Some things, no matter the time of year or current fashions, just never go outta style. And we know what those things are: sex, love, birth and death, motherhood and fatherhood, friendship and loss, war, the natural world, the mysterious, unknowable world, and overarching these, all that can be observed or remembered, or imagined.
And in this country — more this one than certain others around the globe — day-to-day gunfire. Never goes outta style. About the time of the release of this newest They Write by Night, coming in after a long hiatus, there was a big shooting in this big country. And another one since.
But like I say here, guns don’t kill people. Bullets kill people. Poet Natalie Diaz melts all bullets down to one, one master bullet, one bullet that tells the story for all the others. It exits, it returns, is lost, is found. It gets under her brothers’ skin. It gets into other’s brothers’ bones. But “Catching Copper” isn’t a bullet, it’s a poem.
That’s something else that never goes out of style. Great poems.
You can’t kill a great poem–though, sure as heck, some have tried.
— Suzanne Lummis
Top image credit to www.Poetry.LA