The City Soars
The Furnace Roars
Power Abhors
A Vacuum.
The Mountain Sleeps
The Glacier Weeps
Nature Entreats
A Plenum.
*
The valley dreams
The tower screams
The gutter breaks
The summit wakes
The sky is swept
The soil is kept
The sun blazes
The moon changes
The road goes on,
So does the song:
Through towers and cities filled with light
Through fields and forests just as bright
In purest black and blinding white
In flowing day and burning night,
The Wild Wonder flares and fights!
Your destiny is in its sights!
It aims for your frights!
for your delights!
for your rights!
*
The world was not always the world we know.
Something people did has made it so, so
Something people do can make it go, so
Go!
There is no alternative, only the election. Pig
versus lizard. Racist clown versus sophisticated assassin. White
supremacy versus world domination. Dirty old man versus heartless old
woman. Lecher versus sadist. The Koch brothers and the police unions
versus Soros and the Council on Foreign Relations. A proxy war in our
hearts and minds between rival factions of finance capital. CLUMP
2016! Welcome to elections after the end of the world.
The world as we knew it is over, and these are the
morbid symptoms of its aftermath. This is the only way to understand
the colossal mindfuck called the 2016 presidential election.
Every four years the USA and the world at large
consent to lower all levels of intelligence in order to discuss the
presidential elections. Mere resistance is futile. Like a
retrovirus, the machine assimilates all attempts to analyze it. The
election inserts itself through our psycho-spiritual membrane to
commandeer our consciousness and produce replicates of itself. To
comment is to be complicit: every critique or condemnation, including
this one, fuels the engine. Until there is no clarity, only
constituency, no politics, only polls, no ideas, only the cuisinart
of idiocy into which all noble and creative participation is fed.
All that is old
news. But this time
around, a qualitative leap has been taken into a new dimension of
delirium and degeneracy. Trump makes Dubya look disciplined. Hillary
makes her husband look humane. At some point each of us has paused
and pondered, is
this really taking place?
We´re in free-fall. There´s no way out of this election, no exit
strategy. The light at the end of the tunnel is a TV with endless
channels and no choices.
The complaint that “the media is destroying the
election” is redundant and becomes resentful. Its plaintiffs
equivocate, swishing the bitter medicine around in their mouths,
instead of swallowing it: the media didn’t destroy this election,
they created it! How else would we even know it was happening? It’s
all about publicity, and there is no such thing as bad publicity. “It
may not be good for America, but its damn good for CBS.”
As the impossible contradictions of imperial
democracy unravel, greater and greater advertising is needed to keep
up consumer confidence. That’s why they had to start promoting this
one years in advance. Just like all useless or dangerous commodities
need extra advertising, so the cost of an election is inversely
proportionate to its content. The media really pulled out all the
stops on this one! They even risked putting the crumbs of socialism
on the table in last-ditch effort to arouse the voters’ appetites.
They are the high voltage pouring into the tortured corpse of
democracy. The candidates are the monsters, and we are all cast
together as Dr. Frankenstein.
Aside from this screenplay, there are some notable
curiosities in the campaign cabinet, which deserve a spotlight.
(1) When all
the celebrities, up
to the
President himself,
have to go on TV to say “your vote counts,” you know subliminally
that something is suspicious. Greg
Palast has
painstakingly chronicled the “lynching by laptop,” and other
preferred methods of rigging “the best democracy money can buy.”
This is the most important story about this election. If your vote
counts, then for how much? And who counts it? And if you study this
seriously, then you have to answer. Your vote counts an average
of 6/7 unless you’re
white, and it is counted by such trusted defenders of democracy as
the Diebold
corporation. 6/7 may
be a step forward from 3/5,
but the technical integrity of the electoral apparatus may have
actually regressed since the days of Jim Crow.
(2) Over the course of the last few decades,
elections became inseparable from television. Now they have become
indistinguishable. It’s not only metaphor, but also concrete
political economy. It’s one long infomercial for empire, alongside
a sitcom about its indecent demise. At least since Bush and Survivor,
the US election has been a reality TV show. So it is no surprise at
all, and in retrospect it seems inevitable, that a reality TV show
host would eventually contend to be commander in chief. This explains
the ease with which Trump trounced his rivals for supremacy in the
society of the spectacle. He is playing home field. They are
pretending not to be charlatans, he only has to be himself. Trump is
a rabid attack dog, whose leash the Clintons let loose to scare us
into their neoliberal protection racket. It was a dangerous gamble
and it has had uncontrollable consequences. He now has enough lead to
turn on and maim his masters. He has mobilized centuries of racist
heritage, whose primed constituency is the impoverished rust belt.
