Universals

Words of weapon witness words watch words
words to pick the bones of words
and to dig up words
from mass graves
unmarked burials
where words die unmemorialized

scarred.

Words to entangle bodies
wrapping around them like arms
protecting engulfing. Mother words. Womb words.
Father words. Words that know the secret prayers
every hurting body utters.

Words to combat silence. Words to counter fear. Words to unravel
barbed wire fences that cut themselves
into the tongue of those
made speechless by war
bleeding victory from history
until they are inseparable.

Words to make the wounds unforgettable unforgivable inexcusable.
Words to hold people accountable.
Words to remind people of how human
animal earth and universal

they really are.


-in memory of Susan Sontag's life, work, activism and art-
Susan Sontag, the author, activist and self-defined "zealot of seriousness" whose voracious mind and provocative prose made her a leading intellectual of the past half century, died Tuesday. She was 71. Sontag died at 7:10 a.m. Tuesday, said Esther Carver, a spokeswoman for Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in Manhattan. The hospital declined to release a cause of death. Sontag had been treated for breast cancer in the 1970s.