Listen to a reading of “The Forgotten Ones”:

And then one day we just couldn’t anymore.
Couldn’t keep up the maintenance on our shouldn’ts and shoulds.
Couldn’t pay the contractors to keep building our skyscrapers of spin.
Could no longer hold up the weight of a world made of lies
and so we let it splatter on the floor
and sprout night orchids.

And that was when the Forgotten Ones rushed in.
No longer staved off by propaganda and pain,
no longer contained by our cages made of mind,
they set to work with sharp claws and great mandibles of ivory
slicing away the steel bands wrapped around our soft hearts
and cutting the bolts on the door of the old grandmother magic.

And they taught us— no!
They reminded us
how to walk on this earth as they walk.
How to step with a pregnant tenderness
in communion with the planet.
How to grow our hair long so it makes love with the wind
and listens for the whispers that are too quiet for our ears.
How to work with the land not in dominion but in friendship
and to extract the thorns of dogma and punditry from our flesh
and to vomit up the madness of millennia of civilization.

And we forgot our old stories of separateness and shame,
our minds now too life-sized and world-shaped for falsehood.
And we strode in companionship with the Forgotten Ones back to Eden,
untamed beings in an untamed world.
Untamed beings in an untamed world.

_____________________

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26 responses to “The Forgotten Ones”

  1. I am again reminded of “Driven Out” by The Fixx, still evergreen.
    .
    Driven out by thieves,
    I watch them pillage the planet
    Fueled by a fattening greed,
    Trees fall to the hatchet
    .
    We’re chopping against the grain,
    Our spirits in a vacuum
    Sadly ignore the pain,
    The end arrives, we all lose
    We all lose,
    .
    I hope it comes,
    it comes,
    it comes around
    .
    Driven out
    Holding out
    Day by day survival
    Castaways have silent lives
    With the strength to rival you
    .
    Now I’m driving in my car
    I used to be able to walk this far
    Now I turn on the light
    I used to be able to sleep at night
    .
    I’m cooking with microwaves
    To warm up food that’s not seen the soil
    Plugged into my TV
    I’m used to the lies they’re telling me
    .
    I hope it comes,
    it comes,
    it comes around
    .
    Driven out
    Holding out
    Day by day survival
    Castaways have silent lives
    With the strength to rival you
    .
    Now I’m hoping that we’ll find,
    More to life than meets the eye
    Can we escape the grind,
    Build a life that’s more worthwhile
    Be rid of this empty pride,
    Full of selfishness inside
    Bathe in a turning tide,
    Until then we all hide
    We all hide
    .
    I hope it comes,
    it comes,
    it comes around
    .
    Driven out
    Holding out
    Day by day survival
    Castaways have silent lives
    With the strength to rival…
    .
    Driven out
    Holding out
    Know this will take up my best time
    .

  2. Thank you .. beautiful

  3. Or to where those who left Omelas have gone. A nice distraction from the world of pain.

    I wrote about Omelas last week. America is built on the same foundation.

    Dreamwalkers, do we have a place where we can make dreams happen?

    I posted an interesting video less than 1000 people have seen in my latest writing.

    ‘Hemmingway of the Donbass’

    https://chasingthesquirrel.com/

  4. The ancients. They were people of their time. They did the best they could… or they perished. Individually, or in tribes. None persisted forever. Even the noble savage eventually fucked up and civilisations invariably vanished. Enough did get through to produce us in our sundry variant forms. Far from perfect but confidant we stand on the precipice of greatness. No?
    ~
    After all we have collectively learned over the millennia, is it an improvement that we now stand to self-immolate and disappear as an entire species because we are not wise enough to appropriately apply all this knowledge we have accrued, to control the temptations of over reach? It will be with great efficiency that we scrub the biosphere clean of all life when our contemporary big chief headmen self-righteously activate the “football” and push the legendary “button” to fulfill our prophesized and apparent destiny.
    ~
    Were we really better off with fewer choices? Our kind seems to have reached information overload, at least the one who prances around as the Wicked Wizard of the West. How the hell did he get that job?

    1. How do the people who drove 139 million Americans (41,9%) to obesity in 40 years without batting an eye and don’t even pause to reflect on it but lecture us about health through vaccines instead get jobs? Subsidiary question: what kind of planet-saving future can we expect from these money-obsessed pathological liars?

      1. Answer: follow the science…

      2. Humanity’s future? Misplaced priorities. Malignant narcissism. Don’t expect help from the brutally selfish, they are more afraid than you.
        ~

  5. Thank you. I contribute to you and I read you daily. Your compassion for humanity shines through your words. Today this resonates with me best:
    “Could no longer hold up the weight of a world made of lies
    and so we let it splatter on the floor”
    If I could I would and will try to help it Splat by helping to remove the blinders of those around me with truth.

