image entitled “Weary” digitally enhanced by: rob kistner 2010
the dream I dreamt as a young man
that we can change the world’s heart
to embrace love for one another
to believe
people are by nature good
that we can live in peace
and make the world a better place
to believe
universal understanding
is a common goal
of the peoples of this planet
to believe
we haven’t lost our faith
in these sacrosanct ideals
of an elevated life
to believe
there still exists somewhere
a shared and nurtured vision
of a paradise on earth
I’d like to believe
but empty runs the hourglass
I’ve heard the daily news
and I’m so weary, and broken-hearted
yes, I’d like to believe
I’d really like to
but now I even wonder
did anyone ever believe
rob kistner © 2019
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Hi! I’m Edgrrr, rob’s shih tzu.
It is getting harder to believe, but I can’t give up hope entirely. (Though I think it’s really, really time for the Enterprise or Voyager to come back and straighten us out.)
I really wanna believe, and I was quite the pollyanna when I was young. But I just don’t know anymore. But you keep the faith for me Merril. We need the new Starship Discovery to come save us. They have the time-traveling Red Angel, and she can do almost anything. 🙂
Rob, your poem is a little anxiety-producing, especially the question at the end. Know for a fact that at least one person believes, but what exactly the belief is in isn’t that we can unify all humans to work to make the world a better place, because every person has their own idea what a better world would look like and how to get there. Placing a bet on the goodwill of humankind as a whole is probably a losing bet. To have faith that there are those who use their light to keep the darkness at bay is a good bet. To have faith that Mother Gaia, who is a living, breathing being, will keep things from going too far in the direction we are heading is also a good bet.
I hope you are right Jade, but this was written in one of those moments of “I just don’t give a fuck anymore” which happens when I allow myself to listen to the news – which I did last night. I should know better.
I never watch the news any longer- I can’t bear it. I don’t want to become numb to the horrors of our crazy president. This is an intense write Rob.
Thank you Linda! i wish it were a hopful write, and sometimes I find my little thread of hope – just right now, I can’t grasp it.
Well said.
Thank you.
I understand Rob. This world is getting colder and weirder every day. I still believe, just not in all the same things
There is so much wrong in this world Walter, yet we cling to our crumbling beliefs and sytems, spouting the same exhausted platitudes, like they will somehow suddenly make a difference. How can they, when it was under their ineffective mantle that we arrived in this worldwide mess…
you make a great point Rob. The news is not the place to find hope and inspiration. There is no sensationalism in hope. They thrive on and promote the evil that men/women do!
Utopia may not be in our grasp, but we can live and treat others as though it is! Great poem to challenge our thinking!
I sometimes feel like the human society is like a sleight-of-hand show Dwight. The wealthy and powerful are telling us not to look at them. Instead, look over here – there is TV, and pornography, and video games, and fast food circuses, and antidepressants, and yada yada yada – don’t concern yourself with the fact that we have taken the world away from you, and left you with your crumbling fantasies.
I hear pain in your words. It is a sadness that many share, including myself. But I also believe in the power of love. What do you want to believe in? It is amazing what we can see when we are looking for it.
Yes, I feel pain, disbelief, and profound disappointment. My reply to you Ali is my reply here to Kim. Please keep you belef in the power of love. Maybe you can make that belief manifest love in the world. I hope you can. Like I wrote in my poem,I am weary and broken-hearted.
The news knocks the belief stuffing out of us, Rob. I turn it off when it gets too much but you can’t turn off people on trains or on the street who confirm what the newsreader has said – they don’t give a stuff or love their fellow humans, they only care about themselves. And then I come to the dVerse Poets Pub and find like-minded loving humans and my faith is restored.
You make great points Kim. I so want to have faith in the human race, and I never want completely let go of my hope for our species – so I isolate myself in my family, and my poetry. At 72 and having my share of health issues, I don’t have much reason to venture too far or too long from my family cocoon here, living with my wife, son, daughter-in-law, and grandson – in my son’s lovely home. I am surrounded by love. So as long as I avoid the news, and I do like the plague, I can still believe my little world of love is how the real world is. I can still believe in the hope and change that Barack Obama championed, and which I openly and enthusiastically supported – I can pretend it’s real. I was boyant with hope when he was elected. I felt good had finally defeated evil in this country. I now just isolate myself from the rampant insane evil in this country – because I can with my situation. Also, because I feel embarrassed for believing that this country could change, that the world could change. Trump snd his asshat zealots have awakened me to the harsh reality. His cruel, evil pack runs wild, tearing this country down, ruining the planet, for their personal greed and power lust. And the majority of citizens just walk around like zombies, staring at their cell phones and video games, tolerating this shit – oblivious to what is happening. My generation would have been in the streets, openly defying this moronic tyrant. Born in 1947, post WWII, I was a child of the 60’s, who actually believed in peace and love. I protested, I campaigned for my social change candidates, and voted accordingly. What a damned fool I have been proven to be. I worry so very much, knowing the world my beautiful 5-1/2 year old grandson is going to inherit. But still, most of the time I espouse a belief in possibility, and sometimes even feel it. Just don’t feel it right now. My idyllic shield has been pierced, by my own doing, letting the fucked up news of the world in – and I have yet to exact repair.
“I’d like to believe
but empty runs the hourglass”
– great lines to describe those feelings of futilism – whenever I feel that way I look inward and around me for that is all there is to make positive input
Thank you Laura! I turn to Loa Tzu and the Tao Te Ching for a nugget of wisdom to bring me up out of my funk. Yesterday Frank Tassone was quoting the Tao and his writing was so in tune – put me in a much better head place today. 🙂
Thank you, Rob! I’m honored! 🙂
You are welcome, but I thank you Frank!
