F is for Feeling and Fighting

F is for Feeling and Fighting

Today I would like to speak about feeling and fighting. Odd I know! When I say feeling I mean to feel the grandeur of life and death, to awake to yourself, others, the world, the world beyond the worlds, worlds of the imagination, worlds they have not told you about!

And why do I put feeling side-by-side with fighting? Because one must fight internally in the depths of one's being to feel life, ourselves, others. Too many in modern, technological society walk around numbed, indifferent, today the same as yesterday and all the other days.

Life is a gift. And we must fight against conformity to feel, to think critically, to connect with humanity and the non-human worlds. With feelin' and fightin' in mind (and remember never a fight against others because they are different), I offer you poetry today from the depths of my feeling and fighting soul. I fight each day to remain who I am, to feel the depth and breadth of life, to awaken to new truths, surprises, awe, wonderment, and love. I fight inside myself so that I am not deadened by the so-called "rat race," the cult of money, the alleged salvation of new technological gadgets, the false liberation of hero and state worship. After a while, it is no longer a fight. It becomes a labour of love.

I am a political science professor, but poetry is integral to my feeling and fighting! Here are some of my recent poems below. I offer you a range of subjects from love to politics and more! The last one might shock and touch the roots of your being!


Of The Condition of Love


The winds whistled without conditions.
The rains moistened the red-clay earth on condition of anonymity.
When love’s boat crashes, is it due to conditional requirements,
Or the absence of unconditional love?
How can love rhyme the tune of the unconditional?


Only unknown gods high in the sky live in the realm of the unconditional.
We mere mortals prepare conditions,
Even as we speak the language of unconditional love.


Beware those that invoke unconditional love: They cheat!
They are like those people that invoke humanity.
They lie to give themselves a good name.

Unconditional love is an escape clause,
For those unfit for the vicissitudes of love’s tides.
Love is inevitably stamped with conditions,
As surely as the planets circulating around the sun.
Its conditions are harsh like January’s winter winds in Winnipeg.


Even if you stand the test of love’s harsh conditions,
Like Sisyphus, you must push the rock of love up the mountain every day,
Certain that it will fall by night’s fall.
Then you begin the task of love all over again the next day.


So next time you fall in love remember that love is rarely unconditional.
Love is conditional, whether you poured out abundant love,
Or you were miserly when love called.
Those conditions of love are the walls that imbue meaning for prisoners seeking Freedom.

(Tamir Bar-On, April 14, 2009)


I Lie At The Edge of The Road


I lie at the edge of the road,
Dusty memories roaring like engines
Ready for take-off.


I suppose I can look inside again,
Wandering through the cavernous cave of my soul
Sailing on a boat in an unknown ocean with no destination.


Instead I lie at the edge of the road,
My drunkenness your words painting my body
Like an animist ritual in a lost time.
I lie at the edge of the road contemplating your body’s azure temple,
The way your spirit elevates our universe.

From far away our thoughts can be heard.
Our spirits move silently, separately like the solitary three-toed sloth.
Yet you listen, I know you listen, to the silences,
The silences that you love as much as my words.
I want to perfume you with gifts, pearls of the heart,
The ebbs and flows of my tides, the roaring thunder of universes waiting to be born.


I suppose I can look inside again,
Yet I look to you,
As if you were my shadow,
The one that was there when we first kindled a fire
At the edge of the road in a time that history will not record.

(Tamir Bar-On, April 19, 2009)

They Hope To Be Spared One Day

They hope to be spared one day.
Perhaps saved from a second Holocaust?
So they join the ritualistic chorus that chants
“Death to the Jews” at anti-Zionist marches.

Who will save them?
The rabid right-wing anti-Semites?
The Islamists that long for a theocratic state,
Cleansed of “Jews and Crusaders”?
The “progressives” that would not shudder if Israel was extinguished in flames?

When I was young, I longed for political acceptance.
Today after Pale of Settlement, expulsions from Libya and Egypt,
The Holocaust, suicide bombers in New York and Tel-Aviv, and genocidal Iran,
I know who I am.
Killing fields tell you who you are.
They are the signposts of your identity.
Political acceptance is a luxury like the diamonds I don’t have.

A mighty struggle is here, or perhaps it's coming.
I know that I will not be spared.
I know that the illusion of good Jew and bad Jew,
Gracious Jew and eternally cruel Israel
Is an absurd joke.

Once the killing begins it's too late.
The moralizers of the world will not be awakened.
When the machetes come out, as if to remind us of another age,
We will hear murmurs of dissent
Because of the sight of children without ears or heads.

The howling horrors of winter nihilism are upon us.
Springs and summers will fade into autumn rust,
But winter nihilism is here to stay.
My people awake!
Awake my people!
My once awake people why do you sleep?
You will not be spared.
There will be no good night, nor gentleness.
Next time not one of us will remain.

(Tamir Bar-On, March 4, 2009)

Tamir Bar-On