I showed up at ten pounds or so
And was immediately stuck
With two huge imperfect models of myself
That I must raise…rear, maybe?,,,correct?

Correcting two huge imperfect models
Of my tiny, ten-pound self
Was job enough
But those two models were part
Of a race of huge models,
All of them knowing they know everything
But knowing nearly nothing
And but imperfectly knowing
What little they know
So that my job of correcting two imperfect models
Included perfecting billions of imperfect models
And more
All the giant imperfect models saw themselves
Not as destroyed children
But as improvers of children
Through a process of systematic destruction of children.

There was a slogan arising from myth…A slogan of
      Following a straight and narrow path through lives
Where people seemed mostly to stumble in darkness
Through a maze of jungles and swamps
      Of confrontation and aggression and exclusion
Under the auspices of assorted Gods (gods?)
Waiting at the end of the straight and narrow path
To reward the warmaker
With an eternity of peace and love and plenty:
An odd process of learning peace by practicing war,
                             learning love by practicing hate,
                             learning inclusion by practicing exclusion;
An odd process…
Damn! It’s odd…but worse,
It doesn’t work
And even worse than that
The ten-pound child
Has become 67 years old
And rather than correcting the race of giants
Has for many years
Been part of the race of giants,
Destroying children,
Interfering little in the processes of
Learning peace through practicing war
And learning love through practicing hate and anger
And learning inclusion by practicing exclusion
And come to feel not as an improver of anything
And sometimes as driftwood washed up
By the storms of years
On the highest of tides
Onto the beaches of time
To dry in the sun
Before becoming ashes and smoke from a campfire.

But there are moments when I notice that
I no longer think in terms of
       Nigger and Kike and Raghead and Wop and Slope and Bum and Maniac and……
       Other
But in terms of models of myself
That I might understand and love rather than hate
And might walk with rather than fear or kill.

And there are moments when I realize that
Though having rejected most of religion      As
            Jut another justification for prejudice
                                               and hate
                                               and war…
                                               for exclusion
I have found them to contain seeds of love
                                              and peace
                                              and inclusion
Distorted through centuries of power struggles
Into the collection of fallacies they have become;
But the seeds were planted in me…
Came along with the ten-pound child,
And my real task after years spent in raising my parents
Has been to attempt to maintain that seed
                               And provide it nourishment
So that it might continue growing
              At least in me
And reduce by some small amount
Humanity’s penchant for
               controlling and hating
And shed seeds of peace and love and inclusion
To grow in the ashes of the wars
                  And the compost of the hate
So that the rapidity of change
That has arisen over the past century
Can become redirected
From competition to cooperation,
From rejection to acceptance
From exclusion to inclusion
From war to peace
          and
From hate to love.
Forrest Jewell

2 Comments »

1. ?????? ????????. ???? ?????????, ????? ??????? ? ??????????. ? ????, ??? ?????? ?? ?????? ?????? ? ??????????? ??????….

   Of my tiny, ten-pound self Was job enough But those two models were part Of a race of huge models, All of them knowing they know everything But knowing […….

   Trackback by Kylie Batt — May 4, 2010 @ 6:54 am

2. ??,??????. ????? 5….

   Of my tiny, ten-pound self Was job enough But those two models were part Of a race of huge models, All of them knowing they know everything But knowing […….

   Trackback by Kylie Batt — May 13, 2010 @ 2:25 am

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