Fake News (a version of Rumi)

A voice in the air says

       Better be quarry than hunter.

       Don't try to be the sun. Be a dust mote.

       Lunar moth, love the candle.

       Taste your life.

       Put your shoes on upside down.

Meanwhile

Fatburg in the white house

fat fingers twitter and fritter the truth

stripping the carcus where others merely nibble

gold teeth scraping bleach white bone

the better to bludgeon

what others strive to taste.

Dust mote lives

quarried in the everyday heat of the sun.

       Things are reversed from what they should be in this place you live now.

       One who should be hung on the scaffold is made emperor.

       People stand and clap.

       Tombs with ornamental plaster, self-conceit everywhere.

       Palm trees made of wax, wax leaves and fruit, wax dirt.

Wax emperor in his wax tower

gold had never been so tarnished

yet the crowds stand and clap.

Buried deep within his ornamental tomb

freedom has never felt as much like death

the wax leaves wilt and the wax fruit rots

dust motes cling to the wax dirt.

July 2019

Rumi extract taken from ‘Display', in Open Secret: Versions of Rumi, translated by John Moyne and Coleman Barks (Shambala: Boston and London, 1999, p. 75).