Greg Burch is a logger, he is outdoors all year chopping wood for our stoves and many other people, he has been chopping word for several decades. Greg grew up on a farm, he is a tough and hard-working country man, he melts like cheese in the oven when he looks at J.D., his pug. J.D. rides around with him and looks a lot like Winston Churchill to me. He has a lot of gravitas, I love watching Greg’s face when he looks at his dog. He came the other day to drop off the first cord to stack for the winter of 2015, coming right up.
The Internet and my blog offer the opportunity for a new kind of poem, the living and evolving poem, a poem that evolve and change and reflect different realities and feelings. This one is a living poem, it first appeared under the title “And Then, They Came For The Ponies.”
Then, The Animals Were Safe
First, the angry people came for the carriage horses,
and no one spoke out,
because they didn’t know about horses, and how they lived.
They didn’t know
that horses have always loved to work with people.
Then, they came for the ponies, who gave rides to children,
and no one spoke out,
because they said it was cruel for children to ride the ponies in small circles.
And then they came for the old horses in the old cities,
who brought vegetables to the neighborhoods
in their carts, because work was wrong, and work was cruel,
and the old horses were gone.
And then they came for the donkeys, who hauled firewood,
and gave rides
for quarters and dimes. It was wrong, they said,
for the donkeys to haul firewood,
they must live in nature, or on rescue farms, and not among people
in cities and towns.
Then, because work was cruel, they came for the police horses,
because horses do not belong in the city,
and no one spoke out,
because the carriage horses were already gone.
And they came for the elephants in the circus,
because it was cruel for elephants to be in the circus,
and soon the elephants were gone,
left in the vanishing wild to meet the poachers.
And then, they came for the animals who worked in the movies,
the horses and the goats and dogs, they said it was cruel for
animals to work in the movies, they should only be on farms,
in the wild, grazing freely,
and the horses were sent away,
to die in slaughterhouses.
Then, they came for the barn cats,
and no one spoke out, because no one knew what the lives of barn cats were like,
the angry people said they must live like children, be confined and safe and dependent.
Then they came for the outdoor cats, they said
they should not be free any longer, they would hurt the birds, or come to harm.
Then, they came for the border collies, because they frightened the sheep,
and worked in heat and cold,
and because animals should not ever work,
with human beings, for sport or money.
Then, they came for the breeders, because dogs must never be bred or sold,
they can only be rescued, and breeding is cruel and inhumane,
and the border collies and Labrador Retrievers
and Jack Russell terriers and Pit Bulls vanished from the world.
Then, they came for the bomb-sniffing dogs,
because dogs must not work, do not belong in train stations and airports,
they must live the natural lives of dogs,
and then, they came for the seeing-eye dogs, because it is wrong for animals to work,
it is not the natural life of a dog, they must be safer than people.
Then, they came for the therapy dogs, because work is unnatural, and no one spoke out.
And then, when there were no horses, and no Labrador Retrievers, and there were no seeing-eye dogs,
and search and rescue dogs and therapy dogs,
and no border collies on the farms or in the field,
or ponies in the cities, or elephants in the circus, or donkeys or horses on farms or pulling wagons,
or fish in their tanks in the stores,
they came for your horse and your dog, for your milking goat,
for your barn cat and outdoor cat, for your cow and steer,
The angry people came for the pet stores and the petting zoos,
the dairy farmers, the aquariums, the mice and rats in the laboratories,
the people who raised rabbits for meat,
or pigs for food.
And soon, there was no work for animals to do,
no people brave enough or rich enough to be able to keep them..
One day, the animals had vanished from the lives of ordinary people,
and the hearts of the people and their children were broken,
they lost their dream friends and mystical companions,
and the angels wept in frustration and sorrow at a world,
where animals lived only in rescue places,
inside houses and apartments,
on cable news channels
and internet videos,
the only places safe enough for them, the only places that could afford them,
The Kickstarter experience has been a powerful one in my world. Supporters of my work helped me buy a new camera, Maria’s project enabled her to buy a new sewing machine and George Forss is working on his book at last, “The Way We Were.” I am grateful – we all are – this is democratic funding at it’s most democratic. The middle-men are on the run, these are exciting times as creative as they are chaotic.
Maria and I went to Glens Falls today to pick up her new sewing machine, she is getting used to it in her studio. It’s a wonderful thing for her, she will put it to the greatest use. Maria does not think she deserves anything – it is her disease, in a way – it was hard for her to do this project and to accept the rewards. I am so happy she did it and has this powerful new tool to do the great work she produces and that everyone loves. so much. She is the light.
