With winged hero.
Hello, messenger. You are no good at flying but faithful in your attempts.
Pranked again by your devices, you can’t resist the dime store crown, the glitter-wrapped wand to go with it, even as it leaves you short one palm to break the fall. What resistance you have, you spend against gravity.
A study in wreckage, your devotion. There you go again to the height of the last wall in the next fallen fortress, to meet the updraft, that it may lift you backward into the hour at your open hand.
A prayer for the real work.
In the dark of the valley, the sense of an emergency was the beginning of an understanding that we had none of our own––not yet, except in the wild beat of the drums where we gathered in the streets. The gods of progress, long disgraced, continued to shout. We pounded the drums against their noise, and our hearts awakened, to dance in revolt against their empty reasons.
There is an angel among us, pausing to awaken the dead. But a storm stops his wings. Though he turns his back against the future they call progress, the storm blows him into it.
Let the future not be the vast emptiness and us the supplicants of soothsayers. May our knowledge of time be an act of remembrance, our concept of work what we do in service to creation and not as slaves to the death engines of progress. Give us the courage to recognize the narrow gate in every second and be moved.
***
Inspired by the moment at hand and by Walter Benjamin’s essay “On the Concept of History.” In this essay, Benjamin vividly animates the context of Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus.
