Our Past Our Future – a Haibun poem

earth blisters from guilt

of mankind’s ignorance,

shade is cast on all

Remember this is a rambler of a thought withoutt editing, so it went where it went. Enjoy or scream.

The environment has been a concern since Adam took his first breath. Actually, it was before then. God did make the Garden of Eden. Note to some, the Garden was in Eden, not named Eden. You wouldn’t believe how that’s not taught in Sunday School. But back to my thoughts. Environmentalists and the casual green supporters consider they do all they can to stop the killing of our planet. But, none of us really do. We all take, but we can never truly give back in equal measure what we take. There is only so much matter on the planet and it’s recycled every day in one form or the other. But each time, a bit more is lost in the processing. There is always processing. You grow the tomato plant organically from the compost and fertilizer you gathered for the purpose. The plants grow and give. You take. You consume. And then you recycle back into the world. No matter how you recycle it, some is lost in the process by your body. I guess maybe we should just stop having babies and eat up all the cows and pigs and chickens as well as all the other types of animals we raise. So long Emu and Ostrich. Yum.

Yes, I’m being weird today, but this is one of my stream of thought posts that I like to do sometimes. I’m not even sure what I started out to write anymore. But I think it was basically that we all need to do more, go above and beyond what we think we need to do in order to keep this planet burning and turning into a ball of nothing but a sky filled with swirling dust that once was meant to feed living, breathing creatures of all kinds. Then next year? Step it up another notch. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle? About Reduce, Reduce, Reuse, Reuse, Recycle?

Our Past Our Future poetry image

Shade here is not one of the traditional dictionary definitions.

The term can be found in Jane Austen‘s novel Mansfield Park (1814). Young Edmund Bertram is displeased with a dinner guest’s disparagement of the uncle who took her in: “With such warm feelings and lively spirits it must be difficult to do justice to her affection for Mrs. Crawford, without throwing a shade on the Admiral.”

In other words, it’s an insult but an insult of another level.

The first major use of “shade” that introduced the slang to the greater public was in Jennie Livingston‘s documentary film, Paris Is Burning (1990), about the mid-1980s drag scene in Manhattan.[2][4] In the documentary, one of the drag queens, Dorian Corey, explains that shade derives from “reading”, the “real art form of insults”. Shade is a developed form of reading: “Shade is, I don’t tell you you’re ugly. But I don’t have to tell you, because you know you’re ugly. And that’s shade.”

I’ve seen the documentary and I can attest to the truth that shade is a whole other level of insult. If done correctly, it’s done with style, grace, and directly to your face.

See quotes in Throw Shade Wikipedia.

My poem for my Haiku Poetry Prompt Challenge. https://ronovanwrites.com/2020/10/05/ronovan-writes-weekly-haiku-poetry-prompt-challenge-326-scorch-shade/.

 © 2020 Ronovan Hester Copyright reserved. The author asserts his moral and legal rights over this work.

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