22 June 2020
Take down the
statues! Take down General Lee. Take down Stonewall Jackson. Take
down JEB Stuart. (He stands in Richmond now with ropes around his
neck, bleeding red paint, an orange traffic cone installed on the top of his
head.) Take down Jefferson Davis! Take down the sad Confederate
looking south, the monuments to imprisoned soldiers, to dead ones.
Take them down with ropes, with hammers, with the heat of our rage.
Leave them broken noses to pavement; let them breathe our history,
smelling of carbon dioxide and blood. Melt them for poor artists to
make no monuments of. But leave the horses! All over the south,
they’d stand alone, locked mid-stride, always about to go to war
but never arriving. Pull them off their
pedestals and down to the ground of a park where children remember nothing but what remains as play equipment.
"The horses are" comes from Plath by way of a high school English teacher of mine.
2 comments:
Yes to statue poems!
And I love leaving the horses alone, "locked mid-stride, always about to go to war but never arriving." That's a great line.
Buh-bye, Confederate statues.
the description of Jeb Stuart is vivid. And I love the image of breathing in history (smelling of CO2). Yes, leave the horses, and maybe the children can climb on them and be sort of centaur statues!
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