Chath lives and works on a small family farm in Bolton, Mass., where he contemplates writing as a form of escape, but he can’t just rid himself of human ties. He paints the American sky thinking of Cambodia’s tyranny and blood. He’s alone, but not lonely, and tries living to the fullest, however long it will take to acquire true freedom on the road, with nothing but the clothes on his back. Chath earned a master’s degree in community social psychology at UMass Lowell. He is the author of a poetry collection, After (2009); This Body Mystery (poems and paintings); and a children’s book, Sinat and the Instrument of the Heart. His writing appears in History As It Happens with selections from the first ten years of this blog. These books are available online. The big blog book is on sale at the national park gift shops in Lowell (Market Mills Visitor Center and Boott Mills Museum). 

TREES OF BOLTON

Trees of Bolton, this 2019,

Beneath clear, American sky, 

After rain, no rainbow in sight

But despair & regrets, yesterday without the clown

In festive mood of a Hollywood Scream on screen.

Clown on clown, the illiterate rule over earth and sky,

What the clown ought to do and be crazier than what can be believed

As doubts loom higher to reveal how father-sky is a liar.

In the tear ducts of certain Americans,

Insanity, greed, and selfish centering are a way of life,

Staging on a baboon who can set the forest on fire,

Bringing havoc and tyranny to the jungle of ignorance.

Fools are sycophants out for attention,

Money and presidential,

Makeshifts of democrats in disguise,

Republicans’ dire hunger for the return of a Savior,

Their clown-eyed devil smiling the saddest, scariest

Smile, making holes the children can easily fill with stones.

Self-boasting is very American,

The me culture of an X generation,

A technological illness on the prowl

Smearing human goodness the world needs

To fight against dark feign of insatiable power

A party can possess to bleed the republic,

Crack open the sky and earth

Into self-annihilation or self-flagellation

Like Christian monks castrating themselves for faith and purity,

In Christ, this fleshy body of paradise awaits holy men.

Dirtied and stained,

Sin removal is very difficult on natural laws and urges.

The blood of man salt and sterile in stagnation

Hate driven wild, mad men and delusional, 

Nature itself will spin his head,

Take out his eyes storm by storm,

Hurricane by hurricane,

Weathered pillows and flooded beds,

Houses in the wind,

Sky rises glass shattering,

Shrapnel from hail like bullets of mass shooters on a rampage,

Nature can’t or won’t be ignored.

What man does to tear up the sky and shape earth into the mold of his existence,

Nature can do better.

In his own tears, 

Man will drown.

Climate change is the collective nuclear bombs

All the nations possess

To mass destruct in one sweep,

Everything in its way, including the current president,

Out golfing so he can tweet how great he has made America again. 

—Chath pierSath, 9/2019