It seems that almost every day, I am called upon to reaffirm my humanity, my identity and spirituality. Every day there is an e-mail that is sent by mistake, one that is misinterpreted or misread or that offends. The Internet is the most powerful information medium ever, it can also be the most thoughtless and hostile and awkward.
I embrace it and struggle with it. In my world, almost all of the people who used to speak with me do not speak with me directly any longer, there are mistakes, confusions, hurt feelings and misunderstandings almost every day. E-mail is a poor medium for clarity and understanding, even as it becomes more dominate every day.
One person stormed out of one of my Facebook groups because she thought I was aiming the site guidelines directly at her, my editors no longer speak with me much, they send me my books marked up in e-files in three or four different colors. It is strange to be a writer who has no idea, really, who is publishing his books.
This is a powerful medium, and a dehumanizing and isolated one, in so many ways. People are always apologizing to me for what they wrote me, or telling me they are sorry to have offended me when I have not, or scolded me for lecturing them when I have no idea who they are, or chastising me for failing to remember an e-mail message from a decade ago. Or asking me to apologize for something I didn’t say, didn’t mean, or have the right to feel.
Then, there are the growing legions of people who ideas about dialogue have been shaped by cable news and online chat rooms, they sometimes live in a world of anger and outrage. They are losing the ability to communicate their ideas or learn from others. On the pages of Facebook, the world is a sad and angry place.
On my social media pages, I am bombarded with photos of dead and tortured animals, outraged petitions and enraged links and comments and information that is often foolish and inacurrate, sometimes nearly insane. Every day, there is hostility and anger and outrage to deal with, it is so easy to send angry messages, so hard to listen to other people’s ideas. There is love, too, encouragement and support. Love nourishes identity and spirituality, it doesn’t required me to affirm it. Every day I must decide who I am, and this is a gift.
Messages are lost, returned, sent to spam files, forwarded in error. One person I work with every week wrote the cruelest message about me and forwarded it to someone she works with and sent it along to me in error. And the saddest thing about her message is that it wasn’t really even directed at me, it was just so easy for her to send, she was in a bad mood. I saw the message, took a deep breath and told myself to forget it, this is life in our world, my life is not an argument, move on, this is the test of my humanity. I did. Every day I tell myself that this is a test of my humanity, my long struggle to shed anger and fear and my long search for spirituality.
The tragedy of technology has always been that it brings things and takes things away, and we are thoughtless about using it, we bring it into our lives without much consideration, and greedy corporations are eager to thrust it upon us so that they can let go of the human beings who used to speak to us.
This is a gift for me, almost every day I am challenged to decide who I am, and who I want to be. Every day my sense of myself is being affirmed, is growing stronger. Every day I am growing stronger.
I will not live in anger and recrimination. My life is not an argument.
My work must be nourishing, fun, challenging and I must feel good about it. I will set out shortly to change my life again, to find a writing place where that is possible, I insist on working with people who will speak with me and try and understand who I am, and know me and let me know them. Sometimes I told an important friend recently, you just have to pick up the phone and talk to me.
Spirituality is not about the absence of difficulty, it is about the way in which we respond to it. I will be patient, stand in my truth. I will not live in fear or write in fear. The challenge of our disconnected time is to find and keep our humanity in a dizzying and intense and disconnected world. My farm and my love are my connections to the earth, my friends, family, the animals, my writing and photography. They are my sacred place, my center. I choose to try to be honest, to always be open to the world. This is, in a way, my life’s work. I am getting stronger, affirming my humanity.
This is what it means to be a human being, to accept the challenges of our lives and use them to make us more human.
I love barn cats and I respect their lives, I have little time for the notion that is cruel to let them live their lives. They get spayed, they get shots and when it is cold, they get to come in and sleep by the wood stoves. I love and celebrate the mystical lives of the barn cats, and I see and respect their murderous side.
In the real world of real animals, death is respected and accepted. With the end of this brutal winter, the barn cats are beginning to return to their lives. Minnie crawls around the garden looking for mice and she sleeps under Maria’s studio. Flo is a sun worshipper, as many cats are and there is something very spiritual and settled about her. They don’t always want to come inside in the good weather, they usually are in by nightfall.
I respect their wishes, if Flo wishes to hunt at night, I let her, I understand the risk. There is risk in the real lives of real animals, I let them choose how much risk to take.
