Fog horn bellow romps.
Many men, they brood, snarl, bark.
Bred fight dogs, panting.
-@momolinamedia
A world divided needs the poet in you. The careful, deliberate voice in all of us needs expression now. And the place where it most needs to be heard is in that often vulgar, vile, vicious vector of all things rash, rushed, and unreasonable: social media.
You are hereby challenged to
write only poetry in social media posts about politics from this point forward. Be it haiku, rap, nursery rhyme, or some
other meticulous mesh of well-meant words, take the time it takes to craft what
you communicate to your fellow humans. Write
like you have something of value to say.
And why poetry? Because poetry conjures the evocative,
layered nature of language to help us suckle meaning from the muddled murk of
what we think we believe we think we feel. Poets are to words and thoughts what watchmakers are to gears and
levers, forging form and function to help us feel the pulse and rhythm of life
beyond our current space and time. Poetry is a song of Time, a humming
hymn of action bowing to progress, to that which is greater than Itself.
Poetry is language evolved. And language is the first human
technology. In language, humans
converted the energy of grunts and moans into words the way computers convert digits
into information. Language was the Internet before electricity. It is where we searched stories for meaning,
for joy, for truth and understanding. Language taught fire and taught
medicine and taught philosophy. Language is the driver of human
evolution, the all-spark, the engine of human understanding, and the catalyst
of human potential. Language is the mortar of civilization and, as poet
Margaret Atwood declares, war is what happens when language fails.
And these days war is the story
every day. Our earth is swollen with the
waste of insatiable consumption as we wade through distraction bitter in the
bliss of detached connections while the world awaits our fingertips offering a
mood switch at every click of clicks from which consequence comes in a blizzard
blitz of enticements we can’t resist leaving us desensitized and comfortably
numb while death and destruction run amok among our young. We are in a world of trouble. And yet, that trouble breeds poetry.
And poetry is a sublimely designed
vehicle, a finely tuned engine, and a masterful driver of ideas. And rhyming
poetry is particularly effective at this because it is easy on the ears and
easier to recall and can bring beauty to pain, empathy in small doses. And poetry offers answers in the questions it
poses. And we need more questions pulled
from the ashes and the dust, from trouble and the history from which it is
thrust.
And we need poetry that rhymes;
poetry that has correspondence in the terminal sounds of its composition. Breaking down the meaning of rhyme releases a
powerful analogy for what we need in these times of discord and disunity. Rhyme is the correspondence in the terminal
sounds of a composition.
And correspondence is a close
similarity, connection, or equivalence; something that one thing shares with
another. This could be a value, an experience, or a moment in time.
Correspondence is a point of connection between things. Yes rhyme is the
correspondence in the terminal sounds of a composition and correspondence is a
point of connection between things.
And if terminal refers to forming
or situated at an end or extremity of something, and also refers to a
transportation route or a station along a route, then terminal refers to an
ending that serves as the starting point to something else. Terminal means
transitional. And rhyme is the correspondence
in the terminal sounds of a composition.
And if composition is the nature of
something's ingredients or constituents; the way in which a whole or mixture is
made up, or, alternately, a composition is a work of music, literature, or art,
then composition is the make up of a creation.
And rhyme is the correspondence in the terminals sounds of a
composition. Thus, if after breaking
rhyme down we put it back together, rhyme
is a point of unity between things in transition as they make up a creation.
The present rhymes in two
directions with its past and its future. Molecules rhyme in the various
forms of matter. Atoms rhyme in fusion
and in fission. Cells rhyme when they
divide in anything that is living. The artist rhymes the real and the imagined
the way the builder rhymes the blueprint with the building.
We all rhyme with some ancestor who
wore our faces in black and white, and spoke our voices in the darkest nights,
and walked our gait in a day under the same sun, breathing the same oxygen in
the breath you took as these words were written.
Rhyme is like that. Rhyme is,
like life, symmetry, balance, and the repletion of repetition. Life is
rhyme. And any progress in this life must rhyme with the core, timeless
needs that all people in all places at all times share: self-expression,
togetherness, purpose. Progress, as it rhymes what we are with what we
could be, progress is rooted in where we are and pulls us forward to where we
should be.
And we who want the world to
progress have to change our story from only powerfully pointing out what we are
against and clearly calling out what’s wrong, to artfully attracting people to
what we are for and building the beautiful on what’s right. We need our politics to become poetry.
