Mental Flight by Ben Okri What will we choose? Will we allow ourselves to descend Into universal chaos and darkness? A world without hope, without wholeness Without moorings, without light Without possibility of mental fight, A world breeding mass murderers Energy vampires, serial killers With minds pining in anomie and amorality With murder, rape, genocide as normality? Or will we allow ourselves merely to drift Into an era of more of the same An era drained of significance, without shame, Without wonder or excitement, Just the same low-grade entertainment, An era boring and predictable ‘Flat, stale, weary and unprofitable’ In which we drift In which we drift along Too bored and passive to care About what strange realities rear Their heads in our days and nights, Till we wake too late to the death of our rights Too late to do anything Too late for thinking About what we have allowed To take over our lives While we cruised along in casual flight Mildly indifferent to storm or sunlight? Or might we choose to make This time a waking up event A moment of world empowerment? To pledge, in private, to be more aware More playful, more tolerant, and more fair More responsible, more wild, more loving Awake to our unsuspected powers, more amazing. We rise or fall by the choice we make It all depends on the road we take And the choice and the road each depend On the light that we have, this light we bend, On the light we use Or refuse On the lies we live by And from which we die. Extract taken from Wheatley, M (2002) Turning to One Another. San Francisco: Berrett Koehler.
Posted on: Wed, 10 Sep 2014 23:07:14 +0000