Tag: remembrance

Angels of History

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.

Window Mirrors

These growing beyonds.

An old problem: how to phrase 

the far-away steeples. 

How to abandon a conversation 

made of one part memory 

and the other projection?

Which time is it now, the world 

of memory or the procession 

of days marching to the iron-fisted clock? 

What grows beyond the window over there, 

and who has a mirror? 

Let’s shine it by the opening buds, a signal 

to ourselves and our aboves: 

Look, here.

***

The opening line references Marcel Proust’s recollection of the twin steeples of Martinville.