I think (my theory) that nobody ever believed in either human goodness or the power of love. That’s modern hippy stuff. In the beginning, there was Sin, Eve brought it into the world (misogynist Bible theory not mine) and we have been suffering for it ever since. People are not nice, never have been, they are sinful (Bible theory), and there was never intended to be a paradise on earth. Why work for pie in the sky when you die just for your little self, if you can work to have it now and share it with everybody? Love and goodness are down to the individual. Some people don’t have access to either or don’t want to be bothered. We ought to stop pretending we have a special destiny and start behaving correctly as the least little rodent knows how to, and does. I hope you don’t mind me ranting on your blog, Rob, but I’m thinking you probably agree with most of it.
Much of what you said I do not believe. I am a Toaist Hippy, and believe in the power of love, and the peace it can bring. I also strongly, strongly REJECT consulting the bible for anything. It is a tool of the soulless to criminally exploit the masses. Sorry Jane. But I do believe humans need to put away the ridiculous egoist belief that we have some kind of manifest destiny, and that we have “dominion” over the natural world. We desperately need to learn to live in “balance” with the world. Our dasly misplaced egos are what is destruing the world. If humans ever master balance, we can have peace on earth. I am a pre-drugs, “original generation” of hippies, not what hippiness is portrayed to be today, by people who do not begin to understand the original hippy tenets: peace, cooperation, love, understanding, balance, creation, sharing, and hard work. If you are interested, please go read this piece I wrote in 2011 Jane: Aeropachydermicide It will give you more insight into my mindset.
Well written, Rob.
Our difference is our nature.
Unfortunately, that encompasses extremes that will never be resolved.
Thank you Ken. Keeping all the differences in balance is a monumental task – but it is the one we must pursue…! 🙂
Watching the news every day is definitely discouraging….
Mind numbing Jenna!
Sat with this for quite some time, deepens especially that last line, powerful.
I am pleased this resonated for you Paul. This was written to share the frustrations I’ve dealt with in recent years (interpretation: “since Trump and his morons”), given my proclivity, for the majority of my life, to believe people are inherently good. It was also written to make other people think and question. My personal pilot light of belief is still lit, but there are strong prevailing winds trying to extinguish it.
Great thoughts here. Ones I struggle with. I have no problem being skeptical – I just don’t want to fall into cynicism. I think I still subscribe to the 80/20 rule – 80% of people are good. The question is: How many of those actively bring good into the world to others?
I have perhaps have become cynical. My ratio would be 40% bad peole, 20% pure evil, 30% apathetic and useless, maybe 10% who truly want to be actively good people, but frustration is setting in among that 10%. So the three challenges I see Richard: swing as many of those that are only bad, over to being at least apathetic; inspire as many of the apathetic as possible to become mildly active to fully active in promoting and spreading good; give those among the good, who are flagging, someone to follow to strengthen their hope and resolve. This will require extremely special out-of-the-box leaders, not asshat politicians – and I see none on the horizon anywhere with the genuine integrity, strength of belief, circle of influence, or sustained charisma needed. There simply are no Obama’s yet surfaced out there right now. That is why I am growing more and more cynical. The evil supporting Trump has grown even more powerful, cunning, and diabolical since he is in office – and the Democrats remain terrified and impotent, and the prople who should be in the streets protesting and rioting are at home watching their TV, iPhone, video games, pornography, shopping channels, horror shows, fantasy shows, inane reality shows sporting artificial “hero’s, and gulping antidepressants of one sort or another. At the moment, and until something drastic changes, the human race is Fucked! With a capital “F”! IMHO
I think that sometimes it’s easier to believe when we meet people in practice… the news are often scattered stories where we cannot really form any theories…
You cannot see the stars if you’re blinded by the sun.
Information is so distorted and overpowering these days, that my 72-year-old hippy persuasions are bombarded to uselessness – I have no idea what to think anymore Björn. My defense has been to not listen to the news or to visit Facebook anymore. Sometimes I lose vigilance, much to my chagrin. As I commented to Paul Cannon in this post, I still want to believe in the integrity of the human race. My personal pilot light of belief is still lit, but there are strong prevailing winds trying to extinguish it.
Today’s news, and since the the last presidential election…..President of 10,000 lies and continuing….children in metal fenced enclosures…..rolling back environmental policies….Betsy DeVoss “there is no public money”….it is truly disheartening. My hope is the midterm elections were a sign of what is to come. Most disheartening to me is how people can be fooled….and Trump pandering to the basest of beliefs.
Okay. Done venting….using your analogy, let’s hope 2018 will flip the hourglass and that it is soon enough that there is sand left to reverse course!
You and I are fully aligned Lillian. We have gone quite far down the wrong road, with no obvious committment from anyone of current power to turn the thing around – so how we will reverse our slide just isn’t obvious to me. I want us to head in the right direction. That said, anything I can do or influence, be it speaking out for redirection – I will continue to do it. I don’t want the human race to crash. I have a 5-1/2 year olf grandson who must inherit what we do.
The black coyfish in the yin-yang sign has a white eye. A seed of light dwells even in waxing darkness, and the cycle turns. We do our part, then let go. It is all we can do.
“‘master, I am so discouraged. What can I do?’ asks the student.
‘encourage others,’ the master answers.”
–zen story
And the white coy has a black eye Frank, being fully aware of the darkness that is its balance. I had a transcendental meditation teacher back in the 70’s that had a story that he would share with anyone who was all flustered trying to understand something. The student says, “master, I am so confused, I do not know what to think”. The master says to the student, “Relax. The mind is like water, when it’s turbulent it is difficult to see. When it is calm, everything becomes clear.”