Devolution

Since the Trayvon Martin tragedy in Florida, and in the current wave of vitriolic, often senseless shrieking from folks on dang near EVERY side of this issue, the bloom is coming off my rosy idealism. I’m so attracted to the Buddhist notion of opening the mind (and heart) to compassion, but I’m beginning to wonder if humans aren’t simply programmed to club each other.

At times like this, it seems clear to me we didn’t flower in some sacred garden. Surely we evolved from blind, bottom-feeding fish, because we’re still not much smarter than, say, bird-brained peacocks. I mean, think about the parallels: even though the big males in our flock have PLENTY to eat, seven gorgeous acres to wander, safe nighttime roosts out of the elements, and roughly 1.3 hens each (try not to picture a 1/3 hen), the males still chase each other around trees. And they still square off for sudden mid-air collisions, where they try to stab each other with their sharp, bony leg-barbs. Sound like anyone you know?

We may THINK we’re higher-order animals now, but we sure don’t act like it most of the time. The arts, intellectual & technological advances, genteel patio parties, laws, and peace-promoting (at least in theory) religions…they’re just fancy skins over our tiny, hard muscles, wound tight by instinct, and ready to spring. It seems the truth is, I want your cave, you want my woman, and we both want Gluk’s dead squirrel. And his awesome dinosaur-bone xylophone.

I hope I’m wrong. I hope there’s hope for us. Because Ray & I have had three sons Trayvon’s age, and every time I see a picture of that child, it splits me right down the middle. I don’t know what garden we started out in people, but I don’t much like the one we’re in now…

WAR GARDEN

Another hot day in the Garden.

Your people lean on sawed-off hoes,

guard a flimsy pea line. Our people

don’t eat peas, but we want them

anyway. We hang back

from the line with blunt spades

stolen from a dig—prehistoric 

settlement built of hoes and spades.

Both sides have time to kill.

We skim the same manual:

            Verily I say unto you,

            Blood won’t make it grow, etc. etc.

But who follows directions?

Yours and mine, we pour it on,

plow it under, plow it under,

two thousand layers deep,

a rich compost of elbows,

inner thighs, backs of necks,

schoolboy ankles.

One of yours slips in the muck.

In a clamor of implements he’s pinned,

verdigris sundial nailed through his ribs.

For a time he waters your dead peas,

our dry seeds, until

he’s just another mud-hard stepping stone

in our crooked Garden path.

We’re all just ticking gardeners—

time and time and time again.