By G. H. Mosson
We live in a crucible time, a moment of change, and which like everything of this kind, offers hope and fear. In a way, it reminds me of entering the 21st Century two decades ago. Back then, entering the 21st century felt, in my experience, more like a question. Of course, I was younger. What might happen, what might we do with it?
Those open questions, too soon in America, were overwhelmed by the events of the disputed 2000 election, the September 2001 attacks, and the March 2003 U.S. invasion of Iraq, and more, unfortunately. Now two decades later and beset by further and other challenges, our society appears poised not just to react, further, but to make fresher choices.
In this crucible of uncertainty, there is fear and reason to fear. Likewise, there is hope and reason to hope. In 2021, the fact that various topics are arising in the “mainstream” culture dialogue represents a threshold of general recognition for these same topics. Such dialogue is the doorway to change.
Why choose hope? Crisis makes old habits appear absurd. Crisis spurs people into the open arms of new ways, because the old ways are on fire.
I share:
FLAG (ROAD WORK AHEAD)
What would it broadcast, the flag
of the future conceived by your heart?
What cloth would you choose
to make public and plain
the look of your dreams?
Through what language seen
out of blood and brains
would you stitch
the totem of your settlement?
What ceremony would you enact
to beckon the wind come bless
and imbue what you imagined
with the gladdening of breezes?
What symbols,
what words,
what colors
would you scroll across
the first fluttering pages
of your nation’s rising soul?
And what if—suddenly!—
no later than sunrise, tomorrow,
the task becomes yours to fulfill?
The above “Flag” comes from Simultaneous Revolutions, soon to appear as a PM Press Pamphlet. In 2021, American society is grappling not just with questions, or blank pages, but some very specific challenges: (1) climate change, (2) a viral pandemic, (3) racial and historical inequities; and (4) an Internet technology that has created an online culture, and so, is changing our human relationships.
Of course, these topics are mere summary. There are around eight billion people on Earth. Of course, some of these topics are not new, either. Still, dialogue is one form of beginning.
G.H. Mosson and Marcus Colasurdo are writers, poets, and the authors of the poem, Heart X-rays (PM Press 2018), and of several books in their individual names. Their next collaboration of lyric poems is forthcoming from PM Press in May 2021, Simultaneous Revolutions (Pamphlet Series No. 19). For more, seek here: https://www.pmpress.org/index.php?l=product_detail&p=1191
Back to G.H. Mosson’s Author Page | Back to Marcus Colasurdo’s Author Page
