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Poem on the Miracle of Light – a poem by Michael Fine
By Michael Fine, contributing writer
© 2024 by Michael Fine
And we will bomb them
and kill them all
or we will own them
and their flesh, and the flesh of their children
will rot
in the twisted wrecks of cars and buildings,
shattered by the bombs,
which they carried for us,
beneath long coats,
because that was what we told them to do.
Or we will buy them out,
and their children
will work in our sweatshops,
as their women
sell themselves to us on our streetcorners,
and they will wander to the outskirts
to claw at the piles of refuse – a scrap of rotting meat,
and old shoe, a corner of tar-paper from which roofs are made…
as we build castles
and drive cars
and lie in the sun
until they come back.
And they will be together on the dung heaps,
together on the street corners
together in the sweatshops
together in the trucks
together, some will praise us and hope to be us
together, some will speak of the dignity of suffering
together, some will get high, and shoot each other down on the streets
and together, some will plan to be us,
training in the mountains,
dying one by one,
but growing stronger as we convinced ourselves that we have wiped them out.
But others will sing the songs of praise,
and make lives of love and hope,
as they turn their faces to God,
and take strength from one another
as they savor every moment of light,
as they taste each bite of fruit
because they know life is short and hard,
and there may never be sweetness again,
other than the sweetness of the stories they tell one another.
.
And it is those who are together
who know the kingdom of heaven
in this life
while we, who think we are gods,
will all die alone.
Strength is a kind of weakness,
and weakness strength
Darkness holds the possibility of light
and light holds hope –
the hope that we will see ourselves for what we are,
which is nothing—
not strong and not weak,
neither good nor evil,
not important,
not successful,
not rich or poor –
just a dream
gone as soon as we are here
incapable of honor
incapable of kindness
incapable of knowledge or of hope itself;
our only hope a lost humility
in which we see ourselves as the insects we are,
and abandon our cruelty,
abandon this one over the next,
abandoning this pretense of strength,
this vain hope of domination,
which only brings us, again, to our knees
until we are left together,
with nothing left to do but love one another at last –
left squirming and struggling together
because there is no dominion over death,
and because we are only alive,
however briefly
in one another’s eyes,
and are only warmed,
however imperfectly,
by one another’s bodies,
only alive, if at all alive,
by being together after all,
as one life is made by others,
as life itself is passed without thinking, without intention or design
from one generation to the next.
Strength is a kind of weakness,
and weakness strength,
as the ebb and flow of strength and weakness,
and the merging together of strength and weakness,
is light itself,
and the miracle of light
is the miracle of this improbable survival,
is the presence of a single consciousness,
as memory over time,
so that in the ebb and the flow
the merging and the disintegration,
we can discover we are nothing,
and in the discovery of nothingness,
can find that singular humility,
and in that humility,
can discover kindness,peace, and joy
as light suffuses the silly pretense
of conquest, of domination, of importance,
and of riches
as light illuminates our only hope,
which is one another.
So we discover again the miracle of light
which is darkness
then nothingness
then memory, then weakness,
then strength, then weakness, and then nothingness again
and finally
in the beauty of place and time,
of kindness and peace,
that miracle is the overwhelming iridescent joy of being together, once,
in this moment,
here and now,
in the face of the gathering dusk.
___
Read more short stories by Michael Fine, go here: https://rinewstoday.com/dr-michael-fine/
Michael Fine, MD is currently Health Policy Advisor in Central Falls, Rhode Island and Senior Population Health and Clinical Services Officer at Blackstone Valley Health Care, Inc. He is facilitating a partnership between the City and Blackstone to create the Central Falls Neighborhood Health Station, the US first attempt to build a population based primary care and public health collaboration that serves the entire population of a place.He has also recently been named Health Liaison to the City of Pawtucket. Dr. Fine served in the Cabinet of Governor Lincoln Chafee as Director of the Rhode Island Department of Health from February of 2011 until March of 2015, overseeing a broad range of public health programs and services, overseeing 450 public health professionals and managing a budget of $110 million a year.
Dr. Fine’s career as both a family physician and manager in the field of healthcare has been devoted to healthcare reform and the care of under-served populations. Before his confirmation as Director of Health, Dr. Fine was the Medical Program Director at the Rhode Island Department of Corrections, overseeing a healthcare unit servicing nearly 20,000 people a year, with a staff of over 85 physicians, psychiatrists, mental health workers, nurses, and other health professionals.He was a founder and Managing Director of HealthAccessRI, the nation’s first statewide organization making prepaid, reduced fee-for-service primary care available to people without employer-provided health insurance. Dr. Fine practiced for 16 years in urban Pawtucket, Rhode Island and rural Scituate, Rhode Island. He is the former Physician Operating Officer of Hillside Avenue Family and Community Medicine, the largest family practice in Rhode Island, and the former Physician-in-Chief of the Rhode Island and Miriam Hospitals’ Departments of Family and Community Medicine. He was co-chair of the Allied Advocacy Group for Integrated Primary Care.
He convened and facilitated the Primary Care Leadership Council, a statewide organization that represented 75 percent of Rhode Island’s primary care physicians and practices. He currently serves on the Boards of Crossroads Rhode Island, the state’s largest service organization for the homeless, the Lown Institute, the George Wiley Center, and RICARES. Dr. Fine founded the Scituate Health Alliance, a community-based, population-focused non-profit organization, which made Scituate the first community in the United States to provide primary medical and dental care to all town residents.Dr. Fine is a past President of the Rhode Island Academy of Family Physicians and was an Open Society Institute/George Soros Fellow in Medicine as a Profession from 2000 to2002. He has served on a number of legislative committees for the Rhode Island General Assembly, has chaired the Primary Care Advisory Committee for the Rhode Island Department of Health, and sat on both the Urban Family Medicine Task Force of the American Academy of Family Physicians and the National Advisory Council to the National Health Services Corps.