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Original Content at https://www.opednews.com/articles/Riding-the-elephant-by-Gary-Lindorff-Elephant-Slaughter_Elephants_Mother-Earth_Poetry-160503-608.html (Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher). |
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May 3, 2016
Riding the elephant
By Gary Lindorff
Empathizing with the mighty elephant. There is a world out there that needs to be judged and ultimately fail, or we might as well all just go to hell.
::::::::
There is an elephant king
lying flat out on the ground,
wasted.
His life was giving rides.
I know exactly how he feels,
that's the crazy part . . .
To be used I mean,
by those with tiny dreams.
(Elephants actually walk on their toes!
They barely make a sound
because the pads of their feet
surround what they step on.)
This old one is done tip-toeing,
is lying in the dust,
imprisoned by the scale
of what used to be his eminence!
His trumpeting voice
reduced to a mere
fluting in his brain;
whatever he once wanted to trumpet.
He used to dream of rampaging
through the village,
bulldozing huts,
scattering the tiny people.
How hard it is sometimes
to remember
to be proud
of what we are.
(Article changed on May 3, 2016 at 08:18)
Authors Website: https://garylindorff.wordpress.com
Authors Bio:
Gary Lindorff is a poet, writer, blogger and author of five nonfiction books, three collections of poetry, "Children to the Mountain", "The Last recurrent Dream" (Two Plum Press), "Conversations with Poetry (coauthored with Tom Cowan), and a memoir, "Finding Myself in Time: Facing the Music". Lindorff calls himself an activist poet, channeling his activism through poetic voice. He also writes with other voices in other poetic styles: ecstatic, experimental and performance and a new genre, sand-blasted poems where he randomly picks sentence fragments from books drawn from his library, lists them, divides them into stanzas and looks for patterns. Sand-blasted poems are meant to be performed aloud with musical accompaniment.
He is a practicing dream worker(with a strong, Jungian background) and a shamanic practitioner. His shamanic work is continually deepening his partnership with the land. This work can assume many forms, solo and communal, among them: prayer, vision questing, ritual sweating, and sharing stories by the fire. He is a born-pacifist and attempts to walk the path of non-violence believing that no war is necessary or inevitable.