(3) Bernie Sanders rewrote the rhythm and the
lyrics of the campaign trail, opening tactical and ideological
windows, which had been long barred shut and believed forgotten.
Predictably, he dropped the beat. With noble exceptions, his
followers fell in lockstep with the Democratic Party drummer. His
whole purpose has been reduced to promoting the Party and its
platform. Unpredictably,
the specter of socialism has been unleashed.
(4) We finally learned why the Democratic Party
never contested the stolen elections of 2000 and 2004. Voter
suppression works for them too! Their top leadership prefers a
Republican president to a rupture in their machine. Fascism is safer
than socialism as far as the financiers are concerned.
***
***
Only US citizens get a vote, but the whole world
is watching. This election holds the planet captive with screens,
ransomed with dollars backed by military bases. The outcome of this
election is likely to affect those outside the borders of the US even
more than those within them. So I’m writing from Caracas with love,
to beg the people in the country of my birth to see this election
from an international perspective.
Who should Palestinians prefer, who should Libyans
like, where should Syrians stand? Who should Hondurans and Haitians
hurrah? Who should China cheer, who should Russia revere, who should
Brazilians beware, who has South Africa scared, and why does India
care? The answers aren’t easy, they’re sleazy and greedy, and old
and cold – just like the candidates, packaged and sold.
We are not the world. It’s a big world after
all. This land isn’t my land, it isn’t your land, and it wasn’t
made for you and me. So I’d like to share a true story from South
America, and the country from which I’m writing. We have something
important to learn about elections from Venezuela.
In what seems like ancient history here, but which
ended only a few decades ago, the ruling political parties in
Venezuela made an agreement. Their leaders signed
a pact in a fancy
building called Punto Fijo, agreeing that they would share power by
rotating rulers alternatively every election cycle. They would
provide a pretense of participation and rivalry, and promise each
other a common purpose of corruption and control. This went on for
decades. Sound familiar?
In 1999, Hugo Chavez ran for president on a
radical platform: he wanted to call a constituent assembly to rewrite
the Venezuelan constitution. He was elected in a landslide. The Pact
of Punto Fijo and the two-party system bit the dust. Chavez went on
to win over a dozen elections before his death. Since then, in less
than twenty years, the Venezuelan state has been transformed via the
ballot box.
Of course, a full-scale media war has been
unleashed to make you fear and/or hate the names of Chavez and the
Bolivarian government. Obama has decreed Venezuela to be a threat to
national security. You better wonder why. But don’t believe me:
read and review the data on health, education, housing and poverty in
Venezuela over the last twenty years, from the United Nations, the
FAO, or even the World Bank. Listen to what Jimmy Carter says about
their electoral system. Read the corrections section of the New York
Times. Think outside the box that sold you the bailout and the war on
terror.
Venezuela is so demonized by Democrats and
Republicans precisely because it is a democracy and a republic –
not the bogeyman of communist conspiracy, but the precarious promise
of a peaceful revolution. John F Kennedy insisted that those who make
this revolution impossible, make another one inevitable.
This election is a global bait and switch to
immobilize us, to keep us guessing and away from grasping. Our only
consolation is that it’s over at last. The only thing truly at
stake is finding the stake that we need to drive through the heart of
this two headed monster. “Its after the end of the world,” Sun Ra
sang, “don’t you know that yet?” We are witness and warden to
the birth of a new world. It’s time for a constituent assembly and
a constitutional convention.
by QMS, Miami
Beach on a 12-hour layover en route to Caracas, October 2016
Marvelous Miami! Miami
is better at night, mostly because you can't see as well in the dark.
It is a city built for nighttime. The lights disguise the prevailing
shabbiness.
Seen from the air its
truth is revealed. It is a city of squares. It is a flat city. Even
its skyscrapers are flat. Even its voluptuous sexuality is flat and
square, in the sense that it is designed and destined for billboards
and screens, made in the image of the image.
Miserable Miami,
stumbling towards oblivion in the reckless pursuit of happiness. When
I mention my final destination, my taxi driver bemoans the terrible
things that the socialist government is doing to people in Cuba. To
challenge his attitude would be as useless as explaining how much the
music sucks in the clubs on the beachfront. Culture is concrete. The
conservative politics of this place are as solidly entrenched as its
physical infrastructure. To speak to this working class man about
inequality or imperialism would be like trying to talk to its
commercial real estate developers about climate change. Both the
attitude and the infrastructure are invincible, centimeters above sea
level.
