I have stayed away from words,
breathless, in my grief,
for too long.
Diversity is my faith.
Equity is my hope.
Inclusion is my love.
Each breath I take is a promise
that things will be better someday.
And, they have been for a time,
in places expanding across space,
across multiple divides.
In a school, then university.
In a church, then a community.
Across a state, on national forums
Each breath inhaled the hate,
expanded and expelled love in its place.
Breaths took down barriers, created programs,
enacted policies, changed syllabi,
created courses and news ways of seeing,
new avenues of progress, new ways of being.
The backlash always came,
in drips and drabs, all the same.
But this! This! It is a fearsome game.
It is not D.E.I. which they decry.
They want to see us hold our breath
and die.
They SNAP food from the mouths of babes.
They ask the aged and disabled to work their own miracles,
heal themselves without medic-aid,
waste away, and die.
They place tariffs on those who stood at our side.
Making us all pay more for less to save their pride.
They fill their pockets with our labor,
changing coins to crypto for their greedy favor.
They extort heroes who fight to protect freedom world-wide
so that dictators and killers can be by their side.
They miss the days when the few controlled the many.
They refuse to compete, or share even one penny;
pennies earned from our labor, not theirs.
Lately, it seems we have not got a prayer.
We seldom did. But, do not despair.
What we did have was the freedom to try.
Now, our hard-won freedom to speak and act is denied.
We are being denied the right to even try.
We still have one another, and our God-given rights.
We will never allow those to be shoved aside.
And at the end of this life we shall hold hands and sigh
We tried.
We tried.
We tried!
MONEY, MONEY, MONEY
Money counts for nothing.
It has no intrinsic worth,
these tiny bits of metal
dug, then foundered from the earth.
Money adds no value to our lives.
Its value lies outside its cost to self.
Its only value is what it tells us.
Money talks after all.
It tells us what we truly value,
whom we raise up, and whom we let fall.
We bet our future on its use,
or bury it in secure vaults.
We use it to boast about greatness
while it hides our basest faults.
It buys the things around us.
It buys the myth of our safety.
It serves to remind us
we are nothing at all;
but, tiny specks in a universe
among many millions just like us,
trying to rise while gravity pulls us
around and down giant black holes.
Money fools us, a tool that uses us,
while we think we rule over others
just like us.
So, we gather it as best we can
to show we are better than
our fellow woman or man.
We cannot rely upon our own souls
to bring wisdom, love and life,
to end the useless strife.
We buy bullets instead of bread.
We drop bombs instead of supplies.
We destroy earth instead of fear.
We believe our own and others’ lies.
Money becomes our grand prize.
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