Two postcard images of 'Broken Obelisk' at the Rothko Chapel in honor of Martin Luther King.
… in an altered time my breath catches yours my question to myself what poem would I have written if what has happened already hadn’t already happened what song would my throat have sung in between the notes moving with the breath of breath … what dance have danced me …
Everything is plundered, betrayed, sold, Death’s great black wing scraped the air, Misery gnaws to the bone. Why then do we not despair? — Anna Akhmatova
I love the sea; I fear the sea. Growing up on a tiny island meant a close relationship with the sea, but my primal fear of it, nurtured by sayings like, “Sea don’t have no back door,” has meant that despite knowing how to swim, I never venture far from shore and never ever swim out.
How many days is it? I’ve lost track — feel stuck and unmoored at the same time. This day, May 3, 2020, feels like day one of the lockdown — it could as well be day one hundred, or day thirty, despite the recent advisories that certain businesses will be allowed to reopen. This balmy Spring day of 20 degrees Celsius actually marks the seventh week and the fifty-second day of the lockdown here in Toronto.
Language under pressure; risk-taking of highest order, otherwise known as working on the edge; a way of life — these three qualities constitute my personal definition of poetry, even as I’m aware that the sum of these small parts is so much less than the more-than of poetry.
