By Francis Oeser

Medea is myth.
Of course the Greeks were
garralously self-conscious,
naked and proud of it.
Proud as gods
(beyond the ordinary).
Preposterous: no one
murders kith and kin.
Not even gods!

Gods may change
but humans’ unchanging core
deposited by millions of years,
defies our darkness.

Now, disconnected from the earth
we’ve lost ourselves in
a life cloaked in secrets
where only appearance prospers.

Myth is rooted in millennia,
reliable as memory,
as opaque as dreams
perhaps a cause of dreams.

But when no parenting persists,
when secrets prevail,
when myths are suppressed
we need new courage
to outface our darkness,
to die regally, realistically
and we must reject monsters:
Blair, Bush, Putin . . .
Talk is not nearly enough.

“If those bombings were not accidental . . . if they were the work of our authorities – then everything will once and forever take its proper place . . . Then [there] can not be an iota of illusion about those who rule us. Then those people are not minor or large-scale swindlers and thieves, then they are the most terrible of criminals.” — Anton Orekh, September 2011, cited in NYRB “The Moscow Bombings” p 56ff, November 22, 2012.

– Francis Oeser is a novelist and a poet. He contributed this poem to PalestineChronicle.com.