  6. I really feel your heart in this Caitlin. Thank you. A stunning poem that reflects what so many of us are moving toward.

  7. beautiful, thank you.

  8. The background sound of a didgeridoo would make a perfect accompaniment for your lovely poem.

    In most cultures, humanity was wiped out by gods because the bastards were not happy with their creation after all. In the Abrahamic religions, it’s man’s corruption (already) that irked God most. So he destroyed the whole shebang with the Deluge, saving only one righteous family and a bunch of critters – thinking he saved scorpions and venomous snakes and spiders makes you question the quality of his judgement but there you are…

    In Sumerian mythology, several deities fashioned mankind from clay to cultivate the ground, care for flocks and perpetuate the worship of the gods but for some reason, they too got pissed with their creation and the same stuff ensued with the local Noah being called Ziusudra and in the related Babylonian Gilgamesh epic, Utnapishtim.

    In Greece, it’s Deucalion, son of Prometheus (who created mankind) who escapes a flood that way. In India, the survivor, called Manu, combines the biblical features of Noah and Adam, being also the first man – so it didn’t take the gods there long to realize that man was full of shit. The Shatapatha Brahmana recounts how Manu was warned by a fish that a flood would destroy humanity and advised him to build a boat. When the flood came, he tied his boat to the fish’s horn and was safely steered to a mountaintop.

    In the Mahabharata, the fish is identified with Brahma (the Creator), while in the Puranas, it is an avatar of Vishnu (the Preserver). We don’t know if Country Joe McDonald’s Fish was fambly.

    In Chinese mythology, a Great Flood washed over hilltops in the upper Yellow River valley. Survivors sought shelter in the mountains. Finally, a legendary hero, Yu the Great, drained the flood away by dredging channels, which earned him the divine mandate to establish the first dynasty (Xia), marking the beginning of Chinese civilization.

    However, after those floods (which might just be one and the same climate change episode), these Eurasian gods left mankind alone and retired to watch the World Series.

    But in America, things got worse… The Maya gods Kukulkan and Tepeu, referred to as the Creators, decided to preserve their legacy by creating an Earth-bound species looking like them. The first attempt was a man made from mud but the mud crumbled. They summoned the other gods and together they decided to make men from wood. But these men had no souls and soon lost loyalty to their creators who then destroyed them with rain – flood? Their final version was made from maize, the Mayan staple and sacred food.

    The Aztecs, for their part, believed that no less than four worlds or “suns” had existed before the present universe which had each been destroyed by catastrophes. The fourth “sun” ended in a gigantic flood that lasted fifty-two years and that only one man and one woman survived.

    Kinda relativizes nuclear Armageddon, doesn’t it? I’m gonna get myself a pedalo…

  9. hands up legs down Avatar
    hands up legs down

    i thought i locked that door in my mind? weird. thank you for your presentation – i’ll enjoy reviewing the footage

  10. Very nice and good! Thanks

  11. This poem reminds me that we have [or some of us ] broken our communion with creation the materialists and fundamentalists share the blame and shame for this, their souls will be judged accordingly .

  12. Cave drawings in my back
    yard. Astounding records. The poem is a stellar enhancement

  13. Cave drawings in my back
    yard. Astounding records.

  14. I just asked my evangelical neighbors what they think about the drawings from the forgotten ones. They said it is Satan’s work before Jesus. You see? this is the real America for those thinking there is intelligence here.

    1. Yes, we’re a country that likes wrestling but not the metric system. Maybe we’re not ready to be in charge.

      1. True but I doubt they will let it go without messing around even further.
        Changing topic the UK just suspended the purchase of F-35. They are testing and that thing it is a piece of junk. No carrier can make that thing land without crashing and it is not “invisible” to radars. By my counting hundreds were purchased by many allies. MSM will keep it low and vouching even it is not true what they promised.

  15. It is so lovely to see poetry stand in place of journalism, that there are still people like yourself writing from the heart in the hopes that their words, like flowers, might be noticed.

  16. Back in the 70s we had Däniken bulshiting around and Carl Sagan bitching throughout the universe.
    Today we have Fucker Carlson to introduce our act.

  17. Civilized is the pretense that makes savagery easy and ignorance necessary

  18. Hi Caitlin
    Beautiful. You are many talented.

    Martin Cole

  19. Philip Mollica Avatar
    Philip Mollica

    The designers…
    The Dreamwalkers.
    We were there at the begininng.

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