Ariadne
So brief a mention in the accounts
of transition, your crown the party
god’s to hurl into heaven, a shining
example of whim and compassion.
As string or chalk mark the foundation’s
setting, and as a silvery thread guides
the hero out of the labyrinth,
your hopes are scattered or, worse,
formalized into a pattern. As world
decays, and strategy is starving
and bombing kids into submission,
all heritages become entangled.
Old positions /new inflections.
John Kinsella
Cultivation
One of my students showed me the orchards
of her family deleted, the land rewritten.
And photos of the displaced and lost.
That was a year before the invasion
of Gaza and the erasure of trees
down to the splinters of stories.
The granaries broken, houses
split open, and now the last refuge
to be raised and offered as proof
of ‘resolve’. Buzzards, sparrow-
hawks, griffons... no longer raptors
but lost to the vanishing point.
Erosion is policy and endgame
its intonation. The Israeli military
is attempting to rewrite definitions
of suffering. To bulldoze lexicons.
Closing the crossing, harrying
the edges, compressing and dispersing
the soil until it is dust or slurry.
Cultivating a ruin whose fruit is death.
John Kinsella
Threnody
Each martial act shatters the desert owl’s
hold on the grace of night which has seeped
into day through rips in walls of sky,
through holes in the carpet of earth —
fractures of rock and pits of sand.
Each martial act undoes the baby’s
cry for milk, the silently feeding lips
which would continue into sleep;
and when shells lob as precise
as history it wakes before it dies.
Each martial act is enabled by the silence
of ‘learning’, the immanence of ‘making
a living’, an expression that falls as dead
prayers over distance, over the local.
The desert owl remembers differently.
The desert owl remembers the same.
John Kinsella
For all those suffering from the effects of war. And in solidarity with pacifists/conscientious objectors/anti-war activists so often working under pressure from all 'sides'. It seems almost impossible for those involved in war to see that to oppose war is not to condone the wrongs and tyrannies of an invader or attacker. To hold a position of peace is to oppose all war. To be a pacifist is to believe there is no just position in using violence against violence, and that we need to work at every turn to bring dialogue and ultimately peace. Ceasefire is the only way. The dead are never victors. Freedom of speech is freedom to oppose war. To persecute peace activists is to make war on the very essence of justice itself. The lines above are simple and to the point. I hope they say something of what needs to be said. It seems obvious, but it's clearly not.
John Kinsella