Hard to overstate or
underestimate just how sketchy the motherfuckers who run this town
must be. The hardworking women redeem it every day, but they are no
match for the storm surge.
From the air the city
already looks half underwater. When the tide comes in the attitude
and the politics, along with the sexy parties, will flounder
helplessly and pitifully and desperately. The revenge of the
everglades will be silent and soaking. It seems only seconds away.
Of all the cities which
climate change will wipe off the map, Miami will be among the least
mourned, and its disappearance will be among the most geopolitically
progressive.
But in the meantime it
reigns supreme. Far too many beautiful women to refute with mere
reason. Far too much money pouring in to think about alternatives.
Murderous Miami, what
does it know about the Seminoles? What memory remains after centuries
of bad architecture and music and politics, of the ancestors who gave
their lives to prevent this kind of nightmare? Forget the Seminoles,
what does Miami know about its homeless, chewing each other's faces
off under the highway overpass?
This corpulent calm
conceals corpses. I sip my Panama water and swallow my oversized
paella, and wonder what I or anyone is supposed to do.
Magnificent Miami;
multicultural and toned, having fun and seeming so free, even if it
is so expensive. But this paella is making me sick, and my churning
stomach reminds me that I am surrounded by water and a wasteland of
flat squares and flashing neon. The marvelous has never been so
miserable. Death has never disguised itself as something so alive.
The execrably expensive has never been so cheap.
What I'd like to
explain to the taxi driver, and to the infrastructure, and to the
pretty hostesses, and to the whole culture, impossibly, is that it's
not too late for humanity and history.
Here at the extremity
of the American dream, the pursuit of happiness attains a seductive
and protracted climax. You can walk away, though. If you can
recognize how miserable this place is, then you are in on a secret
about the whole modern world. You can invest your your busqueda, your buildings, and your beauty in a place
with more memory and less mendacity, more depth and fewer squares,
farther from the shore line and closer to the heart of all things.
The light of the world
isn't neon. The cup of life isn't frosted.
Let Will Smith keep on
going to Miami. Let's go to Caracas.
por quincy saul, cocuy, diciembre 2015, corregida gracias a diana quintero
Estábamos
caminando atraves del páramo, hacia la cumbre del Ritak'uwa Blanco, y desde
cielos poco claros, empezó a caer lluvia. La cual rápidamente se
convirtió en granizo. Cayeron gotas mas y mas grandes que llegaron
a ser tan duras, que hasta el perro ladraba, pero yo tenia la
sospecha de que era un tipo de buena suerte. (Los que tienen corazón,
laten.) De repente, confirmando mi presentimiento, un granizo cayo
exactamente en mi mano casi cerrada. Agradeciendo la Pachamama, lo
puse en mi boca para saborear su vuelo vertical y su perfección
esférica.
Pero después de un tiempo de cargar mochilas
pesadas en senderos inclinados, cuando estaban llenos de granizados
los frailejones, y no se veía muy bien el sendero, pues la
oscuridad, el viento, y la lluvia dura congelada desaniman un poco, entonces de repente y al azar, no se si por cual instinto o conocimiento,
seleccione una roca bonita del barro al lado del camino, y mientras
caminaba la limpie con mis dedos y hable con ella. Le dije algo
así:
“Saludos amiga, compañera, estimada roca,
eres una belleza. ¿Puedes preguntarle a tu hermana, a tu abuela la
montaña, por nuestra parte, que haga un hueco en las nubes y en los
granizados? ¿Puedes pedirle que abra para nosotros una ventana hacia
el milagro común del cielo? En retorno, te voy a limpiar y a poner
en alto sobre una roca mas grande, otra cumbre; por que al igual que tu, nosotros tambien vamos para la cumbre; lo que ambos queremos quizás no sea tan diferente. Te
voy a limpiar y poner en lo alto, para que cuando la abuela montaña
abra un hueco en el cielo, tu puedas ver y ser vista por tu bisabuela
la luna, y tu bisabuelo el sol, y también por tus otros relativos;
los planetas y las estrellas, para que tus primos en todo el cosmos
puedan verte directamente y conocer tu belleza que ellos
comparten.”
