By now,the seed varieties of the world,  
may have been attacked beyond recovery
by wars of pretense and relapses.
We are still learning
how to handle it properly.
We tend to say.

Some will talk and plan over dinner parties,
over TV or Radio. Most will leave
it behind like another corpse
of lessons thrown to the gutter,
like a dead *** on another Sunset Boulevard.

Iraq's seed banks
we blew up in the 2000s.
In various places in Asia
and the Middle East, places of life and cultured
varieties gone in an instant.
Echoing our imprisoned
ignorance and drives for more instant goods and services.

Indian farmers have committed mass suicides after
their god Hanuman was used by a chemical giant
to sell poison seeds and renewed
bondages of indebtedness.

One question a stranger asked a group of writers on tour
was not what their poetry or books were about,
nor why they wrote it, but how writing may and
may not be helping as we make decisions and solve problems now?

Once agricultural lands turn into new promises
of commercial buildings. Cities of inaccessible towers and
abandoned malls in America, Spain, China, and Russia
feeds us back our own echo.

Like converted uses of lands, our humanity
is converted into inanimate collections and status
symbols of some players or parties. As we face
our continuing struggle between
our oppressor-selves and our genuine roots.

Despite the perversions,
inside vicious habits of waste
where we glorify promises of war and efficiencies,
we continue to be entrusted with the ongoing lessons:
Rarely do surviving generations through famine, war and diseases,  
throw away means to live, or destroy any kind of seed.

Every day we wake to the ruins and remains of
Our living poetry, word spaces, hours, exchanges,
gains and losses, stopping and going. This time,
not just for fires of anguish or unnecessary losses,
but for each other's midnight lamps.#