I am repurposing these lyrics
From Fleetwood Mack’s “The chain”.
Imagining that it is Earth talking like a lover:
Listen to the wind blow, watch the sun rise
Running in the shadows, damn your love, damn your lies
And if you don’t love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
You would never break the chain (Never break the chain)
And if you don’t love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
You would never break the chain (Never break the chain)
Listen to the wind blow, down comes the night
Running in the shadows, damn your love, damn your lies
Break the silence, damn the dark, damn the light
And if you don’t love me now
You will never love me again
I can still hear you saying
You would never break the chain (Never break the chain)
But here we are
Running in the shadows.
Running away from everything.
The deep, darkening shadows:
And the chain of life lies broken
In the shadows:
The shadow
Of wars that link to wars
Of wars that never end.
Of climate change.
Running in the shadow of endless debt:
To conscience,
To decency
To nature
To future generations,
To nonindustrial cultures,
To untold stories,
To oral histories,
To blighted ecosystems,
To nonhuman intelligences.
Running in the shadow of karmic work untended.
Running in the shadow of forgotten dreams
Of real people
Of children,
Of old orchards
And abandoned farms,
Of dammed up rivers,
Of clear cut forests,
Of private property everywhere,
Of mountains whose spirits were claimed by Empire.
Of overfished oceans.
Of streams that stink of human waste.
Running in the shadow of everyday greed,
And uber-greed.
Of statistical calculus,
Of the cult of objective science,
Of grey solutions to green disasters.
Running in the shadow of the lie of recycling.
Running in the shadow of biomass,
Of trees uprooted by monstrous machines.
Of chronological time
Of human-centric time-keeping,
Of linear thinking,
Of binary thinking,
Of the primacy of casualty.
Running in the shadow of failed stewardship.
Running in the shadow of institutional racism.
Running in the shadow of industrial capitalism.
Of criminals writing law,
Of criminals enforcing law.
Running in the shadow of Empire.
Running in the shadow of white supremacy.
Running in the shadow of human supremacy.
Running in the shadow of pandemic fatalism,
Of pandemic callousness and indifference.
Running in the shadow of nuclear pathology.
Yes,
Listen to the wind blow:
Down comes the night
Running in the shadows, damn your love, damn your lies
Break the silence, damn the dark, damn the light
And if you don’t love me now
You will never love me again . . .
………….
Note to the reader:
“If you don’t know me by now” by Harold Melvin and The Blue Notes, came before “The Chain”, but I like the Fleetwood Mack lyrics better. I like the complex metaphor of the chain: The chain of a committed relationship, the chain of life, the chain of lies, of addiction. I suppose we are all bound by some kind of chain. In this poem I guess I am challenging the reader to break the chains that bind us to dysfunction and mend the chain of life.