SIMON PARKER
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Sometimes, Knowing Isn't Enough

1/26/2021

7 Comments

 
Picture


​So, a sprint into foolishness...

Having just finished George Saunders' wonderful new book (A Swim In a Pond In The Rain) on reading and writing, in which he repeatedly extols the importance of spending time with, and on, the re-write; and, being a long time admirer of  Donald Hall's poignant late essays (Essays After Eighty & Carnival Of Losses) where he reveals that he sometimes changes a word between sixty and three hundred times, I am ignoring their advice: Letting something sail into the world because of the wind behind it, rather than a scrupulous and methodical check on whether it is a sea worthy vessel.

Late last night, as an unexpected snowfall entered its final melting, I sat reading Luke Mogelson's troubling and telling essay The Storm (Among the Insurrectionists) in this week's New Yorker. This followed:


                                        In Him We Trust


God must be sleeping or have died 
a while back, 'otherwise, ' she said
'he would have smite

those motherfuckers' whose twisted mouths
conspire to set fire to truth with their firsting 
dragon breath, their tattooed hands hurling 
history onto the pyre of stories 
that cause indigestion or inconvenience
a roadblock on the pursuit to happiness
"Stop the steal, beat the seal, to death
we don’t like the colour of his pelt 
and how the hell did he sign the ballot paper anyway
Af- af- af- af- af- af- after this
 we are the flippers.  Stop the clocks, the count
this is the end of the world as we know it"


Lady Justice has her blindfold ripped
from her face, her lips painted blue 
so that she can sing a proud boy’s anthem
extinguished dreams have fallen from the mountain
and there he is, god, sliding gleefully down its side 
having abandoned his angels to march with them 
Groyper, they call, slapping his stooped back
and his big old white feet goose along with them
to whose house? "Our House!"
​The fountain has poured 

its black liquid for so long that words are forming 
in its raging foam, parasite, parasitism gurgles and spills
over its stoney lip, staining their green and pleasant land
"Look what it’s done to our lawn, ma"


Somewhere on the floor of a deserted building
a shape with coyote fur, buffalo horns and the body of a man
his wounded animal wrath seethes through megaphone
 “I will be he’rd. We will be he’rd.”
He turns his woolly head in thanks 
to their heavenly father, slumped against a lectern
slack jawed, breath wheezing from gaping mouth
and a yellow plastic shard embedded in his cheek
                                            “We need more firepower” he barks





© Simon Parker
7 Comments
MIL
1/27/2021 01:05:10 pm

That is powerful stuff...clearly fired up by the mob you have very vividly captured the events that happened on Capitol Hill with raw energy. No words, in my opinion, need to be reviewed or changed ! I haven't read the N Yorker article but I did watch on TV what went on that day. Right wing populism showing its nasty ignorant face to the world...

Reply
Fabrizio Consoli
1/27/2021 08:58:37 pm

Amazing analogy the one about the wind and the sea!

Reply
martin argles
1/28/2021 11:26:07 am

Its an angry but beautiful poem.
Visual connection are startling but these people were not the successors of Paris 1789 or Petrograd 1917
Oh No! They went in there and then took selfies. Trump is not Robespierre or Lenin. Trump is a weak overblown symbol of a racist, anti democratic constituency. This was a failed burning of the Reichstag.

Reply
Nick Burge
1/28/2021 11:59:02 am

My American mum would have loved this. Great piece of writing. The sealspeltdoom.

Reply
Jose Aguiar
1/29/2021 10:57:11 am

An amazing piece of writing. Strong, powerful and emotional.

Reply
Diego Robirosa
1/30/2021 06:59:21 pm

Powerful, angry, uncomfortable to read through the vivid images arising from it. Made me feel a bit sick but also hopeful that all this divisive energy won't prevail.

Reply
Billy Ridgers
3/9/2021 08:27:30 pm

I missed this when you first penned it, so I am reading it now two months after you wrote it. I’m sure that is not what you intended. It is a poem of the moment, written in the whirlwind. Now that the whirlwind has uncurled, the poem stands there naked and ephemeral.

Reply



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  • Home
  • Blog
  • Theatre
    • Aching Parts
    • Take me to where the arrows no longer fall
    • The Right Kind of Violence
    • Own Goal
    • Mooring
    • Yellow Fever
    • Just Like Flies
    • Snap
    • Home
    • Vex
  • Fictions
    • Gross
    • The 7.22
    • For Those Who Trespass
    • Karaoke
    • We Only Notice When It's Gone
    • This is a story that I am going to make a story out of
    • Les Anglais en Vacances
    • She
    • La Comedie Humaine
  • POETRY
    • Unfolding
    • Street Scene
    • Said and done
    • Ingres and Delacroix share a coffee
    • If you follow the silk road
    • In him we trust
    • n.b. for Barney
    • Who Can Erase The Traces?
  • LIVEWORKS
    • Notes from a wanderer
  • News
  • New Page
  • Contact