A Sabbath Poem (Okri)

          from MENTAL FIGHT
          ~ by Ben Okri, Nigeria

          What will we choose?
          Will we allow ourselves to descend
          Into universal chaos and darkness?
          A world without hope, without wholeness
          Without moorings, without light,
          Without possibility for mental fight,
          A world breeding mass murderers
          Energy vampires, serial killers
          With minds pining in anomie and amorality
          With murder, rape, genocide as normality?

          Or will we allow ourselves merely to drift
          Into an era of more of the same
          An era drained of significance, without shame,
          Without wonder or excitement,
          Just the same low-grade entertainment,
          An era boring and predictable
          ‘Flat, stale, weary and unprofitable’
          In which we drift
          In which we drift along
          Too bored and too passive to care
          About what strange realities rear
          Their heads in our days and nights,
          Till we awake too late to the death of our rights
          Too late to do anything
          Too late for thinking
          About what we have allowed
          To take over our lives
          While we cruised along in casual flight
          Mildly indifferent to storm or sunlight?

          Or might we choose to make
          This time a waking-up event
          A moment of world empowerment?
          To pledge, in private, to be more aware
          More playful, more tolerant, and more fair
          More responsible, more wild, more loving
          Awake to our unsuspected powers, more amazing.

          We rise or fall by the choices we make
          It all depends on the road we take
          And the choice and the road each depend
          On the light that we have, the light we bend,
          On the light we use
          Or refuse
          On the lies we live by
          And from which we die.

(from Mental Fight, by Ben Okri, 1999, David Godwin Associates))