Crystal Ball & The Deep White Pit of Sand

"The words of the prophets are written on the subway walls and tenement halls..." -- Paul Simon

Yesterday, I used the word prescient when, in fact, I would have preferred to use the word prophetic.

The reason I didn't is that the word has been wounded, twisted and warped in the Word Wars so that people generally think it has something to do with "God" and "telling the future".

It is impossible to know the future, in fact, it is impossible to know the past unless one knows the present -- that is to say that which is presented to us now in this precious eternal moment of reality in which we have the pleasure and privilege to exist.

Prophecy is nothing more and nothing less than speaking truth to power.

In order to speak truth it should be obvious that one must know the truth and in order to know the truth one must love the truth -- and be willling to take the consequences.

That is why Martin Luther King is often called a prophet and, in his case, that
is why he was murdered.

The conclusion to what I am trying to put into words is that prophets are not special people whom the "finger of God" has touched or any weird metaphysical shit like that.

We all are prophets to the degree that we desire and really make an effort to see reality and communicate what we know in some way, whatever the consequence may be.

I looked into my crystal ball
but do I care to dare to speak of what I saw?
The sweet reflections on the screen
show monsters rising amid choking clouds of steam.

They fill the streets with mud and cream
and bodies floating softly down silent streams.

There was the time I saw a man,
between two rows of thrashing flails he ran and ran
& when he reached that wicked gauntlet's end,
he fell into a deep, white, pit, of sand.

Was it a film, some kind of crazy show?
I asked my Mom, and Dad, he said it wasn't so!
But as I go through rain and snow,
I wonder, perhaps they really didn't want to know?

When you've got a crystal ball,
you sometimes wish you didn't have a ball at all!

____________
I think I saw the "deep white pit of sand" when I was four or five years old in a newsreel. This would have been not long after WWII and before television -- when you went to the movies, you saw newsreels. I suppose this newsreel had something to do some form of retribution and revenge acted out in one of the liberated countries.