26 June 2020
Is this word sacred,
or that? That word or this? Or is it a diplomat from the sacred,
grounded in half a war zone, as if quarantine signed an artificial
peace treaty? Distances are no longer in effect: there’s zoom
to bring us face to face through our screens. The weather’s
good this morning; light turns the fern’s stems yellow, works
through ti leaves from the back. Light with no mirror still acts as
one. Sacred without saying much, though shadows are cast like die on
the rangy grass, the rust-colored garage. Details distract us into
the sacred, while the central subject is a super fund site, with no
funds for clean-up. Mirror logic: if millions are sick, take away
their health care. In case of pandemic, stop the testing. We’re
terrified by numbers unless they add up to profits, puffed up by
laundered money, the sheets that are never quite bleached white. (But
white’s the operative color.) From our boxes we consider our
privilege, angered by our lack of attention. Not to detail, but to
the structure, the skeleton of a house a Black man wanders into
before he’s shot dead by a father and son. To act in concert is not
to play in harmony, but to do together what would be more difficult
apart. Maybe. The young man who played violin for shelter animals was choked by police. Was that the story of the boy who threw a
sandwich? Or the one with a play gun? Or the man with cigarettes? Or
the boy with Skittles? Martyrdom turns banality into sacred places.
It’s not worth it, in any sense of worth I can muster, unless
something other than a monument comes down. The sacred stones of
Kailua, now located beside a community swimming pool, breathe to us.
Our Indian friend says he knows what it means to hold a mountain
sacred. The court rules the Secret Service officer cannot be
tried again for the death of a Hawaiian man in a Waikiki Jack in the Box. Fresh
off the plane, he felt threatened. Fresh off fragility mountain, we
try to open our chests to what hurts us. Keep pulling. Nothing closes
any more, except restaurants.
--Volcano
2 comments:
This piece opens with what seems to be, for a phrase or two, a language game, but it quickly becomes no play. Is a word sacred or is it a diplomat from the sacred? I don’t have the quotation precise here, but the questions this bit poses are touch...everything... and I love the way the meditation takes up possibilities. What IS quarantining in the digital age? “Distances are no longer in effect.” Love this. It’s like physics itself has been shattered. “Palm’s stems yellow” — I see it and follow it to the lines about light and mirrored light. “Martyrdom turns banality into sacred places.” Sad and true and the broken bumper sticker of our times. This is such a direct and complete way of saying that it’s time to strip away the old monuments. How to find the sacred in a world of late capital?
sacred (& I love how you're looking at this idea) involves history. I'm wondering if there are two ways to create the sacred: 1, the attention to the ordinary (which is what poetry does); 2) violence against the innocent. And then we pay attention. I wish there weren't such a list.
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