Plea for Mercy

Long have I cherished the perhaps unoriginal but abiding belief that all art is a plea for mercy, that underlying all our poetry, music, painting, song, all our dancing hopes and rhymed and rhythmed rituals, is a plea for mercy, a petition to be reprieved, a pitch, if not quite for immortality, then for at least a new dawn, another child, for another day to see the harvest of what has been sown and hear new chapters in the unfinished story, an appeal for the circle to remain unbroken, the chain whole … just a little while longer, dear lord, just a little while longer…


Yes, all art is a plea for mercy.

On the shadow throat of the pilgrim’s path
each chanted step is a prayer,
at the bottom of the heart’s well,
each gulped silence
a plea for mercy.

Every saxophone solo that noodles the sacred night
as the moist nostrils of the newborn calf
nudge and nuzzle the silent udder
is a plea for mercy.

Every lullaby
epilogued by a rose-puckered kiss
on the fevered brow
of the sleeping child,

and every eve when a lover petitions
the stars with verse, a shepherd deflowers
the wind with song, a lone rhapsode
stitches geese into the clouds,
is a plea for mercy.

Every scribble in a tattered notepad, sighing
to capture the melt of frost by the canyon rim,
is a plea held up like the shield of Achilles
when the thhhwang of the bow reminds us
yet again that the great arrow is in flight.

The thrilled eye that dips the paintbrush
into the throbbing crucible before the canvas,
aching to capture the poplars panticulating
in the dusk purred breeze,
is pleading for mercy.

Every crooned blues sired by a whistling train
infected with the pulse of wind-polished stars,
every hand that skips on a goatskin drum
as the barefoot girl shadow dances by the fire,
every oboe bleating the memory of a mother’s scented breast,
is a plea for mercy,

is the compass of our wearied hero on the long trek home,
is a plea, a wince, a supplication,
a hiccup in the relentless countdown,
a fistful of seed hurled at the eternal soil.

* * *

Yes, all my adult life I have held fast to this modest belief and still do even as I struggle to make it up right here and now. Yet, though I would only discover this later on, this and all other warm fuzzy certitudes suddenly turned to salt stone in that one incalculable instant when I walked beneath a crooked metal arc that muttered in a foul-breathed whisper: “Arbeit Macht Frei”.






Photos of Lorenzo shadows:
Top: On the Rocío pilgrimage trail — Spring 2011
Middle: Drinking in the Duero river between Spain and Portugal — Summer 2011
Bottom: Snagged in the barbwire at Auschwitz-Birkenau — Summer 2011