Exhumation
A Poem
Peeling the eyes out of
the earth surrounding them
a couple of dark moons
And we’re looking
for the signal that points forwards
out of this dust
Along the tremulous history
savaged relations, grotesque
monuments
a sorcery of vindication
trying out odd sentences
to fit into something
today
The idea caught
by the tailbone, written in
the corpse before and after
Arrested by nothing
quite so dark
but scratching the skull
for an answer or two
*Commentary: maybe it’s simply the relative darkness of the coronavirus age that has me more fixated on the notion of time, and trying to see ahead. Predictions…and they are supposed to come from the sort of primeval experiences humanity has gone through before; but learning these lessons? I think we do it, en masse, very imperfectly. But into this morass of confusion, pain, and longing (because we desperately want an end to this), I feel thrown and the eyes that I use to feel ahead, as it were, seem always to be wearing a mask…
J.D. Harms 2020
