Yesterday I followed, on the site of the Academy of American Poets, a discourse between a white male poet and a black female poet about race, and a series of letters that she then invited to open up the dialog.  One point made was that the community of poets was itself a small, white group, dripping with privilege, though thinking their modest salaries made them immune to such designation.  I started thinking the issue was maybe not so much what people choose to say about race as who is saying it, whose voice gets the chance to be heard.  And that this particular society of poets was perhaps a small group, and there were others, but their circles might never intersect.

Also yesterday, incensed by things I was hearing from the far right, I started to pen an apology to President Obama:

“I fear we are a nation of buffoons

I witnessed it on Youtube yesterday . . .”

(that’s as far as I got)

These two threads of thought wove together to form the following:

We speak in fractured space

Our stories are refracted

confined within our shards

that cut off interaction

Our words reflect back inward

from the walls of our partitions

and no one on the outside

can hear us anymore

What does it matter to them what we have to say?

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men

. . . . . babel . . . .

And so they left off to build the city.