Let This Be My Epitaph #16

3 small poems vaguely influenced by music

“The United Nations, 2023” by Andrew Kuo

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Hello again,

I’ve been spending a lot of time thinking about disaster and what optimism looks like in response. I’m finding more and more that disappointment, fear, and anger are amongst the long list of hopeful expressions. I’ve felt a great deal of each of these emotions in the last handful of months, but have been comforted by the idea that it means I want more, and better, from this world.

Below are some recent notes I took on/around nights I was listening to music, talking about art in the context of larger atrocity and other mundanities, and just continuing forward.

Just a few short ones. As always, thank you for your time.

Much love,
Ev

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"Improvisation is a survival strategy" - (Artists for Artists in Gaza @ Starr Bar 1/18/24)

It’s a ceremony,
improvised survival
draped in nets & leaves.
Fingers bleed 
doing each knot by hand
to last another season
within the fire.
The abundance of fish, dates, and wine
fewer remember,
but music remains.

It gets harder to imagine the sky
as open.
So much holy geometry
that once stood in marble and sandstone
made into dust again.
But the minaret stands.
We are all called to song
and prayer
and movement
and endurance.

So we keep our eyes on eventually
and spit watermelon seeds
against the bells
that were meant to ring for paradise
as long as it takes,
til air shimmers,
well past summer.

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“I Remember Winter” - (Closebye & Marem Ladsen @ Sundown 1/16/24)

The distance makes it cold.
Under ice,
the sign at the flower shop reads
“Spring is here!”
and it had been,
for quite a while.

I wear my boots
for the first time in two years,
there’s metal peeking through the toe.
Underdressed and arrogant,
I’ve lost the habit of consideration.
It’s time to go home
and let the blood return to my hands.
Pick up the pace, but carefully.

In a few weeks,
those signs for Spring
will ring true again.
Patience was the only requirement.
Then forget the winter
for another year, maybe more,
probably so.
Another story we’ll be lucky to impart.

Left behind, melted.
The salt is what’s left 
from the snowfall.

Left behind, evaporated.
The salt is what’s left
from the heat.

Something to remember it by:
a tattoo of the old outline
of the lake.

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Untitled 2023**

I sometimes think it might be easier
if I didn’t care as much for songs.
The promises of expansion
in overtones, across charts
and desiccated fields.
I haven’t yet decided
if that communion
is romantic or holy.

The unending line of depiction
that moves from happening 
to melody to verse
to bronze to graphite 
and forward.
The myths of absence and ending.
It’ll slow down,
even out,
bend towards justice—

the stories that “raised us right.”
And we’ll tell them just like that,
unmistakable and clear,
embellishing a little further upon each recitation. 
I saw it written in a bathroom stall:
“The truth… simple but elusive”

**previously published in Tone Glow

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