We The Marooned
A Poem by Michael Deklerk
This month the Resonant Man is publishing a series of guest contributions, highlighting voices from our active members and the wider community. These conributions work to enrich our collective enquiry and exploration addressing ‘Masculinity in the Metacrisis’.
Today we include a poem authored by Michael Deklerk who has set with the Resonant Man this past year.
Join the Live Event on May 28th
On Thursday, May 28, we’ll be co-hosting Masculinity and the Metacrisis, an online event featuring climate journalist Amy Westervelt, philosopher Cadell Last, Resonant Man co-founders Jacob Kishere and Matthew Green and Indra Adnan, a psychosocial therapist, author and founder of The Alternative Global. The panel will explore how the climate crisis is also a crisis of modern men — and ask how we can give rise to new forms of masculinity oriented towards planetary health. There will be plenty of room for questions and discussion. For details and bookings click here.
We the Marooned
Deckhands! We are hardly a crew bound by sinew:
despairing where to shepherd without star or clue.
This sageless age without maps entraps in fear.
We crave the helm, a charted course, new frontiers.
The red we bled for modernity’s tribes
left us marooned—we can’t survive.
Where to follow? Where to steer?
Abandon this hollow abyss!
Awaken again Agape.
To be a man in twenty twenty-five,
to build a self not contrived—but alive?
Foul beasts bellow beneath the coral blight:
We dive daringly into depths with our Light.
Gentle like a freely falling feather,
harnessing hardy hands, worn and weathered.
Flowing with the stormy sea’s will,
expressing a Spark, scintillating, still.
Our ship hoists flag not of country or creed,
but a banner stitched by the call we heed.
Ahoy Brothers! Batten down the hatches!
We’re in the tempest’s teeth—
at its churning center we simply breathe;
She’s already taken many scratches
For us.
—
Inspired by the poem A Psalm of Life by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow