and waiting for a rescheduled appointment.

just_jeff and rosa_ostrina were talking in their respective journals about this poem of mine, which is several years old and published in a number of places now; I was honored and humbled to find that rosa_ostrina covers it (I wanna hear it!).

Jeff’s got a piece which springs from much the same well over on his journal right now, so I thought it would be fitting to put this up today…

There’s a huge story behind it, but it also speaks for itself.

POLITICAL ART

a print of “ Guernica” hangs on the foyer wall
above the drink table
here are the famous horse and the upraised human face
they’re screaming as the hors d’oeuvres are passed

and on the facing wall
behind the buffet
hang two photographs
carefully chosen for tonight

in this one is a girl we have seen before
running and burning on a road in Vietnam years and years ago
back then she was trying to fly to safety
on the innocent strength rising along her fiery arms

in this one is a man we’ve also seen before
and despite his death in 1890 he also keeps trying
but he’s frozen awkward and insolent in his attempt
to rise from the snow at Wounded Knee

we are making small talk tonight
clicking our tongues at all these pictures
making crestfallen small talk
because we know we should

handing over money
to save Afghani statues from the guns of rapists
handing over fistfuls of green guilt
for the anesthetic of aesthetics

buying permission to posture unflinching
before those who have fallen
permission to shelter in these picturesque memorials
in the hope of receiving from them some kind of prophylactic grace

as we stare at the burning girl
as we sadly regret Wounded Knee and genocide
as we admire the abstraction of that burning Spanish town
we will click our tongues

while marking the skill of the artist at having those faces
seem so stark in their angled black and white
seem so shot through and through
with an undertone of subconscious red

it’s from this we’ve learned how to watch the news
the news that gives us each day our daily dread
a new crop of victims to be cropped and photoshopped
and we know just what to do when we see the faces

we observe
we regret
we remark
we move on

tonight there’s a gallery fundraiser
tomorrow there will be another
we’ll see the burning girl and the rising corpse again
and we’ll make another print of “Guernica”

why
do we need
all these prints
of “Guernica”?

someday we’ll see
that if we had been changed by all this art
at the first hint of genocide we would smash our cameras
hang our paintbrushes back on the wall

stick our checkbooks back in our pockets
lift the paintings from their frames
and carry them through the streets
to the places of power calling why why

if the people inside our work could speak
they would tell us that if witness alone could change the world
the world would be changed by now
and we would have no need to learn

that this picture
of that girl
is not
beautiful

The new column is up — a brief follow-up to last week’s Clear Channel furor. I felt I owed it to the folks who read that column to say something about the developments since then, and to suggest that while this issue’s “cleared up” a bit, the deeper issues that started the whole mess burning still remain.

I don’t like writing about slam stuff in the column, but the last few weeks have proven to be interesting fodder for larger discussions.

No more, though; at least not for a while. Wanna get back to some thoughts about poetry and spirituality; been reading, again, Hirsch’s book on the Demon and the Angel in the poetic imagination, and I’m ready to have a go at that.

I’m taking a week off though, since I’ll be in Cleveland a good part of next week with unknown computer access.

See ya later…