the engineer

Some say that everyone has a thing that shapes them. Makes them who they are. For me, it’s the war. When I was a child, I lived under a dictatorship. I loved football, I watched the World Cup, supported the valiant versus the bullies. Not much has changed since then. I am now an engineer, a migrant, a citizen of the new world. “If you have no memory, then I want you to remember … the good times that we had. Crowns of violets, and roses, and crocuses.” On this planet, those who walk heavily, carry their needs, or lack of them. I want to renew this unspeakable grief. I want to help others. I really do. And yet there is so much to do. Going back to the sources of evil, I stumble on my ego. I was really good at making things. Taking them apart, and then building them back. One day, I was helped by a professor, he asked me, what my grief was, and then gave me a book. My family are all dead, or they are here, with me. Except for an old auntie, who said, I am too old to start my life anew. Being an engineer is about knowing how things work. That gets me closer to the Truth, and perhaps being close to it, it makes me more likely to know how to help others. The war, it’s the war that drives me. My brother stopped living, he just sits. My father and my mother, they live a life of relative comfort, in a minuscule apartment, supported by our government. But no longer. There are new laws being drawn up. War refugees are parasites, they said. The prime minister of Europa is out and about, telling lies about migrants, about refugees. They say that soon, we shall be sent to Jupiter for rehabilitation. The old dictator back on Earth used the very same word. As an astronomer, as man of God, I can say what Rumi once said: “The astrolabe of God’s mysteries is love.” Compassion is my telescope, and equipped with that, I am to see the spiritual dimension. That is, if they do not chop me up in pieces before the year is out. Yet there is hope. On Tyche, the hypothesis planet in the Oort Cloud, the human species has been able to create a new Palanese society, where ecology and psychology are core issues. We can stamp it out, folks.

”  ‘I’ am a crowd, obeying as many laws
As it has members. Chemically impure
Are all ‘my’ beings. There is no single cure
For what can never have a single cause.”