responses to last week's threats about war

post #354

       This week I want to speak up from within poetry and photography. I want to lament some of the current fashion for bully tactics, name calling and contemplation of bombs and annililation. Many of us are not in the least amused by fruitless threats of warfare. There are always other options, some requiring knowledege and thought-through plans, ones that may not show instant results but which have more of a chance for staying power. Other writers can lay out these options with more coherence than I possess, but, at this point in time, as a citizen of this nation, I am feeling compelled to draw on my art, so to speak, to try to make  some sense and to support compassion in the face of greed.
           Last week my monthly writers group met, in Lexington, and I was very moved by this poem that Martha Gehringer had written. So I asked her if I could share it, with a few photos of mine. Thank you, Martha, for your poetry.          Poetry and imaging help me to see things in new ways, to find the hope that is always somewhere there, and to reach across the stuck parts of our lives. Thank you, artists all.

 

Antecedent

“South Korea is finding, as I have told them,

that their talk of appeasement with North Korea

will not work, they only understand one thing.”

 Trump Tweet, 2 hrs ago

The morning before something big—

some big thing like this that looms,

we take in the view from where we sit—

the late summer garden, green still,

though bedraggled.  Our limelight

hydrangeas blooming soft against the sky—

 

against a looming sky.  See how they have

gone from chartreuse to white to pinkish now—

How they hang—heavy—wet mop heads—

mop heads they are called.  And the arc

of them on their weakish stems such a lovely,

lovely, lovely lank.  Beyond them, all still

green, the ivy leaves, the clover leaves,

the broad and promising leaves of violets.

Come Spring, they will (at least for now

we still believe they will) make purple flower.

The tall grasses in the neighbor’s field

are full of what cannot be seen but surely

surely is there.  Yes. 

Nonetheless. 

Yes.