Butterfly’s Wings

Everything is interconnected;

Poor decisions made a century ago led to a half-century of deprivations and conflicts

Well-intentioned choices made by powerful people changed borders, governments,
created countries, and destroyed cultures and histories.

Displaced people, upset by Empire and cultural changes split off into ever more narrow factions,
 religious fracturing, extremism, violence, intolerance, and hatred.

The desire for unbridled control led to ever-changing alliances, wars, and overthrown governments; the enemies of enemies became friendly allies eventually reverting to even greater enemies than those feared initially.

Those new enemies, knowing so much about their previous allies, turned that knowledge into cultural and actual weapons with the never-ending outcome violence, attacks, insurgencies,
and the mass murder of civilians and the exodus of refugees.

Migration of desperate people combined with global climate change, weather anomalies, famine, drought, floods, and other natural disasters resulted in political discord, closed borders, hatred, blame, and distrust of the other, anti-Muslim and revival and increase of antisemitism resulting
in the rising popularity of insular and autocratic governments.

Greed, the exponentially increasing desire for fortune, power, religious, cultural, sectarian, sexual, tribal and gender-based hatred having an inordinate effect on economies, violence, acceptance, and national and international ethos systems  

Technologies designed to improve lives adapt to encroach on living; causing insecurity, fear, interference, lies, theft, and loss of trust, truth, and independent thought.

Technology also leading to loss of jobs and entire industries, causing more need by people receiving an ever-diminishing portion of income and benefits while corporations and the wealthy become even more prosperous.

Every year, decade, month, week, day, and hour someone’s choice and action will be the catalyst for an entire creation, destruction, or unintended or undesired circumstance; everything is interconnected.

Your unthinking words or deeds might result in another Treaty of Versailles, another Cause of Action, Hiroshima, Overthrown Government, Al Qaeda, Daesh, Iran, Iraq, Libya, Afghanistan, Syria, Pearl Harbor, Tito, Mogadishu, Chernobyl, Fascisti, Pol Pot, Mao, Kim Jong-un, or Hitler.

History, past, present, and future are the roots, trunk, branches, leaves, and fruits of our lives; think before action or speech. Feed or prune the Tree of Life as needed, but don’t be responsible for any destructive growth undermining our foundations.

Ronda R. Scott-Marak

© 5 December 2019

Infernal Triptych

For California, (with thanks, and dedicated to Ross Steiner Z”L)

 “Ashes, Ashes, We All Fall Down”

Sparks, wind, kindling 

Wildfire, trees, businesses, homes 

Lives burnt into ash. 

Ronda R. Scott-Marak 

© 15 October 2019

“Seemingly Weightless Sliver of Ash” 

Dreamed lives left behind

Memories and futures burnt

Deadly Winds of Change.

Ronda R. Scott-Marak 

© 28 October 2019

"Phoenix Rising from Ash”

Flames burning, cleansing

Cauterising, destroying

Rebirth from ashes?

Ronda R. Scott-Marak 

© 31 October 2019

Lyric(al) Poetry

(for Patti, Carrie, Vance, and Ann)

Write as you’d sing it

Phrases, rhythms, and intent

Sing like a writer

Ronda R. Scott-Marak

© 20 October 2019

Grace Notes

It's chilly, but I'm warm enough.

My muscles ache, but I can still walk.

The clouds are grey, but the trees are in colour.

The squirrels are hoarding, but I have food to share.

My footsteps play counterpoint to my heart’s beating drum. 

The traffic is noisy, but I can hear distant singing.

My nose is running, but I can still breathe; 

it is mid-October, and I can smell the air.

The days grow shorter, but I am nearly home; 

the nights are long, but my books and bed await me.

Ronda R. Scott-Marak

© 13 October 2019

​

Reaching

Look with awe upon that you cannot imagine;

overwhelmed by the brightness of staring directly into the sun.

You may think that you are focused on the darkening eclipse,

but the luminosity of that which you cannot see is overwhelming.

Dazzling jewels and the shimmer of molten gold,

colours too intensely saturated and brilliant to comprehend;

the actual sight of which would burn you into coal and ash.

Inside the core of yourself, stretch out your mind, 

reaching with intention toward the least part;

what would your fingertips touch, that foot,

which is closest to your illusory goal?

It is in the reaching, not the touching that encompasses the reward;

the desire for the worldly prize that obscures the divine.

Ronda R. Scott-Marak

© 24 September 2019

Tick

Just a second,
Minute by minute;
Life happens in its own time.
I’ll do it later,
Second by second;
Suspense swells and deflates.
As soon as I’m done,
Hour by Hour;
Substance crumbles to dust.
In a moment,
Day in and day out;
Infinity expands… and I wait.
The Thief of Time is Time

Ronda R. Scott-Marak
© 18 March 2013 

Autumnal Equinox

Is the Day half Light or is it Night that’s half Dark?
In whose realm do we find the grey?
Divided by time and spectrum, cockcrow and nightingale’s song;
with fall comes the ebbing of Radiance and the rising of Shadow.
The wind changing from balmy breezes to polar gusts tell the future of the leaves.
The Brilliance of sunlit leaves fade and become the Gloom of nature’s yearly sleep;
leaving empty nests and branches in the muted autumn days.
Overnight the temperatures sudden drop from summer heat to autumn crisp presages winter ice.
Does the Day recede like falling tides,
or does the Night encroach like the rising tides?

Ronda R. Scott-Marak
© 22 September 2016