What Should Be the Goal?

By ALEXANDER BAKER

To rise, perhaps—yes, that is what we’ve said.
To climb from caves and carve our laws in stone,
to name the stars and feed the unfed dead,
to cast our voices far beyond the bone
of Earth, into the waiting void of night,
to build a world where none must kneel alone—
and yet, behind each age’s gift of light,
a shadow lingers, whispering the cost
of all we dreamed, and all that we made right.
Should it be joy? Or peace? Or reason’s throne?
To end the lash, the chain, the rule of fear?
To still the war within the blood and bone?
Yet even now, the same old gods appear—
new faces on the same corrupting fire.
And still we shout: “The better age is near!”
Each age burns bright with purpose and desire,
but leaves behind a ruin for the next
to lift, again, from ash and funeral pyre.
Perhaps the goal is not to seek the best,
but rather learn to bear what must be borne.
To give the child a sky in which to rest.
To plant a tree where tyrants would have sworn
the soil was dead and nothing good would grow.
To leave the sword, and mend what has been torn.
To shape a song from all we do not know—
and let it guide, not bind, the path ahead,
a flame we carry, not a torch to throw.
Or is it love, that old and quiet thread
that weaves through empires, famine, birth, and rain?
To hold another’s hunger in your bread,
to meet the eye and recognize the same
brief fire within the ribs, the same cold doubt.
To hold to good when no one speaks your name—
and find in that some sacred way out
of all the thrones we build, then burn again.
Could love be all this death is all about?
We do not know. But still, we rise and bend—
and write with blood what no one can rescind.

Ω

Alexander “Al” Scott Pearce Baker is a naturalist, painter, and writer based in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His poems have appeared in The Lucky Lizard, Oddball Magazine, and Marrow Magazine; his short fiction has been published in Flash Phantoms and Dark Harbor Magazine. His academic work on philosophy, natural history and mythology has been published or is forthcoming with Routledge, Bloomsbury, McFarland Books, and Teaching Philosophy.

Asem Moustafa Ahmed is a New Jersey-based artist with Egyptian heritage born in Marrakech, Morocco. After moving to Jersey City at age nine, he developed a passion for art that led him to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and earn his MFA from the New York Academy of Art. Working across painting, portraiture, and sculpture, Asem creates expressive figurative works that reflect the textures, colors, and cultural richness that have shaped his life.