Poem for Poets Who Resist War

 Graphology Superscription 3

Two poets have been imprisoned in Russia for reading poems against war in Ukraine.

            Hooded crows are probing luminous gardens full of the storm.

A spring tide has ripped out of Bantry Harbour exposing winter mudflats —

there had been some flooding — and two people are digging for lugworms.

There is a prismatic glister of oil, an iridescence of unearthly behaviours.

All of this is tragic. All of this is connected. All of this aligns, though it might

not seem obvious. In the violent interstices. Mud and haemoglobin.

Standing outside the perspiring window and not looking back through its glass.

            Hooded crows are probing luminous gardens full of the storm.

Two poets have been imprisoned in Russia for reading poems against war in Ukraine.

 

 

            John Kinsella

Experimental Film 3 — Max Planck subset

This film is also part of a series of poem-films I have been creating as a subset of my Graphology poetry cycle/project that has been going since the mid-90s. As mentioned in the prior posting, these films are subsections of a 'feature-length' experimental movie that is focalised through the poet Hölderlin, glasshouses, gardens, colonialism, AI, animal rights, industrialism and climate degradation, and issues of environment, human rights and 'place'. 

This 'section' arose out of living near the Max Planck Institute for Intelligent Systems (oh, the irony!), and investigating the vivisection that ultimately underpins so much Max Planck laboratory research (by varying degrees of separation, or not). Via The German Reference Centre for Ethics in the Life Sciences (DRZE) website, see. 

Recently, I wrote to one prominent university neuroscientist to object to his inserting electrodes into crows' brains to 'show conscious processes in bird brains'. And though there's been a relatively recent shift in the use/abuse of primates by the Max Planck research facilities (I wrote protest-intervention poems about this horrendous abuse when I was in Tübingen in 2016), the disregard for non-human life goes deep (always 'justified' as being for the ultimate benefit of 'humankind', while disclaiming the suffering of the animals themselves through deploying hierarchical and abusive/demeaning speciesist arguments). For a deeply disturbing article regarding the lengths vivisectors will go to to keep their death programmes functioning, see this. 

There's also a figurative (and literal via the observatory dome which is almost the omphalos of the institute) astronomical subtext... when I was a child, I wanted to be an astronomer... as the power plant in the 'background' spews waste. The underlying 'soundtrack' or 'voice-under' is Emily Brontë's poem 'No Coward Soul is Mine'.

    John Kinsella