A dream called “hope” in the potter’s field

I’m on vacation and among the books I’m reading is “It’s the Middle Class, Stupid!” by James Carvillle and Stan Greenberg, a book I strongly recommend to anyone of any political leaning, anywhere, who is interested in where the world’s greatest economy is headed and what that journey to has meant and means to the lives and futures of America’s universal middle class.

That formerly rock stable middle class which  been since the Second World War has The United States of America’s greatest contribution to the aspirations of ordinary people all around the world:  once known “The American Dream”.  Happy, hard working families, owning their own home, raising healthy children, sending them to college and retiring comfortably  on their savings.

Today’s economy is a world economy and what goes around comes around and what Carville and Greenberg describe is happening in all developed economies of the world to one degree or another.

The picture that Carville and Greenberg paint is astringently, bitterly, bleak: they are crunching the numbers of broken futures, of the blighted youth, of the ravaged aged…  I can recommend the book, but what they describe makes me so angry that it is beyond me to write a discursive encapsulation of it: Only verse.

And this takes me to a little confession… since I was a child, the most subjectively meaningful thing I do is write poetry and older I get, the more I realize that poetry is where I live.  There is a mystery place where expository prose fails, where words boil up from darker places than reason and reasons and arrange themselves as if in the hands of a familiar spirit. Truth is lurking somewhere there and I must dig for it.

I have been brooding for quite some time, about what the inner meaning of this economic crisis means; thinking of all our hopes and dreams that are being shattered every day by people who are getting rich doing it...  This is what bubbled to the top.

My heart is a potter’s field of dreams,

And the wild rose roots among their bones.

They lie under broken glass and poignant epitaphs,

Where every shadow sleeps alone.

On darker nights, translucent discards team,

To filter up and walk my paths:

They weep; they plead, they wheedle, whine and pray

And curse the dreams that clad themselves in flesh,

To flee my heart and haunt the day.