Time is made for
us; we're not made for time. Does
it bother you not to wear a watch? a student asks. To be on watch
is not to watch over, if over is love's preposition. To every watch
its own take on time; no exactitude in the exact. The president wants
new photos to
prove what he alone knows and someone humors him with a
photo dated a day late. It
feels like we've gone back a hundred years, another student says,
but we weren't alive to comparison shop our
status. We can no longer tell what depression is organic, and which
is imposed
upon us. Nor do I feel the old
energy of my anger, only the lassitude of a tired animal. “I am
________ and I was turned away from the United States; I died at
Auschwitz. This is a black and white photo of me as a child in a
dress or a pair of shorts, next to friends or alone with the camera.
I am your witness now.”
Try to end your poem with the
moment that precipitated it. I saw my former student with his arm
around a girl, smiling. That
semester he'd failed in his attempt.
--27 January 2017
[first sentence from The Cloud of Unknowing]
No comments:
Post a Comment