Death of an Oracle

Gerald Stern said poets had a sacred calling. They must not allow the oppressed to remain voiceless, the crimes of the oppressor to go unnamed or memory to be obliterated.

“There is no love without justice,” he would say. “They are identical.”

[consortiumnews.com]

{He was unyielding. He told me, but perhaps more importantly showed me, that I must also be unyielding. We would not, he assured me, be rewarded by the wider society for our obstinacy, nor would we often be understood, but we would be free. And there would be those, especially the marginalized and oppressed, who would see in our defiance an ally, and that, in the end, was all that truly mattered.}

You know who you are. Whether it be from within your indoctrination, or your full support, you know what the powerful do to others, you would not accept on yourselves. Love of country and patriotism is one thing, but you are also a world citizen. When our western governments bring harm onto so many around the globe while also destroying our planet doing so, you're just as evil as they are within your silence, speaking against those who attempt to inform, and full fledged compliance. You don't even recognize our own oppression as they periodically capture more of us sending us into the shadows of poverty, despair, and death. Currently having been exacerbated this year as we watch our bothers and sisters in Europe and Africa being devastated. These worldly bothers and sisters of ours only receive silence and compliant rhetoric of false indoctrination and purposely distorted history.

{“Half the world is at war or preparing for it or recovering from it. Moreover, a sizeable portion of the good people of the world are in political prisons of one kind or another, and a fourth are starving; and we are contemptuous not only of human life but all life on the planet, if not the universe; and we are in a kind of trap, and coldness of heart has become the dominant mode, and the life we force ourselves to lead is degrading; and almost all governments are inept and corrupt and brutal; and we live by delusion, and there is very little dignity left and very little awe; and we may perhaps indeed be evil or indifferent creatures altogether, as the cruel incendiaries among us have for centuries suggested; and in my own country ugliness is apotheosized, and money is worshipped more than ever before; and we elect weasels to office; and we carefully destroy most of what is good from the past; and we murder and rape and thieve with ease; and we bore ourselves to death; and we either believe in dark and mindless things or pretend to be governed by systems and rules we neither understand nor believe in; and we hate the brain; and we are deeply pessimistic. Although there are some pockets of resistance: we produce art and we are somehow great in medicine and astronomy; and we dance and write poetry; and we still live for the future; and for one drop of water, the thirsty among us would gather and weep.”}