People Rise Up

People rise up.

The tide in your affairs
Is a full sea flooding
To fortune
Or misadventure.

People, rise up;

Swell beneath sun and moon
Is heaving across the world.

Forces of nature
Too long ignored
Are gathering.

People, remember,
As the swirling waters hurl you
There is no more to be done.
You are random rain already fallen
In a merciless sea.

For this was never about the water
You thought you were.
None of your imagined gifts,
Nor prowess, borrowed or stolen,
Will regulate its rise and fall.

Father sun and mother moon own you,
Cell and sinew, as if you were sand
In the backwash of a wave.

You are powerless
In the face of nature,
Whose nature you dismissed.

Now the seasons have turned,
And change has come regardless,
Through you and despite you,
Under a cold and disinterested heaven
Every god you devised,
Every demon you once conjured
Bows down defeated by irrelevance.

People, rise up;

In the tide race you are only
A tiny fraction of water
Or, like the breaking wave,
Spume upon the wind.

© BH, 2017

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Lot’s of ‘people rise up’ going on right now. Just a reminder that time’s getting on for them who should rise up to actually do it.

Change is coming - through us or despite us. Now choose.