Just a Kid

On a Swing

When I was a kid,
I used to read a lot to help me sleep.
Probably a book a week.
I could never put one down.

Once I was drawn into its gorgeous subject,
it set my veins singing,
its story purposing my soul.

Sometimes, only the dawn,
and the realization of a new day,
practical steps,
fitting into the duty of society
sharply awoke my senses
to shift into it.

Today, I watch all levels and portals of the news,
presenting a distortion of reality.
Society is calling it news.

I think back to those early hours of the morning,
reading an author’s determination
in a book about an exceptional boarding school
high up in the mountains somewhere in Europe:

Summerhill by A.S. Neill.

Children with special needs
were invited to stay
until they had adjusted to a life
not demanding of the fit
but discovering how to fit.

Summerhill was never just a school.
It was a living breath of freedom,
where children were trusted to grow
through choice, consequence, and community
rather than fear.

Its spirit left a stamp on me
that time has never erased
because it showed that education
could be love in practice
not authority in disguise.

Yet today,
in a world crowded with noise and misdirection
that vision seems almost gone with the wind
a fragile ember of wisdom
that too few notice
though its light is more needed than ever.

I watch our planet
utter discord in a tongue foreign to its own
its voice estranged from the soil that bore it.

I am a single unit of chemistry.
I am a sensitive abundance of love.
I am a constant strategy of possibilities.
I am, though,
but one.

My 'school' that raised me
gave me windows to a meadow of choice.

Life's challenges
kept spinning around a colorful pole
a pole with a tough rope.

It has given me the treasure
of seeing the horizon
beyond destructive storms.

Storms manifested, grew, embraced
and shadowed by giants
untouchable, unreachable
attaining the blackness of despise and hate
as their subject line
facilitating a new earth
where trees struggle to breathe in the disturbance of its movement
creatures run in fear of its strike.

But the earth is trembling
both in the passion of its trembling, chaotic disturbance
and in melting at its very power.

The clowns (metaphor)
are breeding an alliance with hate.

The leaders
are naturally radicalizing their movement.

The chain of cause and effect
has turned dissident
severed from its natural rhythm.

All I feel
is desperate
for any living organ
any living creature
to see what's happening
to what once came
in the shape and form of logic.

If we came together
to elicit and put boundaries
on violent hate
and worked together
to erase the upsurge
of illogical events demonstrating hate

perhaps the Unity of Love
could replace the upsurge
not the race.

We can chat to tombs
or skeletons of history and timelines
without reading or exploring research
but we can't seem to see
the mural as it is.

Leaders lost the dignity of law and order
when money and greed said yes.

Now that money and greed have fruited
leaders have lost morals and foresight.

Where is that demonstrating
on the footsteps of Earth?

Love is lost.
Unity has dissolved.

Ants like me
are crawling through the jungle
of dust and heat
trying to miss death.

Written by Donna Arden