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Refuge
While poetry and writing occupy a large amount of Clint Smith's creative energies, currently his focus is on music — from rock and jazz to world music and Afro-pop, and back again. He performs in and around NYC both solo and with the Non-Aligned Movement, a loose-knit collective of musicians who play music from
around the world.
By Clint Smith
Prologue
The parable of the seasons —
Spring, eager foal, sprawl of green
Summer, evolving of life so virid, almost plenty
Autums, echoes of circular reflections,
& winter retracting, spilling cold wisdom
I
Seizures of history & memory,
Looking for the blameworthy —
Universe gazing impassive through
the bodies with holes in their heads,
& burns that crepitate like
X rays, razing the country
with a zombie-defiled glow
II
Nature,
conquered through beckoning, &
metallic traps in the forest bourne,
unnatural thickets,
every burned face for itself,
every shattered leg and eye
a feast for one, a feast of the disabled
III
Exfoliated by a strange
quirk of chemistry,
of wood charred in the distance, mellow &
drugged armies blasting apart an infrastructure,
impressions of the enemy through night visors
IV
The chokehold on information made sure we never got it
& there were were, flustered, blind & twirling dead batteries.
As if movement were power, & the wind could generate a signal.
Our protection was eventually smashed by the rain.
& then the soldiers came, thugged, frosty eyed
Were they wolves or people? & when they were digging the
Pits, what shape did their eyes take, and what language did they speak
When they watched them naked & tumbling, & the brains
Slowly moving through the top of the grave like an oasis.
V
The future is branded
by the blood swinging in the vines,
the existence that burns in the distance ...
& life's music is alliterated through
the stories fo the aged, animated
by their concept of love, spirit, & the seasons,
evocatively drawn from the pestilent terrain ...
& so from death begins ...
2004
Published May 2005
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