More Poems to Chew On

Entrenched
By Karen I. Shragg

Here we go again
Being swallowed up
in linear circles of history
Repeating the ugliest side of herself
living the part of the cliché
That those who do not pay attention
are thus condemned to repeat it
Kidnappers do the unthinkable
Then the victim’s side
comes down even harder
bombs try to show might
in ‘how dare you think we’d negotiate’
explosion of revenge
and end up creating
even more kidnappers
Making one easily forget
On which side of the fence evil resides
This linear cycle of war and retaliation
And more war
Begging the question
Of why we think our kind is so special
When we are uniquely and oh so successfully
Excel at destruction.

Dreaming New Stories Our Way
by Karen I. Shragg

We manifest our stories
In the way
We war
Or don’t war
The way we buy
Or don’t buy
The way we pray
Or don’t’ pray
And near as I can tell
We’re about due for new ones
Oh how I hunger for new ones
We already know the results of stories
Which profess excuses for subordination
And the Earth’s domination from a specie
Whose brain size indicates
At least the potential of knowing better
Who needs to quit cutting its own umbilical cord
With silly notions that trees
Are better off when turned into paper
And printed with portraits of dead white presidents
Oh how we need new stories
That would speak of equality
That would teach how
no one ever benefits from greed
Or from forcing our ways on others
With weapons that only recycle pain
We need stories not of gods
to meet only when you are dead
But of glory one can get by
Getting that we are but one of the delicate creatures
So lucky to live in this universe
On a rare planet
Still able to support the life
Of a specie with more power than we deserve.


Maybe God went Fishing
By Karen I. Shragg

God seems to have left the scene
Allowing his more than loyal subjects
To continue breeding misery
In his name
It couldn’t be HER name
For women are excused from
A claim to god-driven evil
Animal sacrifice of bygone days
Pales in comparison
To bearing witness
strapped-on bombs
Sacrificial children
Ghostly aftermaths
Of innocent bloodshed
A bow to martyrdom gone mad
with countless victims
of a religiosity I dare not understand
What kind of religious fingerprint
Claims goodness comes with higher body counts
All done
In the name of a God
Who seems to have gone fishing
For he is not answering the prayers
Of either side.

Sacrifice
By Karen I. Shragg

War bleeds us of sanity
Humanity’s better side exemplified
by all that fills art museum walls
Vaporizes in the ashes
Of caring who started the madness
In the first place
After bombs rain down and miss their targets
After rubble fills the anguished landscape
After chasing pain with pain
Brings about only more pain
We who watch
morally wounded from the sidelines
Just want it to stop
Forever
All those orphans on both sides
Real victims nick named
collateral damage so the pain of
what we’ve done won’t sting so much
Their tears are just as salty
Their anguish just as deep
As they look among the rubble
In stunned silence for survivors
Looking like they belong to the same people
And deep down
They do.

Just in Time
by Karen I. Shragg

Wild Turkeys
Stream out of upland forests
As if they never left
Round feathered exclamation points
of conservation success
bluebirds dot suburbs
and fly around like golf balls on courses
which bother to set up houses
In glorious testimony to
Efforts of thousands who cared
To build them homes and reintroduce
Them to their old stomping grounds
trumped only by news of Ivory billed sitings
Lord god birds returning
From beyond the grave
just in time to bear witness to
a warmed up planet
and all that will not survive
because we thought we could
focus on individual species
and ignore the way our daily
habits, our increasing numbers
gnaw away at the life support
systems of planet.