Thread: Hidden Gems
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Unread 04-02-2017, 12:32 PM
William A. Baurle William A. Baurle is offline
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Location: Arizona, USA
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I'd be remiss if I didn't post what is perhaps my favorite poem in free verse.

The following is taken a wee tad out of context, since it's an untitled part of a long series called "Heart and Clock", but it works perfectly fine as a stand-alone poem. It will help to know that Reznikoff was Jewish and wrote extensively on Jewish history and biblical themes.

***

I will write songs against you,
enemies of my people; I will pelt you
with the winged seeds of the dandelion;
I will marshall against you
the fireflies of the dusk.

- Charles Reznikoff

To me, this is one of the greatest expressions of passive resistance I've ever read. It's "turn the other cheek" in five lines. I have an overly aggressive older brother I share an apartment with, and he's in love with his fists, his guns, and his assumptions about power: ie, he believes power and brute force are equal. As much as I explain to him that power, true power, does not require muscle to back it up, he simply gets angry and warns me about "running my mouth". When I tell him the only way he can silence me is to kill me, he shakes with rage, unable to understand. I've taken a beating from him a few times now, and the more he tries to hurt me, the more his disease affects him. I always come out unscathed, except for the odd knot on the noggin.

Edited in: I should mention that my brother outweighs me by about a hundred pounds. He's a big guy. I would be absolutely insane to strike him back, as that would give him license to REALLY pound on me, and I always remind him of this fact. Nonetheless, I stand right in his face and tell him exactly what I think, and I don't mince words. The other night, after he clubbed me in the back of the head with his fat mitt, I turned and told him point blank, "You're the stupidest man I've ever known." (And he's also a genius. I think true stupidity requires intelligence.) The best thing about this relationship is that we love each other, and I know he won't ever really try to bash my brains in - unless and until I start swinging my baby hands. But that won't happen. So, he ends up crying and apologizing, and we make little steps toward tearing him away from his need for violence.

Turning the other cheek is not about allowing someone to have power over you, as some people imagine; it's about considering the source, about rising above brute aggression and violence with reason and patience - and Love. When we meet violence with violence, we feed the animal in the idiot who resorted to his knuckles when he realized he had run out of ideas (to paraphrase H.G. Wells), and worse than that, we feed the animal in ourselves.

All that being said, I don't advocate pacifism as a political answer to the dangerous idiots in the world. Far from it. Pacifism is fine for an individual, in certain situations where it will be more productive than swinging one's mitts; but as a collective effort, it puts innocent people in harm's way.

Last edited by William A. Baurle; 04-24-2017 at 10:58 PM.
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