April is National Poetry Month. Today is a not so gentle reminder of why we should not forget out past. So I won’t end with “Enjoy!” as I usually do. This time I’ll say “Remember!”
November 18, 1978
Morning dawns anew upon a utopia time
A place filled with fluffy white cloud skies
No poverty or hunger or the slightest crime
Where no one ever hurts and no one ever cries
A special place where all can belong
Where God is followed and faith so strong
Built on the words of a charming teacher
Very few noticed beneath the sheen
Of the dashing, dark-haired preacher
Was the susurrus of something mean
A ‘Peoples Temple’ built for equality, tranquility
Headed by a monster of no comparability
But just as all seems right in the dawn
Utopia shatters and blood falls like rain
Sweet cyanide sips are over 900 gone
Bodies die writhing and screaming in pain
In the end the ugly truth is passed
among all the dead bodies amassed
Many simply drank if their faith was true
Or were met with murderous fusillade
But why did the babies have to die to
In the service of this monster’s façade?
Some survived to find their own truth
Forever scarred by the ashes of youth
All they wanted was an earthly paradise
With races coexisting side by side
Who could have ever known the price
Would be one of genocide
Nearly forgotten shadows of a madman’s fate
Jonestown, November 18, 1978
[Bodies at the Jonestown compound under a sign that reads:
‘Those who do not remember the past are condemned to repeat it’]
In case some forgot, never heard of, or were not old enough to know about, the Rev. Jim Jones and the horror of what happened in Jonestown, Guyana, November of 1978, don’t worry; man definitely finds a way of letting bad history repeat. David Koresh and the Branch Davidian massacre in Waco, Texas, was twenty years ago in 1993. If you don’t know/remember either event, tick…tick…tick….
====================
Raivenne-lations 