Democracy Dies in Silence

 

When push comes to shove, what will you choose

as you watch what is happening–don’t you care what we loose?

Content just to drift in a fog of complacency, 

won’t you stand up and fight for beloved democracy?

For the home of the brave and the land of the free?

Ceding and bleeding, with each day receding

into the hands of the oligarchy

who want to dismantle all that we’ve done;

stripping away all that we’ve earned

burning our rights...watch them burn, watch them burn.

In silence, too many hope for the best

believing perhaps this is only a test.

Make no mistake, this is a regime:

picking their targets undoing the seams

of the fabric that holds “We the people’” together.

No one said it would be easy to weather the storm.

to keep safe from those with intent to do  harm

What can we do with such limited choices?

Perhaps use our words, perhaps share our voices.

Perhaps do our best to protest the insanity,

while we still can speak out against targeted tyranny

and those unelected who shape all we do...

There are no real heroes,

  just me and just you.

© G.B 2025

To the Moon!!

 

And it's official! At 2:34 a.m. today, March 2^nd,  2025, Firefly’s Blue Ghost Serenity Mission landed safely on the moon, and attached to the lander are archived works from The Lunar Codex, which I am so very proud to be a part of!

 

The Lunar Codex is the brainchild of Dr. Samuel Peralta, an artist, a writer, a poet, a musician, and yes, an actual physicist, who had the vision to preserve and archive the works of artists, poets, musicians, and filmmakers from around the world. It contains 250,000 cultural artifacts from over 45,000 artists, writers, musicians and filmmakers representing 262 countries & territories and 149 indigenous nations, launched in over 7 missions from Earth to space, the moon, and beyond!

 

The Lunar Codex uses digital and analog technology to preserve on nickel based NanoFiche, an archival medium that is expected to last hundreds of thousands of years, if not more. The advantage of using digital technology is its ability to record enormous amounts of data with a very small weight profile. They are stored in the LifeShip Pyramid that is part of the LifeShip payload, physically attached to the lander. The lander becomes a marker for the location of each Lunar Codex collection.

I am proud and humbled to share that The d’Verse Anthology: Voices of Contemporary World Poetry, Edited by Frank Watson and published in 2013, was on the Serenity Mission. I congratulate my fellow d’Verse poets. Who knew when we shared our voices for this book that we would be a part of something so much larger?!!

Much gratitude to Samuel Peralta, my fellow poet and a mentor at d’Verse, for working diligently to make The Lunar Codex, his vision and dream, a reality!