A Lot to Take In

There is lots to take in these days.  All round us, locally and globally, and any more global impacts us more than ever. 

For a poet, there is a busy field of vision before me. It's like a whole slue of different species of birds dive bombing and soaring past me.  There is Russia with wings, and Ukraine flying in circles around each other. 

There is the byproduct of the war in Europe which is rising fuel costs flying. high everywhere, and that is leading the price of most everything else upward. 

There is Buffalo. Normal was going on and suddenly it turned to tragedy. But what we now know is that the acts of a gunman had been in the works for some time. Percolating in his head and and journals. It was a special kind of hate brewing. It was the kind that  operates solely upon the fact someone is different than you and it is because of that difference, nothing else about them matters. Not the fact they both need air to survive, that both need food and hydration, that both speak the same language that they are otherwise normal except  for difference in color, or the difference of religion counter the fact that they are both human beings. 

Some people say that this kind of hate is predicated on fear. Some ignorance. I suspect it is some of both.  I think that there are people who are afraid of what the future hold, and that fear is predicated on imagining what it is like to be a white minority in America. 

But there are people, politicians included, practically almost the whole of one political party and people like Tucker Carlson that are telling these people they are being replaced. Replaced by outsiders, Non-Americans and this is being deflected onto blacks, latinos, muslims, asians, etc. 

People like the Buffalo shooter feed off this stuff. They justify this hate and their actions against innocent persons. 

As a poet, sometimes I want to close my eyes, but I can't.

The war crimes against Ukrainian civilians - women and children are horrific and I cannot turn my head away.  Ukraine has found its way into a lot of my poetry lately.  I imagine it will continue to do so for a while.  

​I am anxious to write happy Ukrainian poetry though.