What is conflict, and why so much of it – not only in this unending time
of war but all the way back to “Eve . . . Cain . . . Moses . . .” as Norman
Fischer puts it in this, his most timely of books? How to stop it? Can we
break the cycle? Who’s to blame? Is it in our genes, “engraved on the
tongue?” “Why can’t we just get along ? How smooth out these trying
feelings ?” “can we adjust the heat ?/ is there something we can take/
to make this somehow easier/ to make it go away. . . “’do you have// an
anti-inflammatory ?’” “’oh, and you said it was empty ?’” someone (one of
many voices here, none of them named but all of them all too real) asks,
taking some offense at something (who knows what -- does it even matter?)
and now ready to throw the first punch. But stop! Hold it! Enough already!
– “choose another thought/ or wait for the thought” as Fischer says,
pointing the way to the cure for what ails us.

Conflict should be required reading for everyone.

11.5.11
Stephen Ratcliffe

From Slowly but Dearly:

ANOTHER PLANET

in tall grasses
we are thinking
of what we are in
sunshine wondering
where we came from
among flowers listening
to sounds of birds, black —
birds trilling lasciviously
extending themselves toward us
beside the pond we are dutifully
imagining what our life will be like
after we are dead and will have no wish to
think or feel or worry about anything anymore
in the sky we fondly speculate about dear loved
ones who are lost far away probably also looking
for us among the tall grasses of our displaced thinking
we who are still thinking beside the pond as the frogs
croak and the cicadas shriek and the owls strangely (because
it is day) hoot as they never have before under the clouds in the trees whose
branches are knocking together in the breeze among the shade of the trees beside
the creek winding by where the willows are gesturing flagrantly in new bud we
are calculating how we’ll spend our remaining days our lifetime storehouse of
gathered information and music sensation and grief: how strange that in these
purported places we mimic
a colorful life we’ve never lived worry about a determining death we’ll never die
scheme out desires we’ll never fulfill sighs we’ll never sigh loves we’ll never love
and dreams too painfully real for our impassioned slumbers