“Oh, where have you been, my blue-eyed son?”
“To market, to market, to buy a big gun.”
we confuse
omniscience and
ignorance,
redundant
in our habitual
failure to protect
we collect
wealth, polluted with
jealousy,
smothered in
waste—we admire and support
incompetence, greed
we spend time
staring at our screens–
glowing with
apathy,
motionless, a shadow of
imminent demise
Jane Dougherty posted some randomly generated words this morning for us to use to make a poem. After seeing “blue-eyed” I could not get Dylan’s song out of my head, and the word “market” provided the reply, mirroring both the news and my continued distress about it.
I struggled to go somewhere else, but ended up with the above depressing and not-very-poetic shadorma chain.
Dylan (as always) says it much better than I.
I’ve stepped in the middle of seven sad forests
I’ve been out in front of a dozen dead oceans
I’ve been ten thousand miles in the mouth of a graveyard
And it’s a hard, it’s a hard, it’s a hard, and it’s a hard
It’s a hard rain’s a-gonna fall
K. 
😦 wish i could argue any of it
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(Sigh)
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Originally, my first line was very similar to yours, but then it didn’t fit with the rest of the poem.
A young Bob Dylan, and the words still fit.
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They do.
All I could see were the darker words. Our state of mind really colors our work.
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Yes, it does.
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Your poem flowed through my eyes and into my heart. And now, now I gasp at the absurdity of the striving and yet I cannot stop trying.
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None of us are immune. Thanks Muri.
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My absolute favourite Dylan song. Your poem echoes it well. I’m glad you have written about the mass shootings in America. They are so terrible. I hope your country can find a way to enact gun control laws. It is possible. We did here in the 1990s. Our then prime minister John Howard stood up to the gun lobby. He spoke to them about the necessity for gun control after a brutal massacre of innocent people. He wore a bulletproof vest at the time. Howard was not a PM I often supported but I certainly supported the gun control laws he put in place. While there has been an increase in the use of guns by criminals in recent years there has never been another mass shooting.
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The news keeps talking about what Australia, and also almost every other country that has experienced a mass shooting, has done. But facts do not move either gun owners or the politicians the gun lobby supports. Half the gun deaths in America are suicides, but even losing friends and relatives in that way has no effect on their passion for guns.
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Gosh. I heard on the news last night there have been 27 mass shootings in America this year! I hope your country finds a way to resolve this issue.
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Thanks Suzanne. There are so many guns floating around and so little oversight, I’m not hopeful. The Republicans will not budge on this issue, so I doubt anything will be done in my lifetime. Once all these old white men die out, maybe…in 50 years they will be very much in the minority. But who knows if our government can even survive that long?
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Oh gosh. What a bleak scenario. Something’s got to change. Here in Australia it took the terrible bushfires of 2020, evidence of sexual abuse of women happening in parliament and then the horrendous floods of this year to bring about a change of government and, even more importantly, the election of a lot of professional women acting independently. They are advocating for action on climate change and women’s rights. There is also a strong new push from the aboriginal people to make their voices heard on a national level. Even though it’s a terrible thing to say, maybe it will take some kind of major disaster in the US to make people wake up. It sounds like the recent school shooting is bringing new voices to the issue. Maybe if enough people vote against the Republicans they will lose power. That’s what’s beginning to happen here, The old conservatives are being swept away by this new wave of change.
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I honestly don’t see much hope in the short term. Even 9/11 solidarity lasted only a very short time. We couldn’t come together to stop a million Covid deaths. People are still turning out in droves to cheer Donald Trump. It’s a minority of actual people in terms of the total population, but because our political system gives more power to rural voters in Republican states, there not much chance of change.
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Oh dear. Sometimes I give up on humanity! At the moment I’m on the fence. The shift in Australian politics is heartening but I realise many big players on the world stage and singing from a different hymn sheet. Take care out there. love – Suzanne
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Thanks Suzanne. You too. Xo
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I think this is my favourite Dylan song of all, though I know Bryan Ferry’s version best. You’ve adapted it well, even if it is dark and depressing. We can’t overcome our emotions, and nor should we when they arise from compassion. The attention of the world has passed on to other things. Here it’s football. Don’t let it go off the boil there. It’s what the GOP and their gunslinging friends want.
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Nobody wants to state the obvious–the only reason to own a gun is to kill. And yes, I do want to take away your gun. People who enjoy killing should not own weapons.
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But, they say, killing in self defence is allowed. There must be figures to show how many of those 400 million or whatever it is guns have ever been used in self defence. Some people would call that attitude the law of the jungle, no different to the laws that regulate the world of drug criminality.
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Neither cops nor anyone else should have to be confronting civilians with guns killing people at school, work, concerts, shopping, driving, taking public transportation, at places of worship, in their homes, or just walking down the street or sitting on a bench. The only way to keep that from happening is to make sure civilians don’t have guns. Numerous cops wouldn’t/couldn’t stop the shooter in Texas.
I don’t know. The stats on self-defense depend on the bias of the reporter.
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Seems obvious to you and me (and millions of others) but the ones who want to keep their guns will spin a different story.
I know I’m a cynic, but I really do think that change usually comes about, not because politicians have suddenly seen the light, but because somebody has worked out a way of making a profit out of the ‘good’ decision. If only somebody could think up a commercial alternative to guns.
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One of my favourite Dylan songs seems more timely than ever, and the perfect starting point for your poem…
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Thanks Ingrid. So much of his work is.
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