The Wind That Stalks The Rice Fields

The intended topic of this entry has been suspended. How delusional do you have to be? It will take a lot more that this to make the rest of the world collapse at your feet – where are the celebrations today and how far from the aims of a peaceful existence does celebration of this put you? I know that the result is oblivion not paradise. I believed in the gods swooping low over the rice fields, fattening the grains after eating their fill from the offerings given by grateful and peaceful families, slaking their spiritual thirsts from the Coca-Cola left out by the happy, smiling children. And the dead walked with the living, talking with them, just across a tiny boundary, not in paradise but walking with their families on this earth, through the water and volcanic rock that makes this island so fertile. And the sweeping destroyer of worlds is swept from his course across the forests, blown clear by damning madness from the real world, where my prayer is the only right one and no other belief can possibly explain where I come from. I know where all this comes from; the inevitable dark marks and lesions on the brains of everyone, the black swooping fear of future. As people spread the papers over the floor this morning, the same papers I read like some colonial white-suit in the foyer of my hotel, they will see the end result, the cells of skin and bone and brain separated from any chance of enlightenment, and clamour for revenge and more death, up in the sky. They will pray and save for a decent funeral, the beautiful white calf of the rich and the poor storage in the ground before the proper ending sends them over the edge to take the offerings.

And the children will smile and go more hungry, and no war will come, no return to the horror that this island has know in only the last 40 years. They always try the wrong places. A few dead after such terrible things have already gone before will only make it more wrong. And the gods will swoop and return, roaring down to make rice, to make food, to make life and take it in proportion. And who has lost?