WEBVTT

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This next poem, this is for
you guys, the Honors students

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in Janice Dewey's class.

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Thanks for having me in.

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You were talking about
the desensitization that

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takes place when you
get this constant media

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stream of atrocity of
wars, of catastrophes

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gathered from everywhere and
dumped through the screens.

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Mass shootings at
home, wars abroad.

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This cascade of violence,
this constant repetition,

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how can we care?

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How can we make it real?

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What can we do about
what this does to us?

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So, I'm going to
read you a poem that

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is fueled by those questions.

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It's called In a Time of War.

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Time which has come
to seem perpetual.

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"Flies caught in the
sap of the living tree

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someday will be precious
dressed in amber.

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Just so, the past appears
to the present, gem-like

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in its perfect preservation.

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The hardened gold of yesterday,
a relic through which

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today's sun shines.

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But those who are caught in
this sticky sap of actual time,

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insects in the
odds against them.

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Who struggle in the ooze,
slowly sink into the mass,

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the numberless anonymous dead.

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Till the atrocious
becomes the mundane,

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our senses numb from the
sheer litany of repetition.

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Let us then just watch this
one small desperate fly, stuck

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first by the feet, and
then in its struggles,

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entangled entirely
in the glob of sap.

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Its wings heavy
as a brass angel's

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until it is all at once still.

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A dark speck in a
bubble of sap oozing

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from the felled tree in a
forest marked for the mill.

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How many millennia will
pass before a teardrop

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lavalier of amber
carrying its cargo of loss

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will adorn the vanity
of another creature.

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The fly of fossil of a species
no longer present on the Earth.

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The Earth itself a speck in
a cosmos where galaxies are

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carted like cotton on
a comb and pulled out

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into a distance where some
new fabric is being spun

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and shimmers in the firelight
of countless burning suns."

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