By Rachel Eliza Griffiths
Your names toll in my dreams.
I pick up tinsel in the street. A nameless god
streaks my hand with blood. I look at the lighted trees
in windows & the spindles of pine tremble
in warm rooms. The flesh of home, silent.
How quiet the bells of heaven must be, cold
with stars who cannot rhyme their brilliance
to our weapons. What rouses our lives each moment?
Nothing but life dares dying. My memory, another obituary.
My memory is a cross. Face down. A whistle in high grass.
A shadow pouring down the sill of calamity.
Your names wake me in the nearly dark hour.
The candles in our windows flicker
where your faces peer in, ask us
questions light cannot answer.
--------
"The imagery and language of the gun in the American memory must be buried," Griffiths told Poets.org when this was written. "This is one of the most literal poems I've ever written and it is like, as so much is in the times we live, an unanswerable flare, a cry for change."
Yet again I spent half a day doing half-assed work while watching an American horror story unfold on the news -- this time much closer to home. I am very sick of this (literally sick, nauseated) and completely disgusted by the already shallow people obsessed with Miss America being obsessed with the fact that her ancestors are from India -- by this logic, shouldn't the Miss America title be limited to women descended from Native Americans?
Adam had a cross country meet that went well -- he's having a busy week, he has lots of paperwork to complete and is going to a concert Friday night. We liked the first episode of Sleepy Hollow, which we interrupted Monday Night Football to watch (the Nationals game was canceled due to the situation downtown, as the news obsessively reminded us). Let's all have a better day tomorrow. Here are some pics from Homestead Farm last Saturday:
No comments:
Post a Comment