[Newspoetry] Let no hate consume you

[Donald L Emerick]

I don't hate that damn Bush.
I don't hate that damn Osama.
I don't even hate that damn Kerry.
What would be there to hate,
as damning hate would be there?

As a person, Bush might be a fine fellow --
but his addiction to politics corrupts him,
for he plays to the ensettled crowd,
and takes from that crowd his energy,
his inner sense of self-righteousness --
bursting into screaming fits of anger
when he meets any reasoned opposition,
saying any lie that wins him his goal,
which lets him pursue unfolding his ego.

I do despise most of his policies,
but his policies are not him at all,
are they? No man is a bundle of issues,
of positions on issues taken and held.

A man is, for all that, still a man --
it is how he approaches life and living,
how he draws nearer to being ever alive;
genuine sympathy is truly compassionate,
a loving of all, even of those detested
for how they mistreat and abuse others.

Were you wanting me to name a saint,
in truest sense to that uncommonality,
a someone who'd lay down his own life,
and daily does so, an immodest abnegation,
just on a chance of a better world for you?

Piety is true when it is wholly unknown
to idol-loving crowds, immune to chants
that they heave from their breasts, a roar
that drowns out guiding conscience voices.

Western religion, I believe, is anti-hate,
but it is a cultural formation subverted,
its practices always already undermined,
overturned, by co-optative power seekers
who invert alien love into an alien hate,
filiation screams against phobic streams.

A christian, for instance, could I find one,
would already have seen the folly of revenge,
would already have recognized the punitive
as an insane urge to fix an irreparable case,
would have recognized that all parents
have a duty not to kill their own children.
even when the Supernal bids Isaac be slain.

A parent is supposed to forgive and forget,
and not feast upon the flesh of its children
who else would be sacrificed, menu ala cart.
Indeed, forgiving another is not foregiveness,
not at all.  One can only forgive one's self,
for imagining to bring some evil retribution,
for wreaking a wrong, as if that offset wrong,
as if two wrongs somehow a right might make.

One forgives one's self -- not for being human,
all too human -- but for desiring to be a saint,
for giving up all the instinctual selfishness,
that places ego gratification over all else.

And, thus, the contrary forgetting that comes,
against philosophy's long and erroneous maxim,
to know thyself, is itself to be overturned,
by the forgetting even of the forgiving self,
so a world may comes to stand for you newborn,
innocent and pure, impossibly holy and sweet.

It's a peaceful dream I'd bring to a world
that has forgotten how to live forgivingly,
that thinks only of its day and never more
dreams its night has an equal right to be.