It's Good To Be Here
By Benjamin Major
In a glade teeming with dragonflies and orchids,
With hazy sunbeams peering around the trees,
On a grassy bank next to a sparkling stream
I lay with you for one beautiful afternoon
Watching a ladybird as it clung to its leaf.
I filled my glass with all of this beauty
Needing nothing more, thinking,
It’s good to be here!
The ladybird holds fast to its leaf.
Below it, the stream rushes onwards
Taking with it all manner of leaves and twigs
On an uncertain course without a navigator.
The ladybird holds on to dear life,
Keeps its glass from spilling
And its life blood from
Returning to the stream.
We're all returning,
Bleeding into the universe.
Life is that tavern from which we drink.
When it is time to go home we go,
Our cup falling from our lips,
Smashing on the floor,
We spill out into the world.
As men fight like boys with stick guns
Over a land dappled with olive trees,
Believing that they are making history,
The land waits generously, as it has done for millennia,
Caring little whose stick guns win or whose lose.
As those deadly stick wars wage on
The clamour of cups breaking on the ground
Is deafening. Blood is spilling into streams,
Red life-lines washing out into the sea.
I can't tell you how much the universe
Abhors such a waste. No words can express it.
Life. You cannot get lost on the way to this tavern.
We’re all already here, though we are not yet connoisseurs.
Terrified of spilling our cup we cling onto our leaves
As we sway in a tranquil breeze.
When will we finish being terrified and become happy?
When men throw away their stick guns,
Truly understand how fragile their glass is,
Run laughing into the street, crying
“Brother, it's good to be here!”