In another world they do not put a man to death for asking questions: assuredly not. … When my sons grow up…, O my friends…, I would have you trouble them, as I have troubled you, if they seem to care about riches, or anything, more than about virtue; or if they pretend to be something when they are really nothing. …
— Socrates (from Plato’s Apologia)
For speaking truth to power… a cold cell.
Naked now…, and yet, they fear you!
You watch a spider weave, perhaps recall
The crime scene, viewed on a monitor:
Men like puppets dancing in the dust, fired
On by U.S. drones; and the button-pushers
Laughing, ten thousand miles away—life reduced
To video porn, sordid and crazily robotic.
The robots shop, vote, fuck, kill, do business,
Take meetings, squawk endlessly democracy,
Free markets; get replaced—interchangeable—
In the Machine… until a voice says “No.”
And the house of cards collapses; the dream
Recedes; the dark, stark landscape, revealed:
A people bought for bread and circuses—
Mostly circuses—more silhouettes than people.
But the voice remains: Socrates in the agora;
Christ among the Pharisees;
Galileo Galilei; Paine and Thoreau;
Gandhi and King—questioning, exposing.
Now in the shackled world, a moan goes up
From the well of our debasement: Cease
And desist: the depredations; soul-murdering;
Earth-murdering. … The implacable voice arising.
Out of the chrysalis of what has been,
A global being struggles to be free:
To extricate its wings from the wax of retributions;
To save the dying planet; to balance and revere.
Shia, Sunni; Christian, Jew; Buddhist, Hindu, pagan;
Male and female—fledging to resurge anew:
Out of the yearning cauldron of suffering
And endurance—diamond-cut humanity.