“Y ademas,” yo dije
a la roca, viendo otra roca linda en el barro al lado del camino, “te
voy a presentar una pareja para ti. Ustedes son muy distintos y muy
parecidos, muy parecidos y muy distintos. Siempre estaran separados y
siempre estaran juntos. Les pido a los dos, que pueden sentir el amor
de mis dedos, que pidan a su abuela hermana la montaña, que dirija
sus vientos para crear un hueco en las nubes, para que la luna y el
sol y las estrellas puedan verles a los dos, la pareja de dos seres
distintos y unidos, o de dos no-seres unidos y distintos. Les voy a
poner en la cumbre de esta gran roca aquí, con otro hermano, ahora
que están limpias y brillantes, ahora que todo el mundo les puede
ver.” Y les puse allí.
“Entonces me despido de
ustedes, estimados maestros y estudiantes, cada uno y los dos tan
sencillos y tan complejos, y si me haces este favorcito de hablar con
tu abuela la montaña por nuestra parte, te prometo que voy a
escribir nuestro cuento, para que no solo el sol y la luna y las
estrellas les puedan ver, sino también nosotros, los extraños seres
humanos. Les despido a ustedes, hermanos, pero no me despido, porque
mientras ustedes están y mientras soy, estamos y somos conectados
siempre por nuestra búsqueda mutua, de pertenecer a nuestro mundo,
que habitamos y somos cada momento. Gracias y que les vaya
bien!”
Y resulto, que menos de media hora
después, se desvanecio el granizado, poco a poco. No despejo por
completo, pero bastante. Y por los próximos tres días, en la
montaña de Concavo también, muchas veces abrieron huecos en las
nubes – ventanas alucinantes al azul y al cosmos, a estrellas y a
horizontes. Huecos en las nubes que te hacen pensar en saltar
(¿afuera o adentro?) del mundo. Siempre parecían estar justo arriba
de nosotros. Quizás el cielo colombiano siempre tiene huecos. Tal
vez es pura coincidencia. Pero en castellano tenemos otra frase –
tal vez abrieron huecos por causalidad. ¿Y por cual causa? ¿La mía?
¿La montaña? ¿La roca, la pareja? Lo he pensado por varias
semanas, es decir varias y distintas eternidades y momentos fugaces,
y creo que la respuesta, la causa, es la nuestra.
Lo escribo para que se aprenda. Vale la pena conversar y incluso
hacer tratos con las rocas. Con una roca en las manos se puede
conocer también sus relaciones; se puede abrir un hueco en el cielo
y saltar hacia las estrellas.
Quizás estoy
loco. O quizás estoy apenas despertándome de un mundo sin alma.
Based on, in response, and with thanks to the book: “Extinction Dialogs: How to Live
with Death in Mind,” by
Carolyn Baker and Guy McPherson, 2015
“It's after the end of the world,
don't you know that yet?”
-The Sun Ra Arkestra
We are living in the midst of a great
dying,
Living with death every breath,
Growing up with extinction,
“Living with death in mind.”
But death is not only in mind,
Also in heart and hand and nose and
mouth too,
Burning in our imagination and stomach,
An electric black cloud of death
Which covers the dreamscape.
It seems scientific reports
Which always begin “Abstract”
are rarely read or reflected upon.
Perhaps a poem
Can move feelings
Where mere facts have not.
Up against the climate apartheid wall,
motherfucker!
You've got a clathrate gun cocked at
your planetary temple.
The rape of Mother Earth culminates
here,
The bloody and poisonous climax has
arrived.
12 Hiroshimas a second, as methane
seeps and spurts to the skies,
3 watts per square meter per hour of
hot smoke, soaking in,
Somewhere between 400,000 and 5 million
people a year, killed by climate chaos,
And 200+ species go extinct every day.
How many heartbeats to a life?
How many feathers to a bird?
Don't be fooled by the dryness of
numbers, the grayness of theory,
Feel yourself caught in their sensuous and grotesque
gravity.
Industrial civilization has become
meteor, destroyer of worlds!
We face now a greater danger than the
dinosaurs.
As some of them saw a giant burning
streak hurdling through the sky,
We see methane plumes,
Melting ice, growing deserts,
Earthquakes, fires, floods,
Hurricanes and tsunamis,
Fracking and blasting and
Drilling and killing.
The X factor,
Our wild card in the wager between
extinction and evolution:
What we call our intelligence.
How much smarter are we than the
dinosaurs?
As deserts grow we organize elections
and build detention centers,
As glaciers melt we perfect targeted
assassination and particle accelerators...
