Well Bottom Blues

“I resolve to see anew, to take sight into my hand

to spill the blood of the sacred wounds of witness…”

“Fill your pen with love or don’t bother picking it up.”

From Piedra by Luis Alberto Urrea

It is difficult to bear witness to this world without anger. There are worlds of oppression that produce sainted Ginsburg holding a flower and those that produce The Clash firing a guitar at the world. Somewhere in this gap I must help birth a world where the spear and the skald both stand in righteousness against the ungodly giants.

I want to stop reading the news and instead listen to the Palestinian children singing in a tent on Instagram, but we’ve stitched the world together with the internet in a way where one follows upon the other and the lines are never silent. To turn it off is to look away from those children and what is happening around them, and I cannot, I will not look away like Pius XII, Eisenhower and Roosevelt.

If I can’t look away then I must make time to write poems of bloody anger and poems about children gathered about an oud singing in the bright, day-lit white tent which shelters them for an instant from the horror.