Saturday, April 7, 2018

On Jesus and Folkish Heathens, (who claim to not be racist).

I wrote this after listening to the first episode of a podcast that I shall not name. The hosts claimed to not be racist, but... there were definitely moments in how they spoke, and in the way they spoke about other faiths, that showed a distinct lack of empathy for the overwhelming majority of humanity.

It should be noted that I describe ideals in this poem, not all of which are practical for the present moment. However, I long for a Star Trek-like society (admittedly one more friendly towards spirituality) and we'll never walk those thousand miles unless we keep taking steps in that direction.





~*~*~*~*~


Hvitakrist they called him
Not because of pale skin
Though we all go a few
shades lighter at death
Indeed, they referred to his death
To his choice not to fight back
To see him as a weak god
Killed with nails
While theirs held a hammer
Was he a coward, they ask?
Or did he just lose the fight?
For why would someone
not fight death?
Yet we all die. We all fight lost battles.
The gods of Ragnarok
Are no strangers to the concept.
What if this was less of a battle
And more of a riddle?



We fight groups outside our own
Believing that it makes our group
More likely to survive
In a world with limited resources.
But in the end, no groups survive.
A handful of humans and gods,
the myths say...
But that is only from Ragnarok.
There are other battles
And the Norns
Will cut the threads on us all.
Time. Nature. Fate.
The debris of a supernova
Will bury us all in fire and ice
And someday return us
To the stardust
From which we came,
Our elements bursting out of suns
Like blood and bone
From the head of Ymir.
No competition there!
None survive!
It all cools, the universe ends
Sucked into black holes
To pinpoints. To new universes!
Which burst forth with life again!
So there was a trick - life survives.
Life tries again.
Just enough seems encoded
Into the wyrd fabric of reality itself...
But not these small tribes.
Not these petty disputes.
What do imploding galaxies care
For wars started over skin pigment,
Nose bones, books, or borders?
For food for creatures
Whose very fossils have melted
And even the last bit of oil
Was burnt by the sun?



How much of this can survive?
How much of the wyrd can we warp?
Can we weave in enough love
To cause ripples in the fabric of time?
To echo in some Superconscious
In some other place,
Some other world?
Can we survive past the borders
Drawn by humans on the earth
And instead of borders
Just have bonds
Tying one to another
So that we don't let go
As the universe flings us
Into the night sky?
Millions of miles a second
We hurl through space
Faster than Thor's hammer thrown.
Hospitality wasn't about
Who you liked,
Or even knew,
It was about setting aside disputes
When the winter winds howled
To sort out in spring
When the larger danger was past
Because you yourself would not wish
To be left in the cold if it was you
Knocking on some stranger's door.



This isn't hospitality,
It is a lock
Saying I don't care if they die
Or starve
Or get beaten by those who
Are supposed to enforce Law
Even if they did no wrong.
Not my family? Not my problem.
But what if it was Rig?
Is this why you objected
To seeing Heimdallr with dark skin
Even in a different setting
Unrelated to your cosmic stories?
For if there is one thing you know
It's that doors should always
Be open to the gods -
But Yggdrasil forbid
they wear a face you don't like!
How ridiculous.
How trivial.
How tiny.
How small.
When our dust
is all in the same cloud
after the worlds end?



No, you never took an oath
To the little blue dot
(Unless you oathed yourself to Jord)
But if you did a landtaking
And staked out the borders of home
Did the Landvaettir not tell you,
Did the elves dare not whisper,
That you are merely riding
On the back of a Heavenly Body
That someday might collide
With other galaxies, other worlds?
We love to form order from chaos
But look around - the world is both.
Our ancestors loved order
Because they knew chaos too well
But now we assume
That Nature herself
Obeys our petty rules
And closed systems of growth.
Migratory birds
do not know our borders -
And we are arrogant enough
To assume they should!
We pour chemicals on crops
Without thinking about evaporation,
Or run off, or rain, or streams.
We think we can bomb our neighbors
And the radiation will never reach us.
Nothing is as simple
As our minds make it
So is it really order you are after
Or ignorance of complexity?
Or - more accurately -
Do you demand
A world you can
Control?



You can't even control
The moment of your death!
So you have the audacity
To try to control
The moment of someone else's?!



We are all on this boat.
We are all on this earth.
We hurl through seas
Of space and time.
We live, or drown, together.