Without Resignation
If I had a platform, like a great
blank canvas I think I would
paint the true and the good, and the
not-so-good, and still true--
this is what the artist is meant to do.
I don't know what else the medium
is for, and it doesn't stop
in time of war: the canvas only now shows
the death of horses, the murder of musicians,
the destruction of a shop.
Poetry has been written in foxholes,
poetry has been written in internment camps
and while following dead bodies piled high
in a cart. There is no renunciation possible
from the human business of art.
We pick up a pen to change the world,
and though we might not change it,
to put it down is like saying we'd rather
watch it all drown.
The poet doesn't acclimatize but is
the barometer. The poet does not sanitize but tells
what has been needing--we are not here
to whitewash the blood but to
give voice to the bleeding.
To shine a light in the fog of war
or cast the landscape in a brutal highlight
like the flashing of shells exploding--to find
the lyricists who bring the music of the
horror to mind--those you could do
without resignation.
An example: I could tell you the oil fields
of this war are orchards and that blue gray smoke
had risen above green-gray leaves like a pillar
of warning by day and the horror of
losing one's heritage at night, or explain
war sometimes has profits that never
find their way into a bank: not money or blood.
The fallen dancers bleeding at the legs,
the born-to-soon and too-soon-to-die,
the poet trapped in the crumbling of a city,
the false meteor shower of a war-drenched sky.
The beliefs like excuses, the expressions of cause:
I could unwind the layers of gauze
where a limb was splintered and now a red
line of careful stitches replaces that part.
And you can fill in the rest.
No resignation, only art.
Only still trying one's best.
(A response to this story.)
