hiroshima, august 7th.

 

 

There is a density to being blind. A

blind girl can feel the trees coming;

that process that conducts light  impulses.

(I have drifted into the habit

of blinking in my negro dreams).

 

Not the light of a season. Not the half

one of the candle burned in the power outage,

but the light that tears the moon into negatives.

The transmitted light of tiny

examining flashlights

passed through your groin

to witness your contemptible heart/ >

 

as a dickey from some detachable neckline

or on being the pink particles of some

iron wind. The lavish lights

of last evenings rain; that web of

twinkling wires working themselves

into my hair strands , the ones

I plaster southward like a map

of the Carolina's.

The light  that has dibs on humanity. But

having two eyes are the same as

having two replaceable hydrogen atoms

that on this day, 69 years ago,

the man in Korea said he heard

as a child some dichotic hiss, but

different this time.

A spider perhaps? I still fan my face

all day knowing that spiders find the

darkest dim approach. Auntie said that

spiders only bite you when your heart rest

between theory and immunity. That

a thing can be so ferocious, so lacking

in compassion. So tongueless,

so satirical that it can, in the instant

that you realize, turn your testis

into glass.

Reviews

[TL Boehm]

my fingers are pinned to the keyboard and will not comply. This is a ferocious write.

[Cory Barrett]

The potency with which you write is astounding. There are point where the writing feels near abstract, but tug me back into the realm of consciousness... Beautiful write again Dana

[Cory Barrett]

The potency with which you write is astounding. There are point where the writing feels near abstract, but tug me back into the realm of consciousness... Beautiful write again Dana

[W.k.kortas]

The interplays of light and blindness, and how that works on many levels, is handled deftly, masterfully here. The final few lines, invoking that which is "so ferocious, so lacking/ in compassion" and the final image of testes turned into glass (and none for me, thank you) is stark, chilling, the evidence of a horrible and otherworldly force. It's so easy to turn occasional poetry into some rote Wikipedia entry, some movie newsreel of days gone by; this has flesh, blood, and teeth.

[Subterannean]

holy f**k. maybe its the drunk but your good. like generational good. thank you for this.

[Corset]

lol, what he said twice :)

[Marie Anzalone]

My birthday is August 7. It always bothered me on a very profound level that the most significant historical event (that we know of) to have occurred on my birthday is that in-between gloaming: the horror of the world waking up to Hiroshima; the brief respite before the storm of Nagasaki. Truman never made apologies for his decision, and I respect him for that. We have elevated the status of these events to myth; and forgotten the context: my some accounts, the fire-bombing of Dresden was "worse," if qlliafication can be given to such events as the complete destruction of entire cities, cultures. The madness had to end; Truman had complete yet incomplete information to work off of. Jews went back to anti-Semitism; the Roma to their own prejudices; Stalin starved his country into submission while nobody noticed. Japan picked up her grief and wove it into her culture and resolution to move froward on the back of technology. When we look back, will it be the scenes of devastation themselves, or the horror of what one single weapon, one single mistake, one single act of arrogance and ego, could do to the entire world? Have we learned a single damned thing? I have studied the same scenes you have; empty playgrounds, shadows of those vaporized, ravaged trees, sheets of fused glass. Lines that have no destinations to carry their electricity to. The only answer I can come up with is that we need to stare these things in the face and ask some hard questions about what we want our futures to look like. Of this I am sure: if we do not question our humanity, we will lose a great part of it.

and you are so very right, that things march through our own lives with equal devastation and destruction. I have the hunch, though, that human kindness makes them more bearable than they otherwise might be. And I feel like that kindness is what we are losing, every year, bit by bit.

[Marie Anzalone]

"are the same" should be "is the same"

[Frieda P]

I had to reread this one, it's profoundly affecting.

twinkling wires working themselves
into my hair strands , the ones
I plaster southward like a map
of the Carolina's.

I can't really pick a favorite line, they're all so intensely good but that stuck to me.

[Horizon K.]

...There is a density to being blind. A
blind girl can feel the trees coming;
that process that conducts light impulses...

I wonder how different this world would be, if we had less eyesight and more of other feeling, touch, or feeling physically, into another's emotional space-- would there be more peace? Words are never enough sometimes-- for there are moments when we need this, more than anything-- light, that can be shown right through, to expose all that is in our contemptible hearts, an x-Ray view of inner truth. Poetry, tries its best, to be that illuminant, for we write what is most vibrant in our hearts, and not on things that never find their way into our heart space.

Anyway, I love the way you open this-- and the way you close this poem as well, the darkest dim approach of spiders, for that was probably the sound that came first, and the everlasting sound that remained afterward. I have been to Hiroshima, twice actually, and walking through those melted wax museums, makes me, as an American, want to dissapear...