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July 20, 2022
If war prevails / Before war prevails
By Gary Lindorff
If war prevails / If the world doth end, / If everything falls down / Like London Bridge
::::::::
If war prevails
If the world doth end,
If everything falls down
Like London Bridge
And there is no one left
To built it up again
With Iron bars
Or silver and gold . . .
If 2 + 2 stops equalling 4 . . .
If we all get microwaved . . .
(My fair lady)
If a thousand cities are destroyed
(Tomorrow or Friday),
I cannot tell you what I see.
I can only tell you
I won't miss anything
Because I won't be here . . .
(Such as how this street smelled
After a rain.)
No way to resurrect that smell . . .
(. . . My fair lady)
But before war prevails
I can tell you that
Anonymity is better than nothing.
Even memory loss
Is better than losing
Any possibility of resurrection!
So, before war prevails
Let us ponder together:
Who, if not us,
Will mark the unremarkable days
Of unsympathetic infinity?
If war prevails
And all the flowers
Have returned to ash,
What will become of
The memory of hummingbird?
And (let us also ponder):
Who will notice when
The full moon
Tries to knit the wasteland back together
With pins and needles?
My fair lady . . .
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.