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Exactitude and Science

from Western Culture by Kiran Leonard

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lyrics

Last night I went to a lecture
by two human rights lawyers
venerated at distance.
Everybody was cloaked, knowingly,
in bearing what they knew:
nothing, and reflecting
on that map of great distinction
that overtook the countries it described,
rendering homes as ink unto a page
in fiction and in leverage.

They killed civilian policeman
as they stood outside
at a ceremonial occasion,
as covert figures in the air
struck hospitals and elementary schools
and made tombs in bedrooms.
We were sat still but lost our moorings
in images we could not understand,
wincing through fog and all stumbling blind,
“Nothing to be done”

And in the dearth of the west,
before a mother shot to death,
the throat of a piano
unknowingly stifles and empties.

Are we so impossibly unable, limited and limbless?
Like a vassal to my eye,
a hastening silt envelops earth and sky
and redacts even the maps,
as history in idle orbit
strengthens it with centuries of tide:
No head to cut off, or negotiate with, or bribe,
is response all theory?

Are we so impossibly unable?
I see it now;
are words as ink not without equal?
I feel it now:
What need has poetry
in capturing a lengthening shroud,
when deeds and oratory
must struggle with apertures shrinking and proud?
As minor victories, must we
measure all droll condemnations of power;
with hopeless pedantry and brief
comforts our illustrations endow us,
when superior fantasists cast
fictions as infallible science;
when ulterior lyricists paint honesty
as violence.

credits

from Western Culture, released October 19, 2018

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Kiran Leonard England, UK

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