Immigrants or Allotments

Remove the migrants, the waitstaff and farmers; kick out the gardeners, nannies, and maids. What do you get?

Are you going to do it: grub around in dirt all day, dirty faces, nappies, and houses?

Who is going to clean your resorts, mow your golf course, work your slaughterhouses? You? Your children? Your unemployed, needy retirees?

Or should the low-wage grunt work be passed along to veterans, with no benefit K. P. duty for life, cleaning up after and feeding their lessers and taking orders from bone-spurred millionaires who have never had a non-golf-related callous or injury in their lives?

Are the hiring class going to create jobs for us lesser souls doing the work of serfs, slave labour and wages, taxed their employer’s share and eating the leftovers off their plates or arrested for dumpster-diving?

Are we to eat only what we can plant in rented allotments, unwatered by rain, drowned in floods, burnt by flame or run-off, and unpollinated due to climate change and dead bees? Or do we beg for crumbs from the master race and pray for global annihilation to succeed in wiping humanity out?

Ronda R. Scott-Marak

©️ 10 January 2025

Cyclic (Persephone’s Dance)

With thanks to Cosy Sheridan for the mental prompt

Brown Seeds, Bright leaves, Green Boughs, Berries; Shoots and Blossoms, Blooms fruit and swell

Cool winds, snowstorms, fresh’ning breezes;

Grey rains, Ice rinks

Puddles, Swimsuits

Dusk and bonfires, 

Dark skies and hearths, Dawn and snowdrops, 

Day, Sand and Surf

Spinning, Turning, 

dried leaves to snow; Circling, Whirling, 

Live, dance and grow

Ronda R. Scott-Marak

©️ 6 August 2023

We March

Like the Burning Bush, 

we burn but are not consumed. 

Neither drive nor ire. 

I have been considering this week which burns brighter: 

Does love or hate, determination or stubborn will, fury or desire flare up and become embers that glow and last? 

Do our flares of intention become firestorms that destroy everything in their path or burning bushes that draw others to the flames, warming and fanning our intent while not burning out and flaring to a blinding flash?

Ronda R. Scott-Marak

© 14 October 2018

Compassion, Affinity, Neglect, or Rapport?

How many people actually pay attention, are truly aware of their surroundings, feeling other people’s joy, pain, wonder, and confusion?

 

How many notice the fragrance of nature’s growth or inhale the stench of human-made refuse;
assuming that ordure is all that there is?

 

How many well up with tears over a stranger’s sorrow,
smile with pleasure at the sight of a smiling dog or a laughing child;
not too self-absorbed to react viscerally to someone else’s emotion?

 

How many care about anyone other than themselves,
every other living thing in the world,
accepting the sentience of others unlike themselves?

 

Who among us worries as much for strangers
on the other side of the world, the other side of the tracks as we do for the things we want for ourselves?

 

Is empathy a lost art, a word with no longer any valid meaning,
has the reflective bubble in which we now exist replaced the faces behind us in the mirrors of our own egos?

 

Ronda R. Scott-Marak

© 11 August 2017

 

Outside-Inside-Out

After a year of 2020 Vision

of looking inward with forced introspection, 

have we become agoraphobic or socially inept?

If given the choice, will we venture out of doors? 

Like a cooped-up dog on the first day of outdoor sniffs after a long winter, will we give a joyous bark to announce our return or doubtfully stand wary on the front stoop?

We have learned to hibernate, to dwell alone, together staring into little boxes and large screens, to live in stasis.

We huddle in our own safe bubbles, longing for the return of our lives, like the Messiah returning us to what was—to the shops, parks, clubs, and the garden—just not that Garden.

It tempts us with its proximity: outside events, work, school, travel, and other people; dressing in real clothes, wearing a watch, wearing lipstick, going bare-faced, and seeing other people’s smiles. 

We can’t wait, or are we not so ready?

Time has changed us over the last year; we are set in our new ways, lazy, unfocused, unregimented by the world’s plans for us, the requirement to go, do, and be.

For the many people who felt alone before this “we’re all in this together social bubble”, — they are now on the inside, looking out — and uncertain if they can once again learn to live by being on the outside looking in.

Ronda R. Scott-Marak

© 13 April 2021

Hiroshima, Dresden, or Nagasaki

More wars to end war;

definition of despair

death doesn’t halt Death.

Ronda R. Scott-Marak

©️ 5 August 2017

Maelstrom

Why do we always pray for peace but never give thanks for peace when we are lucky enough to find it?

Why are we seemingly incapable of making Peace rather than constantly waging war against each other and ourselves?

Why do we always react in retrospect but never learn from and teach history? 

Why aren’t we taught to look backwards so as to be able to think first and move forward with our feet on the ground instead of our heads in our hands?

Ronda R. Scott-Marak

©️4 May 2024