Happy (Non-Tibetan) New Year

I don't know why certain American people who claim to be conservative Republicans and also claim to be following the teachings of Jesus Christ think it's fine and dandy for some people to boil other people to death, under their aegis.

Or that it's dandy to order the torture of human beings very directly in other ways--such as deliberately and painfully jamming feeding-tubes down their gullets, and deliberately inflicting unendurable pain and suffering by various and sundry other methods. Indeed, some claim such acts somehow qualify as "good."

Beats me. But hey, I'm Buddhist. From that point of view, if one commits an evil deed deliberately, and then afterwards one is satisfied with this action, then that act creates what is called a complete karma: on the basis of such actions, ultimately, everyone will reap just exactly what they have sowed. But I digress.

Anyhow--

Happy New Year.


On the upside, besides persons like Bubble Boy and sadistic pro-torturists Cheney and Rummy, and their shrieking hysterical sheeple ilk, there are also other sentient beings, noble ones, like the Polish poet and Nobel Prize Winner for Literature Czeslaw Milosz, who wrote the following, and whose work I present in hopes that the new year brings to us all a swift renaissance of compassion and wisdom:


ON ANGELS

All was taken away from you: white dresses,
wings, even existence.
Yet I believe you,
messengers.


There, where the world is turned inside out,
a heavy fabric embroidered with stars and beasts,
you stroll, inspecting the trustworthy seams.


Short is your stay here:
now and then at a matinal hour, if the sky is clear,
in a melody repeated by a bird,
or in the smell of apples at the close of day
when the light makes the orchards magic.


They say somebody has invented you
but to me this does not sound convincing
for humans invented themselves as well.


The voice--no doubt it is a valid proof,
as it can belong only to radiant creatures,
weightless and winged (after all, why not?),
girdled with lightning.


I have heard that voice many a time when asleep
and, what is strange, I understood more or less
an order or an appeal in an unearthly tongue:


day draws near
another one
do what you can.







--Czeslaw Milosz


Hat tip to Jesus' General and Wealth Bondage.