March, Twenty-eleven
And the guys down at the paddle tennis courts
Ask, “Marv, what’s goin’ on?”
For nine years now
We’ve fought in Iraq,
Afghanistan.
Africa boils, as Egypt,
Libya, Ivory Coast
Revolt.
Across a little stretch of sea,
Yemen, Syria, Jordan, Lebanon—
Even Bahrain, for Chrissakes—
Churn and grumble.
Don’t even ask
About the shambles
Of nuke-potent Pakistan.
“Marv,” they ask, “What’s goin’ on?
How will this end?”
As if the Earth had never seen
Such gross grotesquerie.
But consider:
Grotesque is what we are.
Consider the first sin—
Just 5 pages
Into that thick book.
They’ll tell you
It was disobedience—
C’mon, really?
Nah!
The knowledge of good and evil—
The loss of innocence—
Somehow, in god’s twisted mind,
That was the original sin,
That brought about the fall of man.
Imagine it!
Knowing good from evil
Cost us paradise.
And just two pages later,
That same Bible,
Reports our first murder.
Motive? It seems god,
Evidently a carnivore,
Preferred Abel’s fat lamb
Over Cain’s ripe fruit.
Not many pages later,
That same god,
Disgusted and disheartened,
Decided to drown
Every living thing
Except Noah’s family
And some creature breeding pairs
(Seven if kosher,
Just one pair otherwise).
Why?
Though clearly pissed,
I guess he was too lazy
To start, again, from scratch.
Let’s skip ahead
To the wonderful story
Of the golden calf.
For dancing around a sculpture,
Levite zealots, at Moses’ command
Murdered three thousand of their kin—
Brothers, friends, neighbors—
That’s what the holy book asserts—
For dancing around a calf.
You get the picture?
You see where this is going?
The massacre at Jericho,
The savagery of Judges
David and the Philistines.
Don’t even ask about
The Persians, Turks, and Greeks,
About the glory that was Rome
And the Huns that brought it down.
Capeesh?
“What’s going on?” you ask.
More grotesquerie;
“How will it end?”
For six thousand years
We have never seen
So much as one half century
Of simple peace.
How will it end?
It never ends.
(3/31/11)