James Broughton channeling Walt Whitman

A toxic fog seems to have settled over planet Earth… people allowing wars, political insanity, environmental suicide, hatred, violence, and profanity to become a 21^st Century norm.

 

It’s not new. And art is one of the few things that can break through our human morass and lubricate our love. When the first Gulf War broke out in 1991, James Broughton responded with this little-known poem:

 

IMP OF THE INNER EAR 

If I seem a maverick kind of rhapsodist

who’d rather be kissed than stamped with approval

blame my blabbermouth on the winged imp

who squats in my ear and loudly deplores

the world’s indifference to the urgency of love.

Since he comes from a region of big ideas

where he specialized in utopian thought

he likes to herald the human experiment

as nature’s most daring gamble with itself.

But now he witnesses with rueful dismay

bodies rotting in the mud of war.

 

Why, he asks, do men revel in murder?

Everyday somewhere on every continent

prodded by hypocrisies of dogma and greed

men are exterminating their own species.

Why spill the blood of a shapely stranger

because his prejudice is not your own?

Why not welcome him to an open armistice,

welcome him into the hug of your home?

Whether ally or alien he is brother of your flesh.

All wars are follies of fratricide.

 

Where are blueprints for a lovable life?

Will bigot and bully continue to triumph?

Belligerent leaders vandalize persons

as readily as they ravage planets.

Granting love a government priority

would risk disarming the arms of the law.

But man must love man or war is forever.

 

That’s how he bugs me, this noisy sprite

Of my inner ear.  He chides me too:

Poet, speak out! Wag the tongue of your heart.

Arm yourself with spunk and sass.

Rouse the heedless from their bastions of snooze.

Blockade every blockheaded general.

Censor the censor who castrates pleasure.

Hexes on rednecks! Poxes on orthodoxes!

Death to the national game of sleazeball!

 

He beseeches me, Ratify your ideals!

Rally those cohorts who have had their fill

of petty rivalry and giant disaster.

Dispatch them across embattled frontiers

to salvage the beauty in human geography.

Send them as missionaries of carnality and zest

to transform calamities into carousals.

Send them to relight a radiance in man

that he may inhabit the flow of his birthright

and partake of divine exhilaration.

 

Fear of love is fear of the sublime.

A caress is a gesture of benediction.

If men would rub their hopes together

and ignite a blaze of shining amity

glory could sing in every drop of their sweat

glory could dance in every spurt of their sperm

and warfares could be sent to the showers.

 

So he prattles on, my preachy sprite,

as he goads me with his ultimate question:

Will you campaign for a redemptive world

planted with flowering beds of soul

where the loveless ones of all the nations

could romp together and heal their wounds

with sturdy trust and tonic merriment?

 

How might we respond to today’s insanities? What creative act could break the polarized morass?

Art by Bee Naidus