February ends as mild as an early spring day with a cooling March wind. There’s sunlight, a field full of blue sky and the promise of green that overtakes the grey of the woods like a coat of fresh paint, a fence opening, inviting guests to come to spring and summer, like an invitation to enter the great backyard of life.
One hopes that love will come to the lonely; compassion to the bankers; honesty to the brokers; money to the 40 million poor and food to the 46% on food stamps. Will generosity of spirit come at all to the Republicans and their austerity programs for lower entitlement benefits and no tax cuts for the rich? One hopes. Will freedom come to the oppressed, to all those who ran out into last year’s Egyptian Spring and struggled for liberty but now find themselves with a combination of Mubarak’s military and the Muslim Brotherhood? And, therefore, the fighting goes on. One hopes for an end to that and the European Union to be able to hold together without impoverishing the Greeks, anymore that’s been done already.
One hopes that Syria will not turn into another Libya, its leader Moammar Gaddafi of 42 years ripped down like a fallen icon and all the good he did forgotten: free healthcare, free education, stipends for newlyweds, free housing, a multi-billion dollar underground aquifer to spread the water north to south.
One hopes each wish will be fulfilled and the Syrians will reach some kind of peace agreement wherein Bashar Al-Assad, a highly-trained eye doctor comes to see the solutions at hand different from his father, and not invite Al Qaeda or some other non compos mentis groups to bloody combat. Will the flow of blood by staunched? One hopes that man as a species will get another billion years to perfect himself like the world without a nuclear threat to destroy it, or without depleted uranium to kill everyone still breathing.
One hopes that Israel comes to its senses along with its bed-partner, the U.S. Israel has 200 plus nuclear weapons at its aged plant in Dimona in the Negev and it lectures Iran to stop its nuclear program being developed for medical and research reasons. Yet the rhetoric rises, the sabers rattle, the drums of war get louder over a tiny nation with fewer people than a city in Iran, a nation of 80 million. One hopes that the U.S. and other nations remember how easy wars are to start and how difficult to end and how painful to endure day by day, not to mention the cost in blood and money.
On other fronts, one hopes that the radiation levels in Japan plunge and life will return to normal, as broadly as we can define that word. One hopes that my grandson will grow to his full height and be a basketball center, hopefully for the Knicks. One hopes that all we love about life survives another millennium at least: paintings, music, sculpture, writing, architecture, statuary and playwriting, dance, the novel and poem, which all bring great joy to many.
One hopes to see the end of obfuscation in corporations, an end to duplicity and the willful blindness to profit on the misery of others, refusing to keep the financial playing field level and to play by the rules. Global MF comes to mind, taking $1.3 billion from its investors accounts and comingling it with its losses, while the Chicago Mercantile Exchange stood around doing nothing.
One hopes, too, for the end of liars in high places and low who flip and flop from day to day on what they really believe. Witness the current political candidates and the president himself. One wishes for all standing armies to sit down for a few years and take a good rest. One would hope they hear, as I do from my bench looking out at this exquisite lake, the Canada geese gaggle above, spinning through the air in the joy of pure flight, giving one hope for life’s eternal renewal. One hopes they return like soldiers not shattered to smithareens so that nothing but a life of continued suffering awaits, or sailors back from distant seas of despair, having witnessed the tsunamis of Haiti, Indonesia, India, or other god-forsaken areas.
One hopes you can breathe the air and continue to drink unfractured water that when drilled with chemical cocktails mingles with natural gas and can explode from your tap when a match is struck. One hopes the inevitable producers will not buy their way in. One hopes we don’t have to eat food poisoned by Genetic Modification (GM). One hopes that the winds will cool the planet and warm it when necessary, seed it with the real thing, Mother Nature’s ovum not the Bride of Frankenstein laboratory hatched seed. One hopes that climate will change favorably and Rick Santorum can stop sacrilegiously mocking it.
One hopes for the heart to prevail beyond the past’s radiation and all its ugly effects. One hopes to hear the music of the birds, musicians of the word and world, playing, singing their best to soothe the savage beasts in our breasts. One hopes to remain human, open-armed, open-hearted; prolific with hugs and kisses and more, the infinite pleasure of the body, the secrets of the angels. One wishes for ecstasy, not the drug but the kind induced by the pleasures of the body, to abandon ourselves to well-earned pleasure and return fulfilled in the truest sense.
One hopes that life can give these things to all before death, taxes, war, ignorance or stupidity can take them away. One would love a universe of harmony, Vivaldi’s music of The Four Seasons every day of the year. One hopes that after the billions of years of mishaps on this planet, life will finally get it right, like making love one summer night on the beach to find we are sensually fruitful as the pounding ocean tide.
Even a half or a quarter of these wishes would be desirable, welcome as Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, in all four seasons.
Let us all hope and wish for the possibility of release from our bottled-up selves like geniis who will provide life with an endless list of fulfilled wishes to make the world the loveliest place it could be. Let us not stint on the beautiful. Let us focus on cures for illnesses that plague, for cures for cancer, TB, deaths in childbirth, an end to AIDS, to blindness, deafness, eczemas of spirit, cleft palates that make children suffer so. One hopes beyond hope that we can fulfill our humanity and that the animal in is can be tamed, befriended, run by our sides on a winter or summer’s night.
One wishes, one hopes for the freedom of animals, and compassion in their care, and a universe spilling like a piñata with gifts and plenty for all. One hopes there is only one religion: not to kill. One hopes that life could be like writing on a pad on a bench in this park that overlooks the lake, the blue rolling sky containing the full intentions of the maker, to bring us to even a momentary joy, to make the rest of our days fruitful, alive and joyful, as sparkling as a good warming fire. This is the best I can hope for—and whatever will come to memory tomorrow is yours, too, for the enjoyment.
Jerry Mazza is a freelance writer, life-long resident of New York City. An EBook version of his book of poems “State Of Shock,” on 9/11 and its after effects is now available at Amazon.com and Barnesandnoble.com. He has also written hundreds of articles on politics and government as Associate Editor of Intrepid Report (formerly Online Journal). Reach him at gvmaz@verizon.net.
Like a breath of fresh Spring air……