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Karl Constantine FOLKES 1935 (Portland)
Life has its reason.
Nations rise and Nations fall.
Life has its own Way!
About this poem
This haiku poem was composed to inform all of us as Fellow Earthlings, as inhabitants of the Blue Planet that we call Earth, that we are all divinely made to be our brothers keepers, and that, as a collective race of people, the demise of one of us is ultimately the demise of all of us as a species. The dinosaurs rose and came into being, one by one, until they were many; and the dinosaurs fell, one by one, until there were none. We too, are like dinosaurs. We too, have our rise and our fall. We all inhabit nations, and they, too, have their rise and fall. Life and nature inform us, quite wisely and profoundly, that there can be no rise without a succeeding fall. Just as pride cometh before the fall, so does laughter bringeth tears. That is The Way. That is TAO. That is the way of life. I have written a poem called “Harmony in Balance.” I must now inform you that in order to bring it into sharper and clearer focus, it is necessary that I expand its semantic equation to more definitively state what has heretofore been parsimoniously expressed; hence, the title of this companion haiku poem, which appears from the universal Collective Unconscious at a time when the world is challenged with a pandemic that has its own intelligence and its own desire, and its own design, causing some of us to fall, while others seem to flourish. Will we heed the call to be our brothers keepers and protectors, or will we, out of greed and selfishness, fall, nation after nation, until civilization is no more? Will we persist in stubbornly following our way, or will we open our eyes to follow The Way of TAO? more »
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"Poetry.com" Poetry.com. STANDS4 LLC, 2023. Web. 4 Feb. 2023. <https://www.poetry.com/>.
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