a poem by Tyehimba Jess, American poet, born 1966, author of Leadbelly, 2005 and Olio, 2016. This poem, 2014, is from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: a social justice database
Head of a crozier belonging to Jacques de Vitry, elephant ivory and bone, 1216 – before 1240. Musee des Arts Anciens du Namurois, Namur, Belgium on display at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY in the autumn of 2016 in an exhibition about the claim of peoples of several faiths on Jerusalem
the war speaks at night with its lips of shredded children, with its brow of plastique and its fighter jet breath, and then it speaks at daybreak with the soft slur of money unfolding leaf upon leaf. it speaks between the news programs in the music of commercials, then sings in the voices of a national anthem. it has a dirty coin jingle in its step, it has a hand of many lost hands, a palm of missing fingers, the stump of an arm that it lost reaching up to heaven, a foot that digs a trench for its dead. the war staggers forward, compelled, inexorable, ticking. it looks to me with its one eye of napalm and one eye of ice, with its hair of fire and its nuclear heart, and yes, it is so human and so pitiful as it stands there, waiting for my hand. it wants to know my answer. it wants to know how i intend to show it out of its misery, and i only want it to teach me how to kill.
The Western, Christian Civilization, 1965, plaster, wood, oil. Leon Ferrari, 1920-2013, Argentinian. Loaned to an exhibition about International Pop at the Philadelphia Art Museum in the spring of 2016
The artist was commenting on the use of ideology, of no matter what kind and no matter the culture or civilization or time period, to kill people.