And thankfully our planet is
round. So if you walk your mind outside and go down left, all the
way to left, as far left as you can go, you can greet your neighborhood Black
Blocker with a warm “Anarchism is order, Government is chaos” in the
morning. Alternatively, if you walk your mind right, all the way right,
as far right as you can go, you can say “minimum government, maximum freedom”
to your friendly neighborhood Libertarian at the end of the day. And
they, being next-door neighbors, can be heard arguing across the narrow alley
between them.
Thankfully we are on a round planet
so the extreme left and extreme right can yell at each other from across that dark
alley of ideology. And we can imagine them rhyming slogans back and forth
at each other:
“Free Minds will make Free Markets!”
“Property is Theft, Eat the Rich!”
“Minimum Government, Maximum
Freedom!”
“Political power comes from the
barrel of a gun!”
“If your aren’t Libertarian, you
aren’t paying attention!”
“The direction, insurrection.
The solution, revolution!”
And in all that confusion, there is
still rhyme, a point of unity between things in transition as they make up a
creation. And in the rhyme there is a
radical center, a radical center where white is a color and man is a myth,
where we are all people of color, gender unspecific. Where humans are animals,
and the planet is us all. Where religion listens when science
calls. Where science acknowledges its limits. There is a radical
center that holds us together. And you
are there. And all are welcome. It
is radical in the mathematical sense, meaning at the root.
And the root is clenched to the
earth, balled up in twists like the veins in a fist raised for freedom. And freedom is getting information instead of
ideology. Freedom is learning from it all,
from the right to the left, to consider it all then take the best and leave the
rest. We can learn from capitalists
about how to catalyze and learn from socialists about how to prioritize. We can learn from politicians about how to
compromise and learn from activists about how to lock eyes on the prize. In Freedom even perceived enemies have
something to teach. Every heart and mind
is within freedom’s reach. In freedom is
the ultimate rhyme.
Rhyme is why your children love the
Hip Hop that recycles your favorite songs, and why so many who once loved Dr. Suess
grew up to love Hamilton. Rhyme
is for dreamers and I ain’t the only one who believes there’s some reason Lennin
sounds like Lennon and the literary Cannon wields a cannon and the only way to
set the mind free is to hip hop hibby to the hibby to hip hip a hoppa you don’t
stop a rockin to the bang bang boogie till up jumps the boogie to the rhythm of
the boogie to be. Yes even when rhymes are silly, they are, at
least, silly.
And believe it or not, there are
those among us who look down on rhyme as childish and simplistic. The
same folks, I suspect, who look down on the insect; the spider perched above in
a galaxy of web, spun from it’s own body.
These be the same folks who look down on the lizard whose every skin
cell is an individual artist in a symphony of metachrosis; who even look down
on the dogs whose love they cherish. What fools we can be when convinced
of our own garish complexity.
But the most powerful poetry is the
simple symbol, especially when it is rhymed with the infinite, divine, purpose
of progress. Every movement for progress
has been rooted in simple symbols: Gandhi in his Khadi at the loom
spinning resistance to the British exploitation of an Indian cotton boom; the Zulu
marching a dance to freedom; Freedom Riders singing Mississippi terrorism
to submission.
Progress is poetry, each one of us
a syllable, a word in a phrase of days done, of days to come, of future people
who wish you could see you: a ménage of
hues with treasures of talents and tools; the truth empowered to renew and
rejuvenate, who refuse to resuscitate the old ways that confuse and reduce a
human being to a gender, class, or race; who redefine politics as we know it as
poetry.
And we are what democracy looks
like. We are power to the people. We are the future in the flesh. We hold the hands that weave tomorrow. We think the minds that conceive what’s
next. We dream in color and we’ve come
to wake the world up. We reach out and
connect like webs to form networks to keep in touch. We destroy the constructs that divide
us and build bridges of unity. From
every country to every city, we are the world community. And we must be encouraged because the
revolution will be rhymed and it is coming right on time.
So be you in the streets stomping
for justice or in power writing policy; be you in schools deconstructing
ignorance or as artist creating space for the visionary; whatever you be, be a
poet and be encouraged. If you can speak,
speak poetry. If you tweet, tweet
poetry. Take time to make your work a
poem.
And if you can walk, walk a song even
if you walk alone. f all you do is
listen, listen for the truth and listen for encouragement for whatever it is
you do. Rhyme the history of progress with
your every forward breath and make your dream world come true. Lift your little bit of this 7.532 billion and
know that we are building a world for our children’s, children’s, children’s
children. We are making politics into poetry.
And so you are hereby challenged
to write only poetry in social media posts about politics from this point
forward. Be it haiku, rap,
nursery rhyme, or some other meticulous mesh of well-meant words, take the time
it takes to craft what you communicate to your fellow humans. Write like you have something of value to
say. Make your politics poetry.
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