Vox Populi
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Pablo Otavalo: Étude
On the outstretched arm of a pinwheel galaxy
and doomed to be free. Into the bonfire
the vanities, as into a cave
the light. Small,
the human world, brutish
and quickly cut short.
Hammer and nail. Sickle
and harrow. Crooked teeth
and massacre. Because we are
thinking primates
we press the bone edge
into the grinding stone.
~~~~
Copyright 2024 Pablo Otavalo
Pablo Otavalo is from Cuenca, Ecuador, and now lives and writes in Illinois. A recipient of the 2013 and 2014 Illinois Emerging Writers Competition prize, his work has appeared in Poetry Magazine, RHINO Poetry and other publications. He says, “We must find what we revere in each other.”
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Like the best musical études, your poem, Pablo, evokes more than its short length might imply. 12 lines, 6 couplets, but with very specific images, very clear notes (with their resonances and allusions and hommages): it goes all the way from the galaxy through so much human history down to (our own?) bones, wrought as tools or weapons.
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Fkn Pablo 🤔🧉
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Thank you Jim for your comment, you nailed what I was going for and called our most of the allusions.
There only two things I would add to help orient a reader. 1. An étude is a short musical piece, a study, to help a student demonstrate or master a skill. 2. The allusion that starts at the end of the second stanza is from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan describing a state of nature outside of society as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short”. My version is less pessimistic I think, but not by much.
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thanks for your poem. You end with an astounding but unsettling phrase: “we press the bone edge/ into the grinding stone.”
it leaves me pondering never ending dilemmas as to our human nature, while admiring how you face us up to them with that phrase.
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Jim’s comment.
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Wow to ‘a both the poem and Jim’s comment.
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Stunning poem! Yes to all Jim Newsome said!
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Wow. This poem carried me through a history of political philosophy, told at a poetic slant: with all sorts of conundrums like the authoritarian taunt that we in democracies are doomed to be free. The bonfires of book burning, the Hammer and Sickle of historic Communism, the crooked teeth, like the crooked crosses of the Nazis, and hints that this has been around since we first evolved, as evidenced by the paleolithic grinding stones which some evidence finds ground bones. The massacres go on. Oh and Plato’s cave, where the light made shadows on the walls. What shadows do we make on walls today?
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Beautiful writing, Jim. Literary criticism raised to profound insight into human culture and history. Thank you.
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Jim Newsome brilliant commentary made me understand the poem so much better — so thank you, Jim!
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your words always inspire. Thanks for letting me get to know them.
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