All Over the Place: A Dance to How We Rewrite

By Michael H. Brownstein












Here we go into the foray of dance and rhythm,

the purple water fountain, the bragging men, the room of beauty and form.

Everywhere the whisper of life lifts its curious head, everywhere a movement.

But then—but then—the evil men with no skin find a reason to destroy,

listen to lies and missteps, find themselves in a wanderlust,

a burial ground full of deceit and the sudden need not to hear soft music,

the hymns of a child, the melody of sky and cloud, a piacere, affettuoso, affabile.

I’m sorry. Did you think this poem was about beauty in motion,

the beat of the human form, the way music is made

out of muscles and arms, a skip and a leap, a form of jazz or ballet,

the many colors surrounding our hearts, our faiths, are being?

No. When the ten-year old ran from his mother’s grasp into the woods,

he did not hear the sharp retort of the rifle, did not feel the smack against his spine,

did not feel its splinters rip into his heart. He did not know his small arms

étendre over his head, his body élargie into a grand écart en l'air and then fall cambré

as if the strings of a puppet were cut, landing against the hard ground

a flash of color against the forest greens, the budding of blossom.

Do you not remember the dance of death of the Mormon child in city of Nauvoo, Illinois,

near the border of Missouri? Here, too, a people grew to success

only to have it fall away in an instant of jealousy, ignorance and anger.

When the gun pointed at the child’s head went off, the bone marked the walls

surrounding his hiding place, the floor colored itself in red,

and his final dance was quick, painless, a body with no head

scuttling in a brief moment against the now slippery floor.

Let us not forget Wounded Knee. Here the cowards attacked a Sioux village

and here is where a baby was grabbed from his mother and thrown to the ground

so hard, his shattered body dropped but did not recover, dolphined but did not arch.

They knew there were no defenders here, only old men, women and children.

Perhaps you did not know:
“(Our) history…(is one of)…noble principles of freedom and equality on which our nation was founded.” —Senator Tom Cotton (Republican from Arkansas), who also told us slavery was a necessary evil and we should not fund states that want to teach slavery with up-to-date methods including, for example, the 1619 Project.^*

I’m sorry, too. The purple water fountain scarred in black and burnt gray,

the death silence of intolerance, the final mute and then the cover-up,

and always the rewriting of history to make sure we do not remember.

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* “Defund Teaching About Slavery? Sen. Tom Cotton Proposes Legislation Attacking The 1619 Project,” by Seth Cohen, Forbes, July 23.

Copyright © 2020 by Michael H. Brownstein Michael H. Brownstein’s volumes of poetry, A Slipknot Into Somewhere Else and How Do We Create Love?, were published by Cholla Needles Press in 2018 & 2019, respectively.