The Warning
Young Bacchus
prances across red rivers of lava, she’s
cartwheeling wildly, raucously wailing,
suddenly lands on a
white linen handkerchief tattered and etched on the volcano’s black edge.
Cradling an empty wineskin, she commences a tender
surrender to what some have named fate
while people hover above the seething caldera like
spirits marooned, they shout their pain,
admonish Bacchus in strange tongues above tornadoes of steam;
she’s pelted by an ominous,
hissing toxic rain.
These old country dancers who flowed like blue rivers in
circles of love and of family until murderous fascists, sallow cheeked men
stiff and passive, thin men eaten inside from slow growing cancers
of blame, fueled by fiery spores of hate for the
stranger, callously delivered these mothers and fathers, uncles, children,
sisters, aunts, grandparents and brothers in cars of iron and blood meant for
cattle
to barbwire camps where nobody, nobody, mattered.
Bacchus, now eighty years’ older, stands as witness arm
in arm with stern Chronos and the oracle
Pythia, throws down the wineskin, torn and stained gray from
apathy, terror, the desecration
of vineyards, fields of lavender and vetch ripped open, blackened
by bombs, by the wretchedness
of humans. She’s draped in history’s shadow across an
ocean where she soberly watches, listening
for omens; yes, even hoping people of today will heed
those screams, that anguished warning
erupting long ago, and will gaze into time’s mirror of present
and past, wholeheartedly consider
how to plunge into life’s blue river in this century:
will we permit those ignorant
dividers of people, arrogant oligarchs who fabricate and scapegoat,
worship concrete walls, whose hubris poisons earth and
sky, to explode in our face-booked distracted faces like magma-infested
mountains or will one more massacre be allowed –if not hallowed--by lovers of the almighty gun, by fear of ‘the
other’, to smear our screens and
front pages before we awaken
from trance, this overwhelmed stupor, to step from our encapsulated
homes, dance and march,
take a knee across the decade’s fields of sport and stage
to transcend futility’s drug, resist with
our sisters and brothers, re-possess power, migrate to our
true fertility, and lay down
on the tracks to block their hell-bound trains of dark iron
and grief from running this time?
Bacchus ponders, nods to
Pythia and Chronos as she looks deeply into our futures through eyes
that shine but cannot see
how gods might matter. Her eyes close, she prays we do no harm
as we turn and walk
away from the massive volcano’s lip. The air clears in the verdant valley
below where we now are
free to be with those who sang and danced, laughed and loved
in ghetto, on farm, joining
them in dissolving madness, as they teach us to flow, to fight,
to redeem ourselves in
great reverberating circles of peace and safety, of reverent quiet,
boisterous joy, of simple
human goodness.
