Robert MacNeil Christie, Author

DISCLAIMER: I do not consider myself a poet. I don’t think I’ve written a poem in over forty years. However, the confluence of events in this past week or two, the two eloquent lines bracketing the text I wrote here, and reading the book on immigration, Everyone Who Is Gone Is Here: The United States, Central America, and the Making of a Crisis, in the context of the current surge in barbarity, forced those words out of me.

“A rat in a maze is free to go anywhere, as long as he stays in the maze.”
~ Margaret Atwood

Field of vision is one thing
Selective perception quite another
Confirmation bias constrains the eye,
Are the boundaries real?           

Trapped in self-righteous narratives of
Sovereignty and superiority, depravity accelerates
Sensibilities atrophy, even die.
Generals of El Salvador, 1932 and today
Their CIA sponsored death squads endure

A century of campesino slavery brews
In your free-trade hi-tech espresso machine,
Same century of blood bananas always on offer, to us
Driving wounded asylum seekers to scratch in East LA
Dodging not only la migra, but undifferentiated
MS13 anger at the life global policies made for them

Iranian Supreme Leader, nuclear bunker busted by
Autocratic attempt gone global in orange denigrations.
Floods of humanity to Turkey, Armenia, even Ashgabat
Nogales too. But where’s the line?

Tsarist imperial KGB delusion destroys its imagined prize
Drones and missiles collide over Kiev, Tel Aviv and Tehran
In a grand video game of pointless human demolition,
Where in this maze can we go? What lies beyond?
With ancient Persian wisdom, Rumi saw the other side…

“Out beyond the ideas of wrongdoing and right doing, there is a field.
I’ll meet you there.”       
 ~ Rumi 

R.M. Christie