Listen

By Virginia Jasmin Pasalo

 

THE wind is saying we reap what we sow. But those who did not sow anything equally reap the karma of those who sow.  It is this collective karma that speaks in silence, louder than the words. We feel it closing in, like a noose about to asphyxiate the guilty and the innocent, by the slightest movement under one’s feet. For acts of greed and self-interest allowed to continue uninterrupted by a cowed citizenry, we could lose our breath instantly, quicker than being swallowed slowly by the mire, and as painfully as we can burn in a fire.

The heart speaks from that inner space where full attention is required for the message to be heard. It never stopped to speak, we just forgot to listen, amid the many competing voices that we have allowed to “talk” to us.

The heart is saying, “Talk to me!”, even when karma has set in, not to change what is inevitable to come, but in the hope that we could build from its ashes.

Hymn for the weasel

shall I listen again
to the discordant harmonies
in the Opera?
the orchestra assembles
the chosen, quivering
to the beat of instruments
and the gestures of a conductor
directing a concert of disconcerting pieces
an adaptation of Wessel’s March
the March of the Volunteers
and the march of the Pied Piper
leading the gullible and the clueless
to a most foreboding abyss.

shall I listen again?
to compositions decomposing
bodies on the streets,
cremating cadavers in prison cells
sent off with adaptations of dirges
and requiems concealing
names of composers composing
narratives and musical scores
at the whistle of the weasel?

shall I listen,
to the hymn for the weasel
filling the hall with joyful flattened curves,
and a second wave of joyful COVID melodies,
through the octave of life and death,
counting the dead, marching ahead,
with the pallbearers?

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