Exiting a shop hours after first dark, to a bluster and a faint mist. People clutching scarves to their faces; hunched into the wind for the first time of the season. A single letter in a lighted sign gutters, soon to die. It’s following the leaves.
Always I look for the poetry in winter, at the onset of it, anyway. It’s a trick to keep me from wanting to flee the northeast. (Of course, once it takes hold and the glitter of year-end holidays has gone, poetry can be much harder to find. Then I simply long for Spring.)
* * *
There were a number of terrorist attacks around Paris tonight, less than a year since the Charlie Hebdo incidents. It’s flooding the media. The city is probably missing its erstwhile walls. The modern danger of being open; the postmodern danger of these kind of events leading to a desire to be far less so. Something that, as we’ve seen before, does more damage than good.
Incidentally, the night prior saw attacks in Beirut; the deadliest there since 1990, yet those events have received less coverage. Hatred is rooted in fear, and spreads fear, or seeks to. So let neither hatred nor fear be the responses to these moments.
e daggar art: THE MUSEUM 