Amnesia #3: Photographs & Videos

looking at snapshots in a photo book eye remember seeing people

like these before, their ordinary, plain blank faces,

flat in black & white photographs, gazing out vacantly

through blue eyes, or gray, or black as small bores, or pebbles,

dumb as local stones found littering the ground where they stand now

underneath these trees, where they are gathered

as if for a picnic in these fading photographs

in this books, or others like this one, stored away in vaults,

in yellowing pages of tattered old newspapers

& in the pictures the people don't seem to notice the body—though

some seem to have a hint or flicker of a smile playing

around the corners of their lips thin as wires, while others point

their fingers absentmindedly upward toward the "strange fruit" hanging

grotesquely above their heads from a tree branch, or the carcass,

charred beyond recognition of anything human,

resting on smoking embers on the scorched bier in front of them—

but how could they not notice the acrid smell

of burnt flesh, the screaming, toxic stench, the excrement released

at the moment when the rope snapped the neck at the spinal cord

& death kicked in, in a spasm of switching,

herky-jerky trembling of the body, the eyes popping out,

the tongue protruding, lolling from the now slack mouth—

didn't this now passive crowd—they were raucous before

the shadow-catcher's shutter caught them

demurely posing—smell this awful stench of death?

that was then, this is now & we see these look-alike faces once again,

in october 2008, though rage has replaced the stillness in those

aged daguerreotypes, perhaps we are looking at descendents of people

snapped in those old photographs—so silent then when caught

on camera—screaming bloody murder now

at republican presidential rallies for john mccain & sarah palin,

during boiling tea party rallies in august 2009, who all hate another black man,

this time the forty-fourth president of these yet to be united states,

this time modern videos & microphones caught their remarkable rage,

their fist-thrusting, hate-filled images & voices for history,

which informs us, lets us know very little has changed

Source: Errançities (Coffee House Press, 2012)