Saturday, October 25, 2025

DO NOT TAKE PICTURES OF THE TRANSPARENT DESTRUCTION! - poem (of a sort)

 

Lawrence Hall

Mhall46184@aol.com

Dispatches for the Colonial Office

 

DO NOT TAKE PICTURES OF THE TRANSPARENT DESTRUCTION!

 

 

Macbeth to the witches:

 

How now, you secret, black, and midnight hags.

What is't you do?

 

Witches:                        

 

                                     A deed without a name.

 

-Macbeth IV.i.48-50

 

Bricks, freedom, columns, windows that let in light, old trees that shaded the lawns, dignity, decency, mercy, kindness, self-discipline, honor, precedents ancient and modern, protections, chapters and verses, the majesty of the law, literature, music, art, dining with utensils, logic, education, good taste – all must go DO NOT TAKE PICTURES

 

 

 

Wreckers guide steel treads

                                                       DO NOT TAKE PICTURES         Over fragments of Amendment V

Trenchers rip the

                             heart  DO NOT TAKE PICTURES     out of Amendment IV

 

Excavators heave Amendment XXII

                                                DO NOT TAKE PICTURES

                                                                              into garbage skips

 

Cranes stack bits of Amendment VI against a chain link fence

 

DO NOT TAKE PICTURES

 

And at dusk a fire, a big, beautiful fire, chantings and clenched fists while tokens of the freedom to disagree, freedom from a government religion, freedom to choose one’s own books, and freedom from fear rise as flame and fire and smoke, and The People wave their made-in-China gift-shop bibles with the words of Our Leader printed in red and sing along to the musical stylings of Horst Wessel.

 

BUT DO NOT TAKE PICTURES

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