Creating a Global Partnership

The Eighth Millennium Development Goal asks us to consider how we can work together to:

CREATE A GLOBAL PARTNERSHIP FOR DEVELOPMENT.

I find that this notion has become swathed in layers of disguise during my lifetime. When I was a child it seemed easy to imagine that our country, actuated by a kind of long-range self-interest, would invest what we called "foreign aid" in needy countries around the world so that they would, in some sense, prosper and come to have societies more like ours.

Now I read books that tell me that institutions like the World Bank encourage development projects that help global corporate enterprises grow and make more money for their stockholders, while degrading the environments and nascent local industries of countries they claim to be helping.

I'm not sure what to believe any more. But I know how I feel, so I try to express that. And that is why I believe we should find poetry that works to implement the Millennium Development Goals.

Here's a passage from my verse interpretation of The Gospel of Thomas, a gnostic text from the Nag Hammadi manuscripts:


Jesus saw some babies nursing.
He said to his disciples, this saying:

“These nursing babies are like those souls
Who enter into my Father’s halls.”

They said to him,

“Then shall we enter the Father’s halls,
Even though we are grown, yet as babies?”

Jesus said to them,

“When you make the two into one,
When what is inside, outside has gone,
And when the out is like to the in,
And the upper like to the lower,
All the same, seed, root and flower,
And when you make male and female
Into one, combining them all,
So that the male will not be male,
Nor will the female be female,
When you make eyes in place of eyes,
When you make hands in place of hands,
A foot in place of a foot appears,
An image in place of an image is,
Then you will enter the Father’s halls.”

I hope you will join me in my effort to use your poetry to change the world.