3 June 2022
A small pink Skecher
for the left foot, illustrated with peace signs and hello kitties
sits on a piece of dull blue wood beside a thick bit of chalk. Hearts and
an 888 encircle it. Did a little girl lose the shoe when she lost her
life, or did someone bring the shoe, as if in memory of someone that
small? So many toys, still behind plastic in their boxes, awaiting a
child’s hand:
dolls, a Power Ranger, a small blue and red motorcycle up on a stone pedestal. A third grade
teacher writes to her former student on a football. He liked
to throw it. “I’m sorry you went threw this,” another
note reads.
We watch the borrowed Red
Army run naked into a lake. I guess horses were hurt in the making of
this film, Bryant says, as they tumble across the screen. Long
columns of soldiers march across, but there are no feet
hitting earth, or men chanting time. It's a quiet march. As he lies mortally wounded, he
keeps seeing one valley in his head. There’s nothing to distinguish
it from other valleys, except in its repetition for him. A cannon ball spits flame, he thinks he wants to live. We see it in the captions. Film is superficial, but we see into and through it. They
didn’t edit it, he says, but war's the cruelest edit. The general sits at his chair
and eats his lunch. Bodies are draped on trenches, spilling off their little cliffs. The ballrooms of Moscow are not so well tended.
Lilith and I walk
down Laukapu Street. We hear a singer through the trees. I turn on my iphone, not to film the stop sign, or the intersection with Haunani, but to record a woman singing. And
then she walks by in sweatpants, jacket folded around her waist. “I don’t like Wallace
Stevens,” Henry said. There's no making the
world we walk in; it’s out of our hands. “Ah mio cor,” she
sings, and in singing stops us in our tracks. It is Handel, she
responds. Find it on iTunes.
Light is sweet as rock candy. It bathes water drops, at once clarifying and extenuating them. Where I thought there were more drops, I found plastic beads hanging from a gate. I don’t mind when beauty makes a fool of me.
--Details from the following: https://www.washingtonpost.com/photography/interactive/2022/uvalde-school-shooting-memorial/?itid=hp-top-table-main
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