...

Poem Without A Title
by Charles Simic
I say to the lead
Why did you let yourself
Be cast into a bullet?
Have you forgotten the alchemists?
Have you given up hope
In turning into gold?

Nobody answers.
Lead. Bullet. With names
Such as these
The sleep is deep and long.

In a recurring dream, we implore the menacing men in red tunics to lay down their arms.
At first, they resist and then slowly, they begin to set down the gas nozzles with which they had tethered the land, holding it hostage.

The pile grew into a precipitous mountain and when like Icarus, it reached the sun, melted into a lake of liquid metal.

In silence, the community came out as one and fashioned melodious gongs and other musical instruments from the molten metal.

The sound was magical and the men in red robes, who had witnessed such incredible alchemy, knew they had done the right thing.

Everything that was not suffered to the end and finally concluded, recurred and the same sorrows were undergone. ~ Siddhartha by Herman Hesse.

In recurring - often mystical - dreams, all my presumptions are encapsulated. What, after all, is more presumptuous than a dream?

OMID – HOPE (PERSIAN)

I sent my Soul through the Invisible,
Some letter of that After-life to spell:
And by and by my Soul return’d to me,
And answer’d “I Myself am Heav’n and Hell:” - The Rubaiyat by Omar Khayyam

This dream of hope projects my desires.

I am a witness.

I am amongst men, women and children dressed in long white tunics. We stand barefoot on fertile ground.

At first, there are no words just thousands of smiles that flash like stars. Tears flow, but they are tears of joy.

This is my axis mundi. This is the center of the world – neither heaven nor hell (or both) – where all god heads are worshiped as one (or not). Our feet are planted in the ground like seeds then slowly, tears run together like a river irrigating the land that once bled black blood then almost suffocated itself.

Instead, our tears made more fertile what was once fallow, allowing us to begin to ripen and grow toward a sun that was obscured by smoke, cynicism and hopelessness. All we could do was smile because the oil had changed and we thrived once again in the land of the rising sun. The atrocities are now distant memories and children can dream once more of being queens and kings.

In a recurring dream all my presumptions and hopes are nurtured. It is a dream of possibilities. As a young boy did, once upon a time, I had the audacity to hope that it would come to pass… that it would not disappear when my eyes were unveiled to the light of dawn.

Shell Hell - Test for a large scale digital print

The pump jack breathes life into the oil industry and powers the ambulance that rushes grandma to hospital while simultaneously sucking breath out of communities that supply oil. In what has been termed, “the resource curse,” the paradox of oil is that it fuels economies, wealth, exploitation, environmental degradation, poverty and conflict.

Fear is not the natural state of civilized people. - Aung San Suu Kyi

Planet in Peril 6:16
Lisa Ling travels to the Niger Delta, where the thirst for oil has created a deadly situation.