"Death does not get the last word,"
a priest once said to me. He'd heard it all, seen every kind of horror, yet he smiled with irrepressible joy everywhere I saw him. He's retired now, and I miss him. I want to believe what he believes. I trawl social media for happy memes, hopeful reminders. #Life is good. Never mind about the dinosaurs. Forget the witch burnings, the lynchings and shootings, the Holocaust. Choose to be happy.
Rejoice!
source: What Do You Say to Your Kids About Dinosaurs and the Bible?
"Vengeance is mine,"
saith the Lord, and from infancy I was taught that we are to trust this God will, in some next life, orchestrate some Day of Reckoning, where wrongs are righted, the innocent are vindicated, the wicked held accountable at last.
As I scroll the walls of Twitter, I see two images conjoined, almost, but 15 hours apart, the mutilated horses, and the murdered girls. Violence is not uniquely directed at one class of people. Police brutality and corrupt cops affect us in all walks of life, even the apparently privileged. My own sister was one of these "disposable" young women. Lisa Peak was found dead in a ditch only half a year after Julie. Almost half a century later, #NoJustice was ever served. Try to get people to care, and you might see why so many protestors and activists resort to riots, fires, vandalism, and roadblocks. Anger, outrage, frustration at the apparent indifference of those who haven't lost a loved one to senseless violence: these are things we sort, sift, and try to channel into healthier outlets. Some days, it even drives me to poetry. And I am not a poet.
like roadside trash,
their killers walking free.
Mutilated horses,
Dogs in chains, cats on fire,
Never seen by you or me
but from a safe distance, sheltered, unaware.
Turn off the TV, and they go away.
Remind me this is not all,
this is not the sum total, this human debris,
these creatures maimed
by killers among us posing as humanity.
Show us oh Lord where the suffering souls be,
help us to save them, heal them, keep them safe;
make us your hands, your eyes, your rescuing wings.
May we be guardian angels in this broken world
where smiling babies, puppy dogs and rainbows
and girls found dead in a ditch
are all said to be loved by their Creator,
Father God,
as alive and well as the dinosaur.
Quick,
tell me a joke.
Hand me the remote,
Turn off the TV, the truth, the sad, sordid stories of our lives.
Make me laugh, all you cats of You-Tube!
That's as far as I got
before remembering that I don't write poetry. Conveying strong emotions in the fewest number of words possible is beyond me. Sometimes, though, I feel like trying. The juxtaposition of mutilated horses, their attacker still at large, right above a memorial to a murder victim whose case is still cold, reminded of @rhondak's novel "High Kill," an expose on animal abuse and how it's like a gateway drug to crimes against humanity. Not that animals are lesser beings than humans, in the minds of people like Rhonda and me, but for millions of Fundamentalists, God gave man dominion over the animals, and Jesus didn't die for dogs or dolphins, so it's ok to dismiss all those other created beings as "less" than us. What we value, what we disregard: it says a lot about us.
"High Kill." Now there's an example of taking one's personal pain and transforming it into exquisitie prose; taking the sorrows and injustices of too many lives, human and otherwise, and presenting it in the form of a novel.
Sometimes, pain is like the grain of sand irritating the clam to produce a pearl. Rhonda's novel is a pearl:
Pearls are formed when an irritant, such as a bit of food, a grain of sand, bacteria, or even a piece of the mollusk's mantle becomes trapped in the mollusk. To protect itself, the mollusk secretes the substances aragonite (a mineral) and conchiolin (a protein), which are the same substances it secretes to form its shell.
As natural pearls are very rare and hundreds of oysters or clams would have to be opened to find one wild pearl, cultured pearls are more common.....These pearls do not form by chance in the wild. They are helped by humans, who insert a piece of shell, glass, or mantle into a mollusk and wait for pearls to form. This process involves many steps for the oyster farmer. The farmer must raise the oysters for about three years before they are mature enough to implant, keeping them healthy. Then they implant them with the graft and nucleus and harvest the pearls 18 months to three years later.
How Pearls Form and Which Species Makes Them
Sadly, if you irritate me, you don't get pearls. You get bad poems.
Today (oops, make that yesterday; I decided to sleep on this one before posting) is the 44th anniversary of a young journalism student's brutal murder, and across the ocean, an investigative reporter in France remembered her.Bright and beautiful, strangled and beaten, tossed like an empty beer can from the window some a low-life's car, Lisa Peak's life was cut short, and the killer(s) walked free.
Other people insist our lives have meaning and "purpose." Forgive me Lord (if you even exist) for doubting that. Better to believe we matter--and be wrong--than to go through life feeling none of us matters and we all end up as dust.
We began as dust: we are stardust.
