Night Vision

Sun long set, in these

Small hours I sit

Watching the darkness.

And what does 

My lonely vigil win?

Over and in the 

Still black lake 

Doubled stars spin

Along with the moon

And its identical twin.

I don’t hear the waves,

I hear but my heart,

So with beauty overfilled,

That this nocturnal vision,

Merely by its sacred sight

Might well cause 

My awed heart’s

Division

Into parts.

Dining Awhile

“I hope that Madame and Monsieur find our dishes to be satisfactory?”

“Oh, I do! I haven’t even seen these dishes in a sack o’ dog years! They are just SO lovely!”

“Madame is too kind. I believe we’ve had these from the beginning. As we say, Melmac’s the platter that matters!”

Heard In Passing

“Turn left up here.

  To see the falls.”

“But I’ve already seen the falls.”

“No, you have not.”

Greta and Gaia

Beau on Greta’s speech of a year ago:

https://youtu.be/_bL5BVW_nT0

The relevancy of that message operates just like the Doomsday Clock. Every day that passes without proactive action against climate change is one more tic of that biological clock towards the point of no return. Then there will be no more warnings, no more moving speeches, nowhere to run and hide. 

Instead, we will be the first sentient species on Earth to have earned the dubious distinction of watching ourselves become extinct for reasons that we are not only responsible for but which ourselves predicted decades in advance. You cannot assign blame for our doom on any particular country or region, because this coming catastrophe carries communal blame, for acts of commission and omission. 

But though we stand on the precipice, we’ve yet to step over it. You know what you must do; it’s been talked about for ages. And you still have time to act.

But not much.…

Who Does Not Race Cannot Lose

Curiosity is the bait.

Details are the weight.

Passion hides the hook.

Hazy is the sight of those 

who rashly race for wisdom.

America, I Salute Thee!

I have to say that I really do admire many Americans. Were I to have been born in that star-crossed nation, with a dough-covered deep-fat fried elephant’s rectum on a stick masquerading as President, I would have emigrated 2 or 3 years ago. That so many American residents still believe that there’s a chance to build a life in the USA and on this planet is, if nothing else, admirable. What exactly is the catafalque that supports this faith in a future I do not know but, I take my hat off in a salute to the US of A, a country that has never let mere facts impede their progress as they crawl towards whatever it is that the future will bring!

Predicates

If the night

Is moonless

Is starless

Do you believe 

The sky’s still there?

(To say that the night is dark strikes me as rather redundant.)

Gods Of The Whirled

From the corners four 

The Divine arrive

To tryst once more; 

To create and hear

Music for the spheres. 

Pan picks up his pipes, 

Plays disjointed parts.

Still more to imbibe

Til Pan’s set to start; 

Mars beats on his drum,

A true martial air 

Which Venus contrasts 

With a whistling wind 

O’er waves that do crash

And in crashing, rhyme

With the clashing below 

Where Vulcan forges

Great gifts to bestow 

‘Pon gods and mortals

When Chronos says so.

Now Zeus has arrived 

A lyre held in hand, 

Orders are given 

To that holy band 

Gathered for reasons 

But gods understand, 

Yet all assembled 

Send songs up on high.

Tuned tones from gods fly;

Tones keep heaven’s order,

Keep the spheres in place. 

We can but wonder:

Do the equations 

We’ve struggled to trace

Truly exist?

Or are they and we

Some steps removed 

From all we seem to see,

From real reality?

A Life Affair

Romeo and Juliet, 

Once they loved, 

We can’t forget. 

If the sky could 

Tell its tale 

They’d lie there still, 

Cold and pale.

The ashes of their

Phoenix love 

Both blessed and 

Cursed from high above. 

Be they doves or 

Something more, 

Their mem’ries shall

Ne’er glide past

Death’s dark door.

Our Covidian Culture

I have a Covid-19 contact warning on my phone now. The basic functionality was installed as an update to the iPhone, which knows what country you are in and who/what the responsible authority is. If I were to leave Finland I would just add my new location to the Exposure Notification monitor. The update was installed maybe a month ago (I wouldn’t trust my memory to hold onto a brick of glue). Today I installed the official Finnish Covid app. It didn’t do anything spectacular. A two week FIFO exposure memory became active; nothing special beyond that.

Reading the tiny text only confirmed my first doubts about the system. The entire scheme is based on two premises: 1) Ideally, everybody has a smartphone, which is a problem for some of the most vulnerable people: the elderly and young children. 2) Like capitalism and communism, in order to succeed you need a completely selfless and honest populace. If your phone could independently detect whether you are infected or not, that would be a quantum leap forwards for the efficacy of the system but, no, the phone owners have to voluntarily tell the system about their diagnosis. Every attempt at setting up a social utopia on Earth has failed. And they have failed because a perfect society will only work if the society’s members are perfect. 

I put this self-protection software on my phone but I don’t expect to get a single alert. An illusion of safety for the masses, masses that won’t even wear a mask. They are not even worth the labour or the cost it would take to save them. Just give them a free sample of a new flavour of Kool-Aid.

Homo Continuous

Every generation of humankind has thought of itself as living in the modern age, believing that its version of the past really happened and that its future is actually possible.

Geopolitical Conflict

When considering the shifting conflicts between the various nations covering our communal planet, one must ask which is more important: a particular way of life or life itself?