I am ducking my responsibility
Before it comes
To telling my grandchildren
(For I shall have none)
That I am the one who did these things;
I am the one who choked the sea
With plastic, wrapped conveniently
Around everything I could ever need
(And some things I didn’t)
To keep them sanitary, clean
Never mind the lungs and eyes
The breaking hearts of those unseen,
Never mind the damaged soil
Pits of poison, smoke’s toxic roil,
Death dripping from the very pores
Of those I never knew, never heard of before.
It was me.
I am the one who chained the men
The women, and the children when
I bought the things which owned their lives
Paid their captors, swallowed the lies,
Ignored the truths I didn’t like
So I could shop, accessorise
Get more stuff, more things, so I
Could plug the holes inside my brain
With gizmos, gadgets, all the same,
All designed to hypnotise –
A smokescreen I would surely buy.
It was me.
I am the one who killed the trees
My carbon footprint running free
A breeze of coughed-up gasoline
And factory smoke, and things unseen
Which leak from gadgets unsafe, un-green
But things I need to keep on up
To pinion life, drink technology’s cup
Of profit-mongering, insistent sheen
To gild the lily of my life, I mean
I need access to all these screens.
It was me.
I am the one who ran the slaves
Existent in this modern day
But hidden, carefully away
From prying eyes and media lens
Just in case we’d have to cleanse
The way we do things – the system works
We use, abuse, discard their lives for perks
For clothes and sweets
With nary a thought
For the ghost in the system
The humans bought, and sold
So we get what we ought .
It was me.
I was the one who tortured and maimed
Sweet animals whose lives were claimed
Destroyed from birth to feed my face
Hidden from the human race
Except for those whose ailing brains
Kill for me, over and over again
Who I’m so quick to vilify
“But it was all for you”
Their cry rings true
And I sit chagrined
Memories of teeth tearing meat
Grease dripping finger-swept down my chin
Not a thought for the lives trapped within
The process of my greed.
It was me.
I am the one who ruined the earth
Who never saw its real worth
Who ignored the wisdoms once bequeathed
To those who followed, too enwreathed
In our own lives, so turned our backs
On what was good, and now we lack
The control, the capability, to undo
What we’ve done, so we
Just bury our heads and close our eyes
We’re not criminals – there’s no crime
We put pennies in the collection pot
And think we’re doing fine
‘Cos we’re contributing;
Assuaging our conscience
Deliberately misconstruing
Our place in all this,
And our responsibility.
When will we stand up?
Own up.
It was me.
Oh my gosh, this is an incredible reality and conviction for us all. We are ALL criminals. Gut punch to the core… We, humans, are destroying our world. One straw at a time. Sigh…
You are so gifted. Your words are gorgeous and profound, lovely Lizzi.
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Thank you so much Kitty, my lovely. We really are wreaking havoc but we have so much capacity for change and good…
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Holy Amazing Shit!!!!!!!! 😱. This is all of us and, WOW!! Sharing big time!! ❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️❤️👏
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Thank you so so much my lovely. I hugely appreciate it. I am so glad you like this ❤️🐝❤️🐝❤️🐝❤️🐝
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This is incredibly powerful.
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Thank you, my Oceanheart 💙 I hope you liked it. I had some feedback about it being uncomfortably close to the bone, but I hope that doesn’t make it bad.
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Powerful and challenging, Lizzi.
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Thank you. I found it pretty challenging to write…and there was more I could have written.
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It’s hard to know where to start. What cause to put your attention on, what issue to address in your own life. It ALL seems like such a mess.
This is gorgeous writing. Writing is always a good place to start.
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Thank you, Precious.
There will never be a place to stop, only so, so many places to begin it can fewl utterly overwhelming. The point is, as you say, to begin with one of the places in our own lives we know we can improve upon, and go from there. We can all begin with ourselves.
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There’s so much to this… the psychological “need” for things. The convenience of things. Of food. Of ignorance and tradition and “normal.” The wanting and buying and the deception of companies over goods made… Technology and progress, repression and spoilage.
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Yes. It’s worse than any kind of mythical hydra – the bits we try to do to fix things domino into a negative somewhere else, and no solution seems to be workable, even for parts of the pieces which are dreadful. It’s all so unsustainable and yet…we don’t have any realistic alternatives 😢
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THIS IS SO POWERFUL
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Thank you very, very much for your kind comment, and for reblogging. I really appreciate it xo
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Reblogged this on Kaleidoscope of Faces and commented:
POWERFUL
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Thank you hugely 😘
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Reblogged this on cabbagesandkings524 and commented:
Lizzi confesses
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Thank you so much 😘
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And in that, all that, we share every indictment, every charge – Will we devour all, despoil all?
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I so, so hope not. The desperately sad thing is we’re almost all, at minimum, complicit 😢
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True. In so many ways we (especially in the so called “developed” world) are trapped in a system with a pathological relationship with the natural living world, one that does not know how to take really seriously the truth that we, as a species, are not separate and somehow independent of the great web of life.
“If you don’t hold the frogs in the waterfalls as sacred as the human family, you’re doomed.” – Barry Commoner
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That’s an awesome quote…and the sad reality is, if we can’t hold strangers’ lives as sacred, or our friends’ lives, or our family’s lives, or even our OWN lives as sacred…what the hell chance does the frog have?
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Which takes me to the only real answer, as sung by Leonard Cohen
“I’ve seen the nations rise and fall
I’ve heard their stories, heard them all
But love’s the only engine
Of survival”
We have to learn to let Love Win, especially against fear and greed.
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I absolutely agree. So much. Love is everything.
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