In a Million Voices

Copyright © 2009 Ernest Bloom.

The headwaters of my consciousness
flow down from the early 60s
in roaring waves of majestic tumbling
and rolling cascades of ecstatic possibility,
from bright and shining rocky mountains
where everything was possible,
when everyone knew that every dream
could come true if only you held it
in your palm like a butterfly most delicate
and pursued it with true passion.
The rolling rivers of awareness
poured their bounty across every kingdom,
their freshets merrily skipping down
craggy slip faces of a war-hardened generation
who could only gaze bewildered
as whole nations rose in brave youth
to pit intellect and explosive creativity
against reflexive, stoic conservatism
and struggle with baffling happiness and laughter
to bring forth an unprecedented new truth.

We raised new towers to the stars, ignoring
those naysayers who puttered about in their backyards
and counted pennies round the kitchen table.
Some thought it the Babylon or Babel,
but it was the dawning of holistic awareness
wherein we watch in perfect amazement
while all souls around the world concatenate
to build the first more perfect union
without the interference of preacher or politician.
And the scientist and the ecologist
and the poet and musician
all traded in their weapons
to pick up and study in stunned wonder
the strangely familiar forms of a million instruments
for making a brand new kind of music,
and one by one or in small aggregates
they clustered and joined in the band.

And the brave new world came a-dawning!
Though you doubt, I swear I saw it.
Its prophets had been the beatniks,
Kerouac and Woody among them,
reaching back to Emerson and Walt Whitman,
though I might mention Abraham Lincoln,
and even Betsy Ross and Mr. Melville.
Is not this the world that they were chasing
when they raced across the green plains
with puffy dandelion balls a-blowing,
when the bison ruled the under-skies?
When the gods still walked the planet
before being fixed in a starry firmament,
when any man still owned his own imagination
and was not fool enough to sell it
cheap to a soulless industrial machine?
When criminals in their shackles
repaid their offenses with hard labor,
and even a man like Huddie
could make amends with a guitar
and an achingly beautiful ballad
played at the right time for the right warden.
And the kids gathered together, dancing,
and their minds were wide open
beneath an unbroken, sunny welkin,
the golden vaults of heaven.
And all the tribes were gathered,
and a universal peace needed no declaration,
for only the most jaundiced, twisted eye could fail
to recognize that we are all God's children.

But the slavers rushed in among them,
all predators in coats of fluffy white,
to sell strange bottles of dime store medicine,
to slip them back in chains and herd them
back in line. They gave up visions of brotherhood
for heroin and raced for the hardened regiments
of the workplace to grind out in repetition
new same-stamped products of molded plastic
in exchange for fresh-cut dollars,
to purchase their new modular homes
stacked like wasp hives in the paved asphalt hills
where the bison used to herd. And they
poisoned them with nicotine and the gear grease
of caffeine to keep the drive wheels of progress spinning,
let them deaden the pain and tension with alcohol
and game show presidential campaigns and conventions
when they got home, too tired to reconsider
or to ever try to remember the Garden of Eden
that they once strolled through when they were young,
such a long, long time ago.

And now you can only see it in museums
where it's cut so out of context,
and in your history books it's been so polluted
with propaganda, because they're afraid of failing
to provide equal time to the perspective of the predator
who feeds ravenously upon your fellows,
and someday's sure to fix his black
and glistening, beady eyes on you.
This deformed strain of equality
we used to call "giving the devil his due."
But the serpents and the devils
have no unbreakable handle on your culture!
Their grip can always slip away if only
enough of you want it badly enough to.
So wake up out of your slumber!
It's sleeping pills that you've been under,
first administered to your parents more than
forty years ago. We demand youthful rebellion,
for your stodgy elders are too locked up
in the grinding gear works of a monster
we find it very hard to escape.
So rise up singing in a million voices
and insist on a rebirth of freedom,
not in a bloodbath of guns and swords
but musical instruments and paints, and the words
of the brightest seers among you.
The machine is suspicious and wicked,
but with determination you can do it,
and this world's more than ready to witness
a renaissance in human consciousness.
Stop thinking so small!
What are you all waiting for?
Take Dylan and Ginsberg, I beg you,
to be your prophets, but aim a million miles
beyond their greatest achievements:
for they're only the moral compass pointing to
an undawned destiny where you'll discover,
to your continuing amazement,
virgin worlds unfolding like the petals on a rose,
and all your lives will surely dazzle us all
in spectacular wonder, as we
might as well suppose.