Dust

I was a child of the world a century ago. There were olive trees and sunshine..and now...

The grey dust settles this evening, the dust, all the way
down
down
down.

I am a child of the world no more.

~

There is a sickness in the world that in former times would have been named evil..the evil of men. But what difference does a word make now?

In the Philippines and the shanty towns of Brazil there are unspeakable crimes. In the land of the pure only the shambolic word "pure" survives. The man in the dust is no other than the child in the dust. 

"If you leave the daily chores for a single day," someone said to me last night, "see how much dust accumulates." There is so much dust that things take on a different shape over time, become unrecognizable. Is time passing so quickly because there is nothing left to say. It is as if humanity has run its course. Ghosts and ancient forms are waiting in the shadows.. 

~

...

child after child in the 
chalk
embrace of chemical death. We saw again

the elegant economy with which God
sculpts
the infant face. Not one..

Not one dis-
figured by what brought them here,
by death
throe and the bland assimilations

of the evening news, by lunatic cal-
culation
or malevolence, which launched the gas,

by money,which made it, 
and made as well  
the sumptuous ground rhythm

that supplants the children on the screen,
lures Emma
full front now and wants her to want

with the whole heart of childhood what 
money 
will buy. The patron's deft 

technologies. Our sponsored 
view. The cutting-room distillations that can take

our breath away. The man 
in the dust
and the child in its unearthly

beauty, still in his arms, they're 







,they fell as they ran.

--Linda Gregerson.