will read for food

Of the Empire

I attended the Decatur Book Festival last month, and in the 100+ degree heat (at least, it felt like that) found myself wandering slowly around, fingering all the paper-arts and handmade leather journals but spending my money at the booths of the many small independent booksellers in the square. From Wordsmiths, a collection of essays by Gary Snyder called Back On The Fire. And from Charis Books — a shop that makes me nostalgic for my radical feminist days when I followed Mary Daly from an adoring distance, too shy to declare my overwhelming crush– I picked up a copy of Mary Oliver’s Red Bird. And the first poem I opened to, at random, was this:

Of the Empire

We will be known as a culture that feared death
and adored power, that tried to vanquish insecurity
for the few and cared little for the penury of the
many. We will be known as a culture that taught
and rewarded the amassing of things, that spoke
little if at all about the quality of life for
people (other people), for dogs, for rivers. All
the world, in our eyes, they will say, was a
commodity. And they will say that this structure
was held together politically, which it was, and
they will say also that our politics was no more
than an apparatus to accommodate the feelings of
the heart, and the the heart, in those days,
was small, and hard, and full of meanness.

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