Grace at dVerse is hosting Open Link Night where we post a poem of our own choice. My choice has been influenced by the poems Grace posted as a reflection on the protests and Floyd’s death. So, I’m reblogging an earlier OLN poem about George Floyd that I wrote in the moment of grief having watched the video of his murder. Still can’t get it out of my mind, can’t erase the anger I feel of the injustice to him, and sadly, for so many.
Mish is hosting Open Link Night at dVerse – the night we choose a poem to post.
Photo: unsplash.com
“It is the denial of death that is partially responsible for people living empty purposeless lives ….” Elisabeth Kubler-Ross
And Yet
She was never shy
and so we kept hidden
somewhere out back for
her own sake, you understand,
too brazen, taken to impulsive acts,
impetuous, ill-mannered,
an embarrassment to us all,
but she got our recently,
crept through her window
to play in the streets,
lifting her skirts at all,
laughing derisively as
they run, as run they should
in this season of the
end of everything where we
have hidden from ourselves,
while death has cast her shadow
and yet returned us to life.
“If you remember me, then I don’t care if everyone else forgets.” Haruki Murakami
Re-Membered
Death is so singular,
so rude without compare,
beyond any place and
not just a little ambiguity
as it challenges the
primacy of our built reality,
an unwelcome intrusion into
the facia of polite circles
where everyone merely exists
and avoids the revelatory
nature of an invitation to
reframe life in the veins of
a narrative, re-membering,
putting back together a
semblance of what was once
so meaningful, a body of
moments that live on
in the telling.
Photo: David Mcnew, Getty Images. LA as a result of Corona lock-down and less traffic has clearer skies. Once again Mt. Everest is visible from India and Nepal, and other cities, especially Wuhan, have clear air. For a moment the earth breathes, but only a moment, and we’re not touching even the tip of the carbon berg.
“Silence is only frightening people who are compulsively verbalizing.” William S. Buroughs
Breathe Again
Why haven’t we done this before,
is the monk’s cell so vulgar,
so stark, that we cannot contemplate
the wholeness of solitude
and turn aside, weary as we are,
to rest a while from the wheel,
letting the earth breathe again,
that we might too.
We raged against that suppuration
of darkness that swallowed the night
and laid waste to the light,
that consuming plague, which
wrote itself on the hearts
of unwitting bystanders
near the corner store,
or the park railings,
unpicked by sweating masks
whose tired incantations
wrenched large at death,
and laid in arks
the valley of flowers
hinting at the new Jerusalem,
we did not go gently.
