Hard-Edge Planet

In our previous post, Democracy Is a Love Affair, we asserted that democracy begins not in systems or procedures, but in the heart — in love, empathy, dignity, and the willingness to see no one as disposable.

(https://alanjamesstrachan.substack.com/p/democracy-is-a-love-affair)

In Janet’s poem, Hard-Edge Planet, we turn from that vision to the bruising conditions that test it. On a planet full of sharp corners, collisions, cruelty, and strongly defended selves, tenderness can seem naïve, even impossible.

Yet this poem insists otherwise: the harder the world becomes, the more urgently we need kindness, softness, and “collective love” in order to thrive.

Hard-Edge Planet is an invitation to imagine what it would mean to meet a brutal world not with more armor, but with deeper devotion.

Hard-Edge Planet

Included in the deal
of living on 
a hard-edge planet,
is the part about
invariably getting hurt.

Bumping ‘round
ninety-degree corners,
impossible angles,
battered by
countless protrusions, 
geologic and human,
we hurl along marathon paths,
crushing, crashing,
provoking harm with
personal edges —
inner blocks
and barricades,
hurdles erected
for safety and defense.

In this land where
objects are much closer
than they appear,
where bumper cars, 
smash-dancing,
fight clubs,
and TV coliseums
are familiar wreckage
(the things we do for fun)  
there is no getting off easy,
no respite
from the daily mosh pit
of close encounters
without closeness.

The less we feel,
the harder we hit.

Where is our drive for
overdoses of kindness,
a currency of compassion?
Is there such a thing?
Or do I only imagine it
as I feel the pounding of 
my naked human heart 
rounding a sharp bend
and colliding with yours?

An empire’s commerce
— its curse — is cruelty.
With predatory talons
it circles high above,
scratches from within —
clenching, clawing
each soul’s sinew —
emptiness gnawing on
the bones of existence.

We have come to worship
the pageantry of
intractable insistence,	
impenetrable fortresses,
endless kabuki moves
of ritualized resistance
and antagonist relics
of ghosts gone by …
even while

watercolor palettes,
those fluid hues and halos
by which we first arrive,
those bondings and
ever-bending rainbows
that bless our first
and final footfalls,
still surface with promises
that human spirits are
wonders indestructible.

Wouldn’t it be better,
wiser, 
more amazing,
to shine our rainbow light
indulgently 
upon each other’s souls; 
to twine ourselves together
with green and lacing
vines of constancy
and tenderness?

I need your love.

I’ve said it plain and true.
And I am counting on 
you needing mine too.

Let us strive to build
soft bowers of 
collective love.
Let us plant
winding thickets of
conspiratorial devotion,
so, when the hard hits
do come along,
or catch us unaware,
we will have cultivated
downy souls 
and shared round nests
from which to navigate
— and even —
to welcome them.