Whatever "God" is, may we manifest all that is good, and may we vanquish all who would harm another living creature or destroy what another has created. Let us trawl the internet for hopeful memes and keep the darkness at bay. Let us do good, be good, and triumph over evil.
Even if it drives me to writing bad poetry and painting silly cats on wood slices.
Captain Kitty
was the love of my life in early childhood, and I spent many hours staring at the fluffy white queen in her pearls. I also played with dolls and lived most of my days in an imaginary world, the real one (in which we led Willie the Pig and Jenny the cow and Weirdo the Rooster to the slaughter) being too harsh for my tender girlish heart.
It's just so sad.
I don't believe I am a poet either because sometimes I have the words and just don't know what to do with it.
The pain drives people like me to find means to expressing whatever it is we feel, see, and sometimes abstaining from social medias and the likes makes the headaches go away for a while.
Rip Lisa Peak. And I do hope she gets the justice she deserve even though so much time has passed now.
This could be a good idea, abstaining from social media, but it's where I go in search of happy memes and reminders to have hope and keep trying. You sell yourself short - you do know how to put words into poetry! Thanks for reading and commenting.
I haven't seen your poetry, but this story is excellent: https://hive.blog/hive-170798/@aduragbemi/theinkwell-writing-prize-or-or-without-reverence-the-gods-will-die
"Without reverence, the gods will die" - without our belief, will they exist? I was just reading a quantum physics news item on the observer and reality, moments after reading the New Testament command from Jesus to believe and you can move mountains, but it all depends on how resolutely we believe. Well, if it depends so much on that, we might as well resort to New Age physics or magic. Fantasy novels always rely on the power of our believing we can make things happen.
See what I mean - you raise so many issues in one short story. :)
Believe. Believe you are poet!
https://hive.blog/hive-174578/@aduragbemi/i-m-explaining-a-few-things
I've been playing catch-up, and everything I see is good.
I remember Captain Kitty. I had that very book when I was small, the one shown in your photograph. It was one of my favorites.
It's the abuse against animals that does me in. I mean, I don't like abuse against humans either, but let me see if I can explain. That gory video circulating TikTok of the man livestreaming his own suicide by shotgun? I didn't even flinch. My heart broke for the poor little dog who walked into frame while the headless corpse sat cockeyed in the chair with the sound of blood splattering on the floor. Chalk it up to my days as an EMT, but scenes like that don't bother me much. Except for the animals. They never have a say in any of it. They are always innocent. Like abused children--never would such violence enter their minds until they're victims of it.
Humanity is depraved. I'm convinced of this. More and more, sane, sensitive human beings are becoming the exception, not the rule. I know this was all "prophesied." I know we've been taught to expect it. But suffering of the innocent is not something I'll ever acclimate to. And I will never have an ounce of compassion for anyone who intentionally harms an animal, regardless of what fate they meet.
Of all the people I know, Rhonda, only you have told me your also loved Captain Kitty in your childhood. More of that synchronicity!
When you were writing High Kill, you used to mention your research, those horrific videos you'd find. You're tougher than I am. In "Stonehaven" I mentioned snuff videos but I could never watch kittens under high-heeled shoes... girls being suffocated... people dismembered... just reading about drug cartels is lurid enough. To watch Jihadi John behead a Christian, an American: I'd close my eyes.
You make a compelling point about the suffering of innocents. In the Midwest, foster parents have collected money for the kids in their care, only to lock them up and let some of them starve to death. I could not make this up. It's also recent, not some 1970s story. Department of Human Services is run by idiots, incompetents, or fellow torturers. How do we collectively rise up against such evil, when it hides behind closed doors? It's not as obvious as the Gestapo coming for our Jewish neighbors. It's insidious.
Thanks for reading and commenting! And may "High Kill" gain more readers every day.
One of the cats is wearing a corona mask :).
I liked the way you used a lot of different elements - things you are upset about, writing poetry, funny cat Youtube videos - for weaving one post. Makes me feel it's not so much one message you want to get across, but an overal feeling, mood. As if the whole post is really a poem.
Ohhh I love you - "the whole post is really a poem" - thank you for not dwelling on the part that actually was an attempt at poetry. Yes, I painted cats in masks during Quarantine. Come May, things started opening up little by little, but the masks are mandated everywhere, and little old ladies have been caught on video spraying mace in the face of a young couple eating lunch in the park. Scary times. Old lady had only to keep her six feet of safety away from them...worse, the couple's 3-month old bulldog puppy was within spraying distance of her mace. The bystander who filmed this got her license plate, but of course nothing will come of it.
Woman sprays mace on maskless couple at California dog park
https://www.bizpacreview.com/2020/07/27/woman-sprays-mace-on-maskless-couple-at-california-dog-park-952203
A stranger unleashed pepper spray on a couple who were eating lunch at a San Diego dog park without wearing masks. July 27, 2020 ...