SUMMARY OF LEARNERS INTRO & VOCAB
Raising sheep;
Weaving woolens, satins and tapestries,
Linen from fine-spun flax
Perhaps the first domestic plant
Known to mankind;
Spinning cotton that’s so tough to pick,
As Gandhi taught us to;
Or the silk of infinite toil:
Were those the source of literacy?
Were spirit and wisdom born from poetry
alone?
And prose restricted to accounting and such
trifles,
Because reading was easier to forget
Than the recitation of good poetry,
Nothing more and nothing less?
Censuring sheer lack of wisdom
By simply not memorizing it
And banning its transcription?
Did some epics survive the end of the world,
When all book-learning died?
Was the epic, the Veda, the only thing left alive,
Through the rolling clockwork of the Yuga
Once known time had stopped,
Once all the pages and pixels have vaporized,
(So much arduous work, vaporized!)
With the skill to transmit them?
Water power,
For mills, small boats and fishing.
Was that the source of the numeric?
Or was it in mines,
Or in the ancient chip of flint?
Parallel and perpendicular:
A genial way to teach youngsters geometry?
Survival wisdom
Cast off from nearby massacre,
Out into the hills
Or unto distant shores.
Noble virgins raped,
Cast far from the shielding arms
By the last dying gasps
Of desperate fathers
Lovers, husbands and brothers
All dead in combat.
Out into the wilderness,
Far from warrior-haunted plains,
To distant hills and shores,
Out among dumb shepherds,
And even more reticent fishermen,
Where safety is bought in silence.
To tarry there distant and linger,
Sigh over beauties and laughter long gone,
And count the stitches, carefully,
Reweave the nets,
And devotedly recite surviving rhymes,
Despite the tears they wring from one.
While mighty cities
Were flattened, torched,
Spilled out to sea,
Set adrift in famine and disease,
Blood-greased charcoal spots.
When cities were combed by weapons,
Snuffed out, every peaceful hearth,
For years and decades and centuries,
If God’s need be.
Our nightmares crowded with zombies,
Or zombie-billed movies,
Lunging clumsily to kill and devour us,
Merely starving survivors of this hecatomb?
Phantoms historically recorded in DNA
Of a long forgotten past, best forgotten:
Merely us in less lucky form?
There, tucked away from the zombies
Stashed away from plagued and looting armies,
To teach surviving children, if able.
Always instruct the children,
To recite the poems and count the weaving.
Thus, in bold fisheries
And the delights of downy wool
fine-embroidered,
Of magical books and rare wines,
Traded across a thousand miles and years of
time,
In a civilized way, in our very own way,
During the better years, before and after.
The science of gold’s tinkle and abacus
clicks
And the singular charm of good music
Along shared shores.
Let us speak of civilized ways,
However ephemeral, yet heroic.
What wise men speak of
When their bellies are topped off
And their children, safe and sound asleep.
Every Learner, often and together,
As long as there’s peacetime left.
In courts of law,
Why wash each other’s feet?
The ritual cleansing of jurors, certainly,
Let every litigant wash the feet of his
adversary
And of other celebrants?
Before and after trial?
Let us speak of this forgotten wisdom,
Of God’s mercy for all of us
Reflected in our mercy for the Other,
And of this threat thus calmed
By the miraculous peace of God.
Let us speak of swollen hearts,
Of the passionate liberation of our
affection,
Of the love we’d forgotten for everyone,
Repressed, stifled in our breasts,
For ourselves and everyone else.
Of tears of joy and cries of relief
Of human angels singing the praises of God
Instead of apes praying their stupid demands.
As if we knew what we needed
Better than He,
Except to accept His love.
His tenderness that keeps us alive –
We, lost in the heart of darkness –
By which this chill could be rewarmed,
And every child cradled in tender arms.
The music of laughing babes,
And of great swarms of birds,
From forests as far as the eye can see.
Every front door unlocked,
In dependable security.
Guarded a thousand miles deep,
By warrior valor avowed most worthy.
The sacrifice of starvation, scandalous,
Of plague, inadmissible,
Of injustice, unjustifiable.
Everywhere Learning instead.
Thousand-year life spans,
A question of choice.
With the ethics of newborns:
Infinitely fragile and charming.
Sacrifice vestigial but deeply rooted,
Self-sacrifice, not that of the Other.
Celebration explosive but shallow.
Everywhere apparent, nowhere unseen.
Never again the other way around.
What can I tell you about this peace
technology
Of which we have lost all recall?
Me, mere weapon mentor,
Keen wine bibber,
Ancient druid spokesman
Of long dead prophets,
Mere apologist for the sorrily mistaken?
Harken to the herald of Learners!
The herald, not the hero (Saraute noted).
True heroes and heroines, they are a comin’.
Much deeper-thought Learners than me,
Much better peace technicians,
True lovers of their neighbor,
More abundant among Learners.
Proud to serve as that herald.
Pound it out loud and clear on the Internet,
No matter how fleeting my message
No matter how poorly written.
I spit in the eye of doom,
That you may read me and agree,
Or deny me just as conveniently,
Or better yet, make something better happen.
Harken!
We have just come into
The Kali Yuga, the Age of Destruction,
And are lunging for Satya Yuga, that of
Truth.
History has never been our judge and jury
Sentencing us to the scaffold,
But our past, a mere cracked mirror.
Like an old snakeskin
Sloughed off without knowing it.
Having hit bottom and bounced,
We are on our way to better things,
Whether or not you understand.
It is up to you, young Learners,
With but little help from us
Weapon-tainted elders.
Dragging the coagulated blood
Of every victim of our history.
Starving babies by the billion and
indifferent
To this blot on our souls.
Instead of sniping the poorest,
Every hand to the oars and the bailing!
Every heart in the longing that it succeed.
Every brain helping it along.
The peace mentality of which we should speak.
The requisite technologies will follow
Its awakening… Ours…
There may yet be enough time,
Before the pixels fade, as expected,
Before the world is jumbled once again,
Before bright eyes turn into bitter dust,
Entropy bays its final victory,
And shuts us up forever,
And the Yuga dice get rethrown.
In God’s Name, heroism!
A little common sense, somewhat better heart,
The best possible world,
We can place on the altar of God,
Not this scoundrels’ mediocrity,
This WeaponWorld concentration camp.
Replace it with the heroism of PeaceWorld
Before we are annihilated in any case,
Crushed and incinerated like bugs
By this merciless Universe.
Let blaze our ideals!
Our fondest dreams,
Like the simple chorus of our radios,
More mighty than a second Sun.
May our foremost hopes of peace and
solidarity
Shine brighter than entropy,
Cast a flare into the abyss of Death!
Familiar with is bitter truths,
We could pilot and transcend them,
Into the calm mercy of God.
What do we have to lose?
We who must lose it all in any case.
What are we afraid of learning?
Who know nothing.
Of what are we afraid?
With nothing left to fear.
I defy you to embrace world peace.
Could care less about your origin,
Your many prejudices,
Your fears and your misfortune.
I invite, instead, your honor
To help build human happiness,
As a deputy to this honorable race.
LEARNERS: On the Move from
WeaponWorld to PeaceWorld