Science is slow, conservative, often
soporific, sometimes cold-blooded.
Plenty prediction, little conviction,
less prophecy.
Yet these are prophetic times, even on
the time scale of geology, writes Scribbler in 2014:
“The time of dangerous and explosive
reawakening increasingly seems to be now,”
A vast microbial universe surging to
life after thousands of years of hibernation,
Steaming their hot celebration from the
sea and soil to the sky.
We may be smarter than dinosaurs,
But can we evolve any faster?
Catastrophic climate change doesn't
really select for vertebrates...
The Greenland ice sheet is a firing
squad sliding at attention,
The Gulf Stream and then the whole
hemisphere is the firing line.
Try to get a feeling for the feedback,
The cumulative comeuppance, the
hatching eggs of roosting chickens:
The warming that awakens more warming,
The melting that means more melting,
The burning which brings more burning,
The earthquakes whose ripple effects
trigger more earthquakes,
The deserts which drive more desert,
The storms that spawn stronger storms,
The dying which sets off greater chains
of dying,
This is the feedback which is slowly
but surely
Burning off the clouds.
A distant relative of the feedback
which boiled off the oceans on Venus.
The symbolic deadliness of the
dark ice and the dark snow,
Forming and falling and faster as the temperature rises
Signals the scale of the changes upon
us.
Hotter and steamier the cycles go,
until it's
Up against the wet bulb effect wall,
motherfucker!
Try metabolizing at 95 degrees and 100%
humidity.
Heat waves already wash away thousands
of lives every year,
The gases released by retreating
glaciers reinforce their retreats,
And with every catastrophe the stock
market soars;
Shipping and drilling in the Arctic,
Big growth rates in guns and oil and
drugs,
Soaring surveillance states,
Mass extinction and mass incarceration.
Up there in the vast reaches of the
atmosphere
The future is forged, on molecular
timescales.
The smoke works its silent way into the
fabric of the sky,
The warmth from the fire you burn today
will return as temperature in 20-40 year's time.
Today's joy ride, your children's Mad
Max.
Climate apocalypse, prime-pumped in the
pipeline.
If the causes are complex, the effects
are dead simple.
What methyl isocyanate did for
Bhopal, perfluorotributylamine may do for the biosphere.
Make no mistake, they're planning for
it,
The same ones who got us into this
mess,
First the masked gods and disguised
kings,
Now the unmasked gods and naked kings,
as Abdullah Öccalan tells
it.
The emperors with no clothes
And their more-or-less loyal 20% of the
world who generate 80% of the emissions.
They are planning in secret and
supremacy,
They are planning more madness, more
feedback;
Blasting off to Mars, engineering the
seas and skies,
Creating higher walls and deeper
prisons, smarter phones and dumber people.
The big conservative corporations,
BP, the World Bank, the International
Energy Agency, the United Nations,
Are predicting weather that humans
cannot survive
In their end of century forecasts.
Some say sooner.
No surprise perhaps that the politics
based on positivist science
Culminates in nihilism at the planetary
level.
(I think therefore I die, says the last
Enlightened Man.)
Don't ask a climate scientist or a
policy person to unite or defend or lead a community.
Nothing of what we call politics today
is ready for this,
What we call politics can't even think
or speak rationally about this.
“What we have come to think about as
politics is,” says Amitav Ghosh,
“In a sense, actually a great
distraction from all that is really important in the world.”
Hence endless painted chains of mind
and heart-numbing conferences and summits
Chanting incantations to exorcise the
collapse and the abyss.
Forget 1999!
Party like it's the End of Time!
In 2012 enough ice to cover Canada and
Alaska melted,
This summer for the first time we
glimpse the ice-free Arctic, folks.
Methane plumes in the Antarctic too;
Picture 150 kilometers cubed,
Melting each year off the West
Antarctic Ice Sheet.
And how! 2 times faster from 2010-2013
than from 2005-2010.
When you shiver into the polar vortex,
it shivers back.
“One result... is boreal peat drying
and catching fire like a coal seam,” writes McPherson in 2015.
This much forest hasn't caught fire for
over 10,000 years.
The ocean hasn't been so acidic in 300
million.
And the color source of the blue
planet,
The oceans we know less about than the
Moon or Mars,
There the fabric of the life web is
fraying.
The specter of the jellyfish haunts the
currents,
Messengers of a planetary restart,
Re-preparing the pre-Cambrian.
The age of coral is ending and the
reign of the jellyfish begins.
