Vox Populi
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Andy Young: Ash Wednesday 2020
Sitges, Catalunya
We slept to the clatter of the sea
and rose to search for the weeping
drag queens displaying their mourning
behind the king’s erect effigy paraded
to the sea and thrown in: procession
of outlandish widowhood, pañuelos
black wigs face nets a parade
of public weeping that we needed
though we couldn’t say why
we’d spoken of Italy—the virus was
just starting there—as we walked the narrow
sea-wet streets the night before, but mostly
we noticed the cobalt blue stitching everything
together, painted strips at the base of things—
we toasted the blue and the Carnival spectacle
a few weeks later the borders would close
again the rich decide who lives
~~~~
Andy Young teaches at New Orleans Center for Creative Arts. Her second full-length collection, Museum of the Soon to Depart, was published in 2024 by Carnegie Mellon University Press.
Copyright 2024 Andy Young. First published in Museum of the Soon to Depart. Included in Vox Populi by permission of the author.
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later the borders would close
again the rich decide who lives
So painful, and the helplessness I feel when I read lines like that, everywhere I look, these lines are pertinent, one way or another. What a hauntingly anguished world we live in…thank the gods for poetry that says what we feel.
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“again the rich decide who lives”
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“public weeping that we needed
though we couldn’t say why”— how I feel most days this year
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I second that
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Yes…
>
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Yes. Little inscrutible bouts of weeping, like grief.
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