View from Dayspring's Meadow |
Meditation Interrupted
Alone in a meadow of many meditations,
adsorbing silent beauty of rolling woodland
in the relative darkness of a sub-urban night;
a tragic specter gripped me, more chilling than the evening air.
This road, dead wrong since the day
its ink first scrawled onto paper,
has, in spite of its deadliness
a life of its own.
First imagined to carry smiling faces in the family sedan
to where they are not presently,
born M-5, now grown to M-83,
its slick asphalt a linear tombstone
covering a billion violent deaths in just 5.7 miles;
precious, innocent lives taken with ease,
without a shiver of conscience
Children's Sunday at Dayspring Creek |
by the tracked monster named progress.
Blinking, I see itâs not here yet ---
but I feel the approaching tragedy in my bones,
great glaring lights and rolling rubber roaring
where tonight only great horned hooting
punctuates the night on a land still at peace with its residents.
Can reason and compassion triumph over entrenched error?
Error upon error upon error,
accumulating into a vast document
whose Purpose and Need page one
renders irrelevant the ever-growing
compendium of outrageous insults
to trees and toads, raptors and reptiles,
flowers and flickers, sunfish and salamanders,
One of nature's miracles |
solemn rocks and bubbling streams,
happy neighborhoods and healthy schoolyards,
dark nights and silent retreats.
Itâs the Purpose we must change, and the Need.
What do we really need?
What do our great grandchildrenâs great grandchildren need?
What is this deadly force, which relentlessly pushes
to consume and destroy the precious planet
which alone sustains our life?
How can this tale have a happy ending
when fifty years of bad decisions become entrenched one-by-one,
while six hundred new moons have shone upon the growing record
of recognized rack and ruin,
filed away to show future generations we knew
what we were doing,
and we did it anyway?
O Great Spirit, Holy Creator of all that is,
As you smiled an impossible Yes! into the belly of a peasant girl,
we beg You to stand before this encroaching terror,
and deliver â through the surprised lips of the assembled decision-makers â
A final, miraculous No!
Written by Gale Quist
Member of 1992 MoCo's M-83 Citizens Advisory Committee
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