Friday, October 02, 2015

Dear Millennium, Inadequate Witness

To end the week, a poem entitled "Dear Millennium, Inadequate Witness":

Say we no longer bear witness to a body-politic of trauma
after revolution
            by anesthesia or erasure. Say we cover our eyes
to crossed olive-wood beams on a hill.  Modes of witness  
expose our inadequacy, the human.  Forgetting
is a sign—yes, a thing once existed. Say we are unworthy
of witness, internal or external—
                    our damaged wisdom, for instance,
our diminished capacity for empathy
         and heightened apathy to torture
mingled with doves    
                 of unfettered desire
                               or an eclipsed divine.

-- Karen An-hwei Lee