Refuge
While poetry and writing occupy a large amount of Clint Smith's creative energies, currently his focus is on music from rock and jazz to world music and Afro-pop, and back again. He performs in and around NYC both solo and with the Non-Aligned Movement, a loose-knit collective of musicians who play music from
around the world.
By Clint Smith
Prologue
The parable of the seasons
Spring, eager foal, sprawl of green
Summer, evolving of life so virid, almost plenty
Autums, echoes of circular reflections,
& winter retracting, spilling cold wisdom
I
Seizures of history & memory,
Looking for the blameworthy
Universe gazing impassive through
the bodies with holes in their heads,
& burns that crepitate like
X rays, razing the country
with a zombie-defiled glow
II
Nature,
conquered through beckoning, &
metallic traps in the forest bourne,
unnatural thickets,
every burned face for itself,
every shattered leg and eye
a feast for one, a feast of the disabled
III
Exfoliated by a strange
quirk of chemistry,
of wood charred in the distance, mellow &
drugged armies blasting apart an infrastructure,
impressions of the enemy through night visors
IV
The chokehold on information made sure we never got it
& there were were, flustered, blind & twirling dead batteries.
As if movement were power, & the wind could generate a signal.
Our protection was eventually smashed by the rain.
& then the soldiers came, thugged, frosty eyed
Were they wolves or people? & when they were digging the
Pits, what shape did their eyes take, and what language did they speak
When they watched them naked & tumbling, & the brains
Slowly moving through the top of the grave like an oasis.
V
The future is branded
by the blood swinging in the vines,
the existence that burns in the distance ...
& life's music is alliterated through
the stories fo the aged, animated
by their concept of love, spirit, & the seasons,
evocatively drawn from the pestilent terrain ...
& so from death begins ...
2004
Published May 2005
|