In view of the current violence unleashed unto the world, whether here or in Eastern Europe, I want to dedicate today’s poem, A Brief History of Hostility, to the victims: in Portland, and likely soon in Ukraine, in Russia. So many families losing loved ones, so many friends losing their allies, so many communities destroyed by wrath, greed and ambition.
Jamaal May’s poem appeared in “The Big Book of Exit Strategies,” published in 2016. Given its purview of themes of war and slavery, it seems a good choice for Black History month, but also relevant during a week where Europe is on the brink of war.
On Saturday here in Portland marchers had planned a protest to remember Amir Locke and Patrick Kimmons, Black men killed by police. Multiple women, directing traffic in preparation of the peaceful demonstration, were gunned down by a man living nearby, who approached them on the street and called them terrorists, killing June Knightly, a 60-year old woman walking with a cane, having just overcome cancer, and severely wounding the others. In the words of one of the victims:
“We were unarmed traffic safety volunteers who weren’t with any protestors. Four women trying to de-escalate & he unloaded a 45 into us because he didn’t like being asked to leave and stop calling us terrorist c*nts. We were in high vis and dresses. He murdered a disabled woman.”
The shooter was then shot by someone in the crowd, trying to come to the rescue of the victims. The aggressor’s name has not been released by the police while I write this, 48 hours after the event, and the Portland Police has erected a wall of silence other than calling him a home owner (code for White, or linked to castle doctrine) involved in a confrontation with armed protesters, unaffiliated with any political background. All counterfactual, as it turns out. There was no notification if he was arrested while in hospital, and his apartment was searched only after the FBI stepped in, suspecting a hate crime. Roommates, colleagues and family had testified to his links to the Proud Boys and other alt right forces, his frequent threats to shoot up Black Lives Matter folks, and the possibility that he was running unregistered guns. According to the media, virulent anti-semitic and islamophobic threats had been conveyed earlier to police, with no reaction.
(Update: he is now charged with multiple crimes. A GoPro video of the massacre, viewed by the DA, confirmed that he was the attacker. One of his victims is paralyzed from the neck down and in critical condition at OHSU.)
Meanwhile, on February 21, Russian President Putin basically said Ukraine shouldn’t exist. “A steady statehood didn’t occur.” Almost the same words that Stalin said about Poland in 1939.
He also confirmed he will recognise two breakaway Ukrainian regions as independent, a move that Ukrainian politicians see as “dangerous and a declaration of war.” It is certainly a violation of international law, the Minsk agreement. We will know, when you read this, if an invasion of (all of) Ukraine has begun in earnest. As I write this, military columns are entering Donbass.
I am linking back to an older blog here, that described the ebullient musical comedy of the Ukrainian Teatro Pralnia, a group of young musicians who are on my mind today, wondering what their future holds. You can see their 2018 full show at the Kennedy Center here.
A Brief History of Hostility
In the beginning
there was the war.
The war said let there be war
and there was war.
The war said let there be peace
and there was war.
The people said music and rain
evaporating against fire in the brush
was a kind of music
and so was the beast.
The beast that roared
or bleated when brought down
was silent when skinned
but loud after the skin
was pulled taut over wood
and the people said music
and the thump thump
thump said drum.
Someone said
war drum. The drum said war
is coming to meet you in the field.
The field said war
tastes like copper,
said give us some more, said look
at the wild flowers our war plants
in a grove and grows
just for us.
Outside sheets are pulling
this way and that.
Fields are smoke,
smoke is air.
We wait for fingers to be bent
knuckle to knuckle,
the porch overrun
with rope and shotgun
but the hounds don’t show.
We beat the drum and sing
like there’s nothing outside
but rust-colored clay and fields
of wild flowers growing
farther than we can walk.
Torches may come like fox paws
to steal away what we plant,
but with our bodies bound
by the skin, my arc to his curve,
we are stalks that will bend
and bend and bend…
fire for heat
fire for light
fire for casting figures on a dungeon wall
fire for teaching shadows to writhe
fire for keeping beasts at bay
fire to give them back to the earth
fire for the siege
fire to singe
fire to roast
fire to fuse rubber soles to collapsed crossbeams
fire for Gehenna
fire for Dante
fire for Fallujah
fire for readied aim
fire in the forge that folds steel like a flag
fire to curl worms like cigarette ash
fire to give them back to the earth
fire for ancient reasons: to call down rain
fire to catch it and turn it into steam
fire for churches
fire for a stockpile of books
fire for a bible-black cloak tied to a stake
fire for smoke signals
fire to shape gun muzzle and magazine
fire to leap from the gut of a furnace
fire for Hephaestus
fire for pyres’ sake
fire licking the toes of a quiet brown man
fire for his home
fire for her flag
fire for this sand, to coax it into glass
fire to cure mirrors
fire to cure leeches
Fire to compose a nocturne of cinders
fire for the trash cans illuminating streets
fire for fuel
fire for fields
fire for the field hand’s fourth death
fire to make a cross visible for several yards
fire from the dragon’s mouth
fire for smoking out tangos
fire to stoke like rage and fill the sky with human remains
fire to give them back to the earth
fire to make twine fall from bound wrists
fire to mark them all and bubble black
any flesh it touches as it frees
They took the light from our eyes. Possessive.
Took the moisture from our throats. My arms,
my lips, my sternum, sucked dry, and
lovers of autumn say, Look, here is beauty.
Tallness only made me an obvious target made of
off-kilter limbs. I’d fall either way. I should get a
to-the-death tattoo or metal ribbon of some sort.
War took our prayers like nothing else can,
left us dumber than remote drones. Make
me a loyal soldier and I’ll make you a
lamenting so thick, metallic, so tank-tread-hard.
Now make tomorrow a gate shaped like a man.
I can’t promise, when it’s time, I won’t hesitate,
cannot say I won’t forget to return in fall and
guess the names of the leaves before they change.
The war said bring us your dead
and we died. The people said music
and bending flower, so we sang ballads
in the aisles of churches and fruit markets.
The requiem was everywhere: a comet’s tail
disappearing into the atmosphere,
the wide mouths of the bereft men that have sung…
On currents of air, seeds were carried
as the processional carried us
through the streets of a forgetting city,
between the cold iron of gates.
The field said soil is rich wherever we fall.
Aren’t graveyards and battlefields
our most efficient gardens?
Journeys begin there too if the flowers are taken
into account, and shouldn’t we always
take the flowers into account? Bring them to us.
We’ll come back to you. Peace will come to you
as a rosewood-colored road paver
in your grandmother’s town, as a trench
scraped into canvas, as a violin bow, a shovel,
an easel, a brushstroke that covers
burial mounds in grass. And love, you say,
is a constant blade, a trowel that plants
and uproots, and tomorrow
will be a tornado, you say. Then war,
a sick wind, will come to part the air,
straighten your suit,
and place fresh flowers
on all our muddy graves.
Heavy clouds looming.
You have a choice of music today – Bob Dylan’s Talking World War III Blues
or War’s War is coming (Blues Version)
