Sickness Afoot
Sickness Afoot
Thursday, January 19, 2017
7:22 AM
The Parliament of Owls is in session
But we cannot see their eyes
Their heads are looking behind them
Because owls do not move their eyes
What’s coming comes from behind
It’s not what is clearly seen, so visible now
It’s the sickness afoot, the sickness coming
That’s what the owls are looking for now
Sickness is afoot, evil’s in full view
Sickness is afoot, where is our guide?
Sickness is afoot, what to do? What to do?
Sickness is afoot, where resides the guide?
Leonard wrote that magic is afoot
And Buffy sang his words
Leonard wrote that God is alive
And Buffy sang is words
But now, sickness is afoot,
And evil is alive, and where is our guide?
Sing the song that’s in your dream
Dreams of the night will be our guide!
A Note…
In the dream I saw owls sitting on branches of a tree.
No eyes could be seen as they were all looking behind
them. A sound began to rise, I think it was from the owls,
singing the line, “Sickness is afoot.”
As I woke, I started hearing Buffy St. Marie singing
Leonard Cohen’s words from his book, Beautiful Losers.
Dreams have to do with the future. Our conscious intentions
as well as our hopes are all formed from what we know,
from what is past.
The owls know what is coming. Look to your dreams
to provide the hints.
A poetic contribution from Mike Daniel
A Needle Just Won’t Do
Life, Real Life, got caught up in
Our techno-Gordian knot
Squeezed ever tighter
Within complexity
Threads of soul
Love, and beauty and truth
Choking to death
One person says
I hope things will be better in the future
Another says
I remember the past, it will solve the present
Our egos say technology will save us
Bring on the machines
I sense my soul there
I love J my phone
We cheer not knowing why
But we hope it’s the right thing to do
Because we did it in the past
My phone app said do it
So I did! Selfie!
God rolls on
Looking for a remembrance
Of the beginning
Wondering how
Mirroring got so
Screwed Up
And so one day
Something new arrived
Humming a sly tune
Owls heard and reflected
The Great Unraveler
Thank you Russell for sharing the poem and the note – the image of bunch of owls on a tree branch after evening fell remains with me for a few days now. And I’m compelled to share Walter Benjamin’s comment on a work by Paul Klee called “Angelus Novus”. I feel it in some way corresponds with theme of “backwards” or “from behind”, and with the overall ominous sense of what’s happening. Benjamin writes thus (from wiki):
“A Klee painting named Angelus Novus shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.”