Cummings, the Prophet by Galen Cunningham

Cummings, the Prophet
by Galen Cunningham

History needs no hypothesis,
nor are you a parenthesis.
But I may be a comma,
and you may be a period.
We curate the past with names;
but none of them mean
what we mean them to.
Rather, history does a spell
on our vocabulary and word,
strangling centuries of rhythm;
and all things fall into their
appropriate absurdities.
Windows of the world drop,
shuttering our cluttered past;
and midnight brims with
dreams shadowed in pillage.
Cummings dropped his lines
before the world furled
its scientific banners of war:
How do you say infanticide,
child rape, genocide, genital
mutilation, global extinction,
the end of the Holocene,
with words such as these?
Perhaps it doesn't belong
to privileged poetry—
the distances between
what we ought to say
and what happens to be.
But this does not mean that
the wish to be absolved
of memories bind to story
does not have a word at all;
for many, and several words,
may come around to disconnect
the stars twinkling distantly
like commas amid the periods;
like constellations lost in a
paragraph of wars aftermath;
like missing syntax; anything
can un-describe the strange
privilege it is to be on earth,
blessed with language,
and yet lost to all its meaning.