Page 16 - Poems

Lines:

BEFORE AND AFTER

Lily-white rose the anthem “Fluctuat
nec mergitur”. Tossed by the waves
but never sunk. In whorls of neat white
graffiti, first, on the palisade of a gutted
café christened Mondes et médias at Place
de la République by late noon on fourteenth
November two thousand and fifteen. Fluctuat
nec mergitur: letters wrought, you may have heard,
as the city’s escutcheon, several hundred full moons
back by the boatmen’s guild, then resurrected this day,
flaring from the ground to the trees at République, then
from lip to lip to lip, hand to hand to hand, soul to soul to
yet more souls, as we tried to count and comprehend. Count
and mourn the names of the dead, the damaged. Wrap tongue,
over and over, wrap thought, around these new words – the dead,
the damaged, the living, the innocent and the culpable – that cleave
belief and sanity. Engrave on the plinth, apses and pediments of minds
the exact loci of our tread, our breath the night before; the paths we’ll take
to haunting for wakeful years. Tossed by the waves but never sunk, we the living
would seep and spume these afternoons through eleven streets to converge beside
Marianne’s lion, beneath her olive branch at Place de la République. Trickle through
avenues and passages and boulevards and faubourgs. Magenta, Saint-Martin, Voltaire,
Vendôme, Boulanger, Beaurepaire, and others... Surge in all shades and shapes, native
and foreign — from carnation to magnolia, tiger-lily to laburnum, dandelion to lilac,
larkspur to amaranth to orchid, a flotsam-battalion of flowers that kept unfurling
more war-cries against terror and hatred. Même pas peur – Not Even Afraid –
the simplest, the steeliest of them, the one that would ripple around the globe
before other realities (division, dread, power, polity…) could get their boots
on and kick us cobalt. Those be the days we’d give up the amnion warmth
of metro lines, the snug underground, to reclaim streets and squares clad
in ashen, adamant feet, kindle cobblestones with our toes, quaff a briny
sun, and pluck shards of sky to line buttonholes with lead. Those be
the days we’d need to unseel grief and see it hurtle to the heavens,
see its pinions of cramoisy and purple slice through cloudscapes,
and an endless, wordless keening shatter innumerous stars.
While behind grief, at all the hours impossible to record –
not just midnight nor half-light, dawn or noon – flew our
raptors: blame and guilt and illogic, a baker’s dozen

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