Organized Forgetting
I was looking back through some old poetry I had written a little over a decade ago and found several gems.
This one is particularly appropriate given the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall fall as I wrote this while taking a course on Czech literature and film. It was striking in that class just how rigorous the Communist efforts at controlling history, or at least the perceptions of history,were. They literally would airbrush people out of pictures and eliminate the appearance of them ever having existed. That was truly shocking, just how existentially destructive this totalitarianism really could be.
Here is the poem (a referenc eto the ill fated 1968 Prague Spring):
Organized Forgetting
A leader in a picture airbrushed away
Never one street name may stay
Yesterday's sins disappear unmentioned
Utpoian society so well intentioned
Lost letters, lost memories, lost hope
With fresh wounds one must cope
A dead husband rots in silence
A tearful wife standing in lone defiance
Tanks roll in, blood flowing in the street
Bold images made so discreet
Next day, business commences
Nothing said, unpunished offenses
From above collective thought controlled
The land's memory is on hold
This one is particularly appropriate given the 20th anniversary of the Berlin Wall fall as I wrote this while taking a course on Czech literature and film. It was striking in that class just how rigorous the Communist efforts at controlling history, or at least the perceptions of history,were. They literally would airbrush people out of pictures and eliminate the appearance of them ever having existed. That was truly shocking, just how existentially destructive this totalitarianism really could be.
Here is the poem (a referenc eto the ill fated 1968 Prague Spring):
Organized Forgetting
A leader in a picture airbrushed away
Never one street name may stay
Yesterday's sins disappear unmentioned
Utpoian society so well intentioned
Lost letters, lost memories, lost hope
With fresh wounds one must cope
A dead husband rots in silence
A tearful wife standing in lone defiance
Tanks roll in, blood flowing in the street
Bold images made so discreet
Next day, business commences
Nothing said, unpunished offenses
From above collective thought controlled
The land's memory is on hold
Comments