Why do you hate the dandelion?
Do you despise also the wishes of the children?
You dare turn against the instincts of life itself?
Are you ignorant of your foundation?
Why toil with such effort against life’s adaptation?
How you worship the predictable and mundane – wasted potential!
The comfort of uniformity found in the carefully maintained height of each grass blade.
The bee wearied –
Follows a wish from the child with hope.
For an island of color, amidst the sea of single hued hopelessness.
Do you not envision beauty where the parking lots sprawl?
Do you believe diversity of flora is the woke agenda?
I stroll the lines of iron bars upon the rows of church doors.
How many barriers are required to protect you from the other?
Border walls, segregation, prison bars; bars upon your door, the lock upon the door itself, the police.
Why do you war with such ferocity against your neighbor?
Why do you ask “and who is my neighbor” (Luke 10:29)?
Are you blind to humanity itself?
Why do you press with such effort against the instincts of life?
Is it not Jesus who desired to gather a nation under his wings as a hen would gather her chicks (Matthew 23:37)?
Yet the very best we can do with our resources as a “Christian nation” is to build instruments of oppression and destruction.
Sowing division.
Pushing people away –
Into the fringes, into the margins, into the crevices, into the pit of our worthless society!
Oh, how I would gather you under my wings!
Yet I’m powerless.
Or so I tell myself.
Pathetic.
But we see the cathedrals, the institutions; the state, the billionaire –
Those who despise the very instincts of life itself!
Casting a shadow of death over humanity.
Are we not wearied!?
Are we not tired!?
We still desire this conformity!
In the horror –
In the knowledge of the suffering.
In the cold reality of what our ignorance,
What our folly,
What our stupidity –
Worse our selfishness
Has inflicted upon humanity.
Has cast upon humankind.
We pretend it’s normal.
That it’s the way things should be, the way things must be.
Why do we make war against the instincts of life itself!?
How do we debase ourselves to be such pathetic creatures?
Did not the Samaritan treat the wounds of the stranger?
Were they not a stranger, but rather a neighbor then?
Did he not pay to house them?
That seems pretty neighborly to me (Luke 10:29-37).
Why do you spit in the face of Jesus Christ?
Why do you blaspheme the name of your God?
Why do you disobey his commandment?
Why do I falter with the same hypocrisy in practice?
Pathetic.
Why do we allow social norms to restrain us?
Why do we justify oppression when it benefits us?
Why do we lie to ourselves about our potential to achieve change?
Are we cowards by instinct?
Are we not freethinkers?
Are we not lovers of the earth?
Do we not cherish humanity?
Where are the tightrope dancers1?
Where are the free spirits?
Where are the prophets?
Oh! How the child would wish upon the dandelion!
“Just let me gather all humanity under my wings!”
“Verily… , unless you be converted and become as little children, you shall not enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. Whoever therefore shall humble himself as this little child, the same is greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven” (Matthew 18:3-4).
Oh! How we wish upon the dandelion.
“Just let us gather all humanity under our wings!”
- Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: First Part, Zarathustra’s Prologue 6 ↩︎
The Lambent 