This next poem, this is for you guys, the Honors students
in Janice Dewey's class.
Thanks for having me in.
You were talking about the desensitization that
takes place when you get this constant media
stream of atrocity of wars, of catastrophes
gathered from everywhere and dumped through the screens.
Mass shootings at home, wars abroad.
This cascade of violence, this constant repetition,
how can we care?
How can we make it real?
What can we do about what this does to us?
So, I'm going to read you a poem that
is fueled by those questions.
It's called In a Time of War.
Time which has come to seem perpetual.
"Flies caught in the sap of the living tree
someday will be precious dressed in amber.
Just so, the past appears to the present, gem-like
in its perfect preservation.
The hardened gold of yesterday, a relic through which
today's sun shines.
But those who are caught in this sticky sap of actual time,
insects in the odds against them.
Who struggle in the ooze, slowly sink into the mass,
the numberless anonymous dead.
Till the atrocious becomes the mundane,
our senses numb from the sheer litany of repetition.
Let us then just watch this one small desperate fly, stuck
first by the feet, and then in its struggles,
entangled entirely in the glob of sap.
Its wings heavy as a brass angel's
until it is all at once still.
A dark speck in a bubble of sap oozing
from the felled tree in a forest marked for the mill.
How many millennia will pass before a teardrop
lavalier of amber carrying its cargo of loss
will adorn the vanity of another creature.
The fly of fossil of a species no longer present on the Earth.
The Earth itself a speck in a cosmos where galaxies are
carted like cotton on a comb and pulled out
into a distance where some new fabric is being spun
and shimmers in the firelight of countless burning suns."