history.

I’ve seen in the eyes of students, when recognition and understanding light up.

I’ve seen in in the eyes of audiences, who tear up or laugh at the telling of a relevant anecdote.

I’ve seen it in the eyes of the wounded trying to make sense of their past: the craving for a story that offers validation.

Imagine a world where we are absent from stories. This is a reality for many, whose race, ethnicity, or beliefs excludes them from discourse.

Chimamanda Adichie says it best in her Ted Talk: The Danger of a Single Story.

Is This War?

“War is hell.  You can’t photograph a flying bullet, but you can capture genuine fear.”
– unknown

The bomb has dropped
control slips from our grasp

We pray for a parachute
for someone to pull the cord

numbers escalate,
lives plummet

We offer encouragement
isolated voices faltering

moment of impact imminent
the implosion inevitable

impact reverberates
responsibility moot.

(  Image my own.)

Imagine

If we could lift understanding
to indigenous teachings
expand our love
to earth, sky, and sea
Make personal gain taboo
and Ancients a weigh point

If we could witness the mountains
slow floating across the sky
and touch the dolphin’s soul
anxiously swimming
where tuna are netted

Would we cower at our insignificance
or move forward, learning to accept
that all of life is deeply woven
into the fabric of our collective hopes.

(Image my own)

Crisis

How did undocumented –
a civil infraction –
reduce people to ‘bodies’?

And how did empathy –
observation and support –
merit death by gunshot?

When we stretch for explanations –
to fit the violent rhetoric –
are we too not complicit in crime?

Red, blue, it’s all intolerable –
the global stage is watching –
a nation in rapid decline.

“He’ll burn it all down,”
we’d been warned –
prophetic at that.

The terror escalates,
the system no longer works,
people are uprising to stunned silence

Where is the hand of justice,
governance for and of the people,
a nation for all….gone?

Greed drives this destructive machine.
Cut off the source of fuel, methinks –
if power is to act out empathy.

Ukraine

Planted seeds for prosperity –
images of children frolicking
the delight of yellow horizons
tradition setting our fields ablaze

Till greed came knocking –
brother turning on brother

Rhetoric and lies shrapnel
shattering our dreams

Only the deer frolic now
unwitting participants in
this unprovoked slaughter
land mines defiling landscapes

But seeds are not lost,
nor are the legacy of generations
whose soil has known the red of blood
spirits who cannot be deterred

Independence will remain ours
the land a testimony to our toil
fortitude born of oppression
Ukraine stands proud.

(Image my own. Currently, in Ukraine, most areas have electricity outages, leaving inhabitants with hours of no light or heat in this cold. Any talk of peace is propaganda. The bombing has escalated.)

What’s Wrong With This Image?

I hear my mother’s voice
questioning my intentions
certain I’m not doing it right
this wifely thing

I’ll be abandoned, surely –
it all rests on a string for her –
if dinner isn’t on the table at 4:38
or the beds are not made right away
or the laundry basket, unfolded,
remains in sight –
then who blames the man
for leaving.

Six generations now
I’ve witnessed women fighting
for equality, for recognition
and still the old guard holds on

And now politicians –
men with loose jowled egos
and paunchy stances –
and so-called religious leaders
call for a retraction –
women’s lives at stake

Who will lobby for women’s rights
when the female voice is silenced
needs carefully tucked away
so as not to raise ire in her mate?