Here, to discover every day until May 18th, the 13 poems by Sandeep Bhagwati who inspired his lastest creation Niemandslandhymnen.
IX — Avarice
By greed or lust, we hasten to disseminate
Our dividend gospel, our psalm of perpetual profit,
We chant the sapphire sutra of snowballing wealth, we speculate,
Sing surahs on sukuks [1], intone hymns on hedge funds as if they were words of the prophet.
With spreadsheets as our epiphanies, let us elevate our rejoicing to feverish corporate pitch:
Let our capital canticles circle the globe, dim the sun, and ascend into lucrative orbit!
There our credo on eternal gains may make gods laugh, but it precipitates humans, all humans alike, poor and rich,
Who every day gamble their soul on the specious premise that, once in a proximate future, our voracious accumulations will allow us the means to re-liven
The landscapes, the oceans, the skies we so coldly abandoned in haste to pursue our fanatic, insatiable itch,
And by terra (re) forming our wizened biosphere, one fine day, maybe, perchance, to redeem our species for scorching the ground beneath our feet while we had recklessly striven
To make all of it our own, to ravish, exploit it to pieces, to lacerate its beauty, rip into its intricate web of relations, to renounce our future, its unbounded, fertile, inconvertible promise
Through matterless manipulations of the given.
- a debt-financing tool in Islamic economies that loopholes religious laws against charging interest.
News posted on Monday, May 15, 2017.