The World Was Made For Love
Available at: Amazon
Sometimes we need to get beyond the daily blur of information, so that we can think about the Big Picture of our world today. Poems give us a bite-size nugget in a short period of time, so that we have something to think about as we go through our day.
The 85 poems in The World Was Made For Love are crystal clear. They enable you to reach with your thoughts into your own future. They help you to understand how we together can build a better future, around the entire planet.
Woven among the poems are photographs which give each poem a foundation in reality. You will remember the poems, and you will remember the pictures.
As in all of the books by John Slade, we move from an honest appraisal of our troubled world today . . . to a solid vision of hope, and determination. We have everything we need to build the Renaissance of the 21st Century.
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Sample Poems from
The World Was Made For Love
Saint Croix, Caribbean.
A Single Choice
It comes, finally, to a single choice:
Do we believe in our children,
Or do we believe in oil?
Do we bequeath to our young people
The greatest opportunity in all of human history,
Or do we poison the 21st century?
A single choice,
A global choice.
Loon mother with newborn chick.
Take Me Back
Take me back to another time,
When life was ripe upon the Earth.
I want to see the full abundance.
I want to hear the whooshing wings of a thousand geese.
I want to hear the thundering hooves of ten thousand buffalos.
I want to smell the fertile water of the sea,
Washing like laughter over a sheltering reef.
Take me back to another time,
When life fashioned itself into a million versions of perfection.
“School Strike for Climate”
Fridays For Future, Stockholm, Sweden, March 15, 2019.
Beautiful Child
Beautiful child, I’m sorry that we had to take your world away from you.
We had to drive to work, you see,
So that we could earn the money to feed you and clothe you,
And buy that red bicycle which you loved so much.
We were always in a hurry, you see,
Dashing through the weeks and the months and the years
While you grew into a person who watched us from a growing distance
With fear in your eyes.
Because, perhaps dim and distant in your mind, behind other cluttered thoughts,
You knew the world was warming,
Your knew the ice was melting,
You knew the fires were burning,
And you knew that this was the world you were going to inherit,
While we, dashing, did so little to stop our adult insanity.
And so you were terrified.
My beautiful child, you were right.
And I was very, very wrong.
Precious life on a perfect planet.
Funeral Veil
Were Earth an increment closer to the sun,
No snow would there be, nor me.
Were Earth an increment further from the Golden One,
No rain would there be, nor me.
Wherefore then, in perfect and perpetual equilibrium,
Do we earthlings yearly conceal ourselves behind
A shroud ever darker,
Blocking with all manner of airborne muck
The gentle rays that would bless us, bless us, bless us unto eternity?
Shall we not allow the sun himself to bestow his spark
Unto our multitude of clamoring machines,
Before the Earth herself is forced to wear the veil
Of a mother mourning for her children?
Sunlight glitters on the water.
The breeze sweeping across the lake plays with sparks of energy
that have just spent eight minutes and twenty seconds traveling from the sun.
Dip your cup and drink from the mystery
that gave you life.
People with Determination
You see, the Renaissance of the 21st Century is going to be built
By people with determination.
The kids of the world are weaving together.
More than ever before in human history,
Kids who have lived through repeated bombings of their city,
Kids who have seen their cousins ripped to shreds by shrapnel,
Kids who have heard screams from inside the rubble of collapsed buildings,
Kids who reached out to the world with their YouTubes from the war zone,
Kids who know the cold rain and worsening mud of a refugee camp,
Kids who have seen their parents struggle while trapped
In somebody else’s war,
Yes, these kids of the world are weaving together.
These kids are going to break out of the shackles of the 20th century.
They are going to leave behind the stupidity and the insanity of war.
They are going to insist that oil, one of the great causes of war,
Be left buried deep in the Earth.
The Renaissance will be powered by the beneficent sun, by the ubiquitous wind.
Those kids—those great kids—are going to scrape the Old Shit
From the soles of their shoes.
They are going to spread their wings in a new and powerful way.
When the last gun has been silenced, and the last warplane grounded,
When the children no longer scream in the night, in the chaos, in the flames,
When their mother can raise her daughters and sons within the shelter
Of a strong and lasting peace,
A peace built by those kids, those great kids, Architects of Peace,
Then will the Renaissance begin to show us a multitude of opportunities,
Then will the Renaissance nurture our awakening talents,
Then will the Renaissance show us what we could become.
The kids dashing for safety in the rubble today,
While warplanes roar overhead,
And dust fills every breath,
Are going to become a generation of people with great determination.
Fridays For Future
Stockholm, Sweden, March 15, 2019.
I Want a Purpose
I’m tired of exercising my thumbs.
I want to harness the wind; I want to harness the sun.
I want to look up all day, not down.
I want my face to be a bit sunburned when the five-o’clock whistle blows.
I want a job that requires that I spend my life learning,
Though I was bored to death in high school.
I want to think in terms of jet streams, as their meanderings bring us our weather.
I want to think in terms of ocean currents, snaking like giant rivers around our planet.
I want to think in terms of the next unprecedented century,
The fullness of which I shall not live to see.
But the kids still unborn . . . they will see the next century, and more.
Yes, I want to go back to school, to sit at a desk, to raise my hand with a question.
Somebody told me there’s a drought coming.
Somebody told me there are monster hurricanes coming.
Somebody told me that the wildfires in California and Congo and Russia and Greece
Will be in my back yard within a decade.
Somebody told me there’s a Renaissance coming.
Somebody told me about a Weaving of Schools around the world,
So that students can share their research and their pictures,
Their music and their poems and their dreams.
Yes, so that a global generation could grow up together, working together
To solve planetary problems with planetary solutions.
Someone told me about jobs,
Designing and building and installing and maintaining
A clean energy web around the world.
Somebody told me about jobs,
As we harness the sun, as we harness the wind,
As we harness the ocean currents and the ocean waves.
Yes, I could use a job,
A job with a purpose.
That would be like getting paid twice.
I’m tired of exercising my thumbs.
I’m tired of being afraid of what’s coming, and doing nothing about it.
I’m tired of being bored, even though boredom is pretty much all I know.
I’m certainly tired of being poor, or almost poor, with nothing steady, nothing steady.
I’m tired of my life being bits and pieces.
I want to wrestle with the wind.
I want to cup a mirror to the sun.
And when I go to bed at night, I want to lay my head not only on the pillow,
But on the planet as well, for whom I worked all day, on whom I shall rest all night.
When I awake to greet the sun at dawn,
And step out the door to a breeze on my face,
I shall savor a powerful purpose . . . a purpose that beckons me.
Book categories: Climate Change and Clean Energy