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Poetry || SubmissionsSaving the DeadThomas Fortenberry (Painting, 'Gaza,' by Silvia) Saving the Dead Sea is not hopeless-- just salted with hate and full of ignorant sinkholes.  We have to learn to lookbeyond the horizon see the sea as Mother Earth sees her: embracing us all, hugging our shores, kissing us with waves of joy and hope and redemption. A desert is a desert only if we fail to irrigate our dreams. A sea is a sea only if we succeed in draining our greed. God does not punish those who act only those who fail to act in renewal, in giving back. Anyone can take; this is the easiest act of the babe. But only the blessed grow up, grow wise, can give, hope for tomorrow, and release want from our burning grasp. Quenching our thirst for vengeance is paramount: what better way to triumph than see all our future generations succeed, prosper, grow? If you squeeze a heart in your angry fist the blood will flow away, the tissues dessicate, and in time the pressures build until even the clay yields dust. How do we create a desert in the garden of the world? Go ask the serpent mark tattooed on Cain: the brand of unforgiving ignorance and hate. We can all take a drink of bitter, briney Lethe, forget forever, and fall over the side of the boat to drown beyond the boney grasp of even the Ferryman's care: imagine sinking in the depths of eternal hatred wound five times round hell seeing without hope you are being watched by the coin-bright stare of the leering skull of greed. This is no myth. It is the reality of the world we create every day: we succumb to our own sloth, allow death and cruelty to infect us, we explode our love in the marketplace, exchanging gold for blood while we film it all live, breaking, exclusive. We can go on living that bloated-corpse way, or we can stand in the middle of the desert, and see the wide-blue circle of heaven kissing the horizon of possibilities. If you had faith you could walk on water, levitate: the Dead Sea allows miracles for those who believe. If you had vision you could see a sea moving upon the sand dunes and pipelines slithering like snakes across the desert. We could build a future, grow a new garden, if we dared dream and act. Thomas Fortenberry is an American author, editor, and publisher. Owner of Mind Fire Press, he has judged many literary contests, including The Georgia Author of the Year Awards and The Robert Penn Warren Prize for Fiction. His work has appeared internationally in publications such as Amelia, Cicada, Maelstrom, Contemporary Southern Poets of 1997, Poetry Magazine, Writer's Choice, Fiction Network, Soul Unmade, Poetry Superhighway, Ariga, Eternity, Gravity, Uno, Lower Than the Angels, Wooden Head Review, Poetry Depth Qaurterly, Lumi Virtuale, Storytellers, Left Bank Review, Biblioteca di Babele, The European Legacy, and is the introduction on a new edition of H. G. Wells' The Outline of History. Today's Situation
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