A Canticle of Our Times

The Gyroscope

“Wherever two or more people are gathered together there is politics,” speaks an anecdotal quote from somewhere long gone and strangely relevant.

Tough words.

For a tough crowd.

But there we are. At the center of it.

The center of politics.

Politics drives us as we deny it.

Politics changes us.

We change politics.

It is in the bone and marrow of our lives,

In the very blood of it!

Politics is us.

Hail, Politics! The bane and business of life!

Hail, the destroyer of worlds!

Are you bloody enough yet?

What is political?

Ay, there’s the rub.

Politics is as politics does, each and every kind. One and another.

What are politics?

That is the question.

The politics of what is possible,

Or what is inevitable?

Which prevails?

Who decides?

Who or what makes it happen?

Which one is better? Which one works?

We are the gyroscope, the spin machine that does not cease turning,

The claw that ever clutches, the crowd that continues to grow,

The hate that ever musters,

And having mustered, dissipates into the void,

And comes back again.

The mob that will not cease.

The butterfly that turns back into a cocoon and regrows into something else, through pain and grief.

We are change,

And change is an abomination and a godsend.

We are the future,

Guernica reborn.

Mi Lai on the 6:00 O’clock news,

Kent State cast down, once again,

A girl crying over a fellow,

In anguish.

The change we long for comes and we are not satisfied with it,

Yet we strive for it again.

Insist on it!

Change! we say.

Change!

We demand it!

And yet we stay the same.

The widening gyre does not cease but widens on,

Ever growing,

Never stopping,

Never slacking.

It slows not nor knows where it goes next, plundering always.

It just keeps on, as it has always.

Every step is death,

Every grope forward kills,

Every death nourishes,

Every boot grinds forth a new life,

A new pain,

A new hope.

And in some foreign Bethlehem we are reborn,

Maybe,

For a time,

Until death drowns our ceremonies again,

And another generation of innocents learns the gyre of politics.

Thus the gyroscope spins.