And plankton, to whom we owe about two
of every three breaths,
Locked in epic struggles for survival
from shore to acid shore;
Our entwined fate is playing out from
the molecule to the mesosphere.
Yeah, “it's time for a jailbreak,”
write Baker and McPherson in 2015,
No coincidence that this book was
recommended to me in a prison,
By a man named Maroon, who knows what
time it is,
Time for psycho-historical-spiritual
breakout/break-in,
A planetary proof by diagonalization.
But it's after
the end of the world. Don't you know that yet?
Time to build arks, not tombs,
Time to mourn, but also time to
manifest,
Time to organize the exodus from the
coastlines,
Time to save seeds and tend soils,
Time to rally to the watersheds;
The end can be predicted, but the
beginning must be prophesied.
It's time for the Evolution Dialogs!
It's time for the Emergence Analogues!
Not a dialog of finding deliverance in
defeat,
But a manifesto of revelation amidst
apocalypse.
To live with LIFE in mind!
Live without death time!
Time to be free of both illusion and
despair,
Time for the vision we will perish
without,
Free of hopium and hopelessness,
Free of the empire outside and the ego
within,
Time to think and work in timescales
that span generations,
Time for a prefigurative path to free
life
Through the gauntlet of mass
extinction.
Time for Pachakuti consciousness,
Time for a 5,000 year peace plan
To follow the long arc of the rainbow
Whose warriors gather on the horizon.
There is a hinge between prediction and
prophecy
On which the revolving door of history
spins.
Time to decide what we value most.
Time to fight. Time to fly.
"I just want to ask a question
Who really cares?
To save a world in despair
There'll come a time, when the world won't be singin'
Flowers won't grow, bells won't be ringin'
Who really cares?
Who's willing to try to save a world
That's destined to die
When I look at the world it fills me with sorrow
Little children today are really gonna suffer tomorrow
Oh what a shame, such a bad way to live
All who is to blame, we can't stop livin'
Live, live for life
But let live everybody
Live life for the children
Oh, for the children
You see, let's save the children
Let's save all the children
Save the babies, save the babies
If you wanna love, you got to save the babies
All of the children
But who really cares
Who's willing to try
Yes, to save a world
Yea, save our sweet world
Save a world that is destined to die
Oh, la, la, la, la, la, la, la
Oh, oh dig it everybody"
(Save the Children
by Marvin Gaye)
Also
referenced/related:
Space
is the Place, directed by John
Coney, 1974
Manifesto
for a Democratic Civilization: The Age of Masked Gods and Disguised
Kings, by Abdullah Öccalan,
2015
“We
are living our lives as though we are mad,” Amitav Ghosh, 2016
Maroon
the Implacable, by Russell
Maroon Shoatz, 2014
“Manifesto
of the Island of the Sun,” Evo Morales, 2012
It seems that all these streets are paved To hide from sight the bottomless graves Of the hands that laid these stones And the hands that defended their homes; These towers soar over both sets of skulls and bones! It seems the towers try to flee, Seek refuge in infinities, Climbing because they can't atone For the sins of their foundation stones. It seems we walk these streets so fast Because we fear their silent past Which lingers still around every stone Laid by hand of skin and bone. We close imagination tight, And limit it to simple sight, And so we rarely hear or feel The ghosts beneath the pavement, Real! And so we rarely touch or smell The timeless tolling of the bell, Resounding through the pavement stones The silent song of skulls and bones, Flying between the towers high, History that does not die. The cosmic conscience is resolved! History shall be absolved. Let your imagination open, Like one who has awoken, And pause upon the pavement stones And think about the skulls and bones, And all the past we walk upon, And of the earth to which we belong. Those skulls and bones are the same as ours, A difference of mere measurable hours -- Think of the hands that paved these streets, Of the murderous history underneath, Which buried its builders just the same, Often the streets bear the murderers' name. Be deafened not by misery, But hear our absolution's plea: Live with those who lie beneath, We are as fish upon a reef. Do not let their memory die, We are as birds within the sky.
From these city streets we'll steal Hearts of iron, minds of steel, And in a village garden tend To seeds the soil will transform, To hearts and minds from earth reborn, Together in the green we'll grow, Together in the garden tend The child's birth, the empire's end. Then from these village lanes we'll steer Hearts of envy, minds of fear, And in the city's furnace fuse Ingots of a greater soul, Elements of a wider whole, Together in the flames we'll fly Together in the city fuse The damned of the earth and the sacred muse.
