Baroque Lamentations

Baroque Lamentations  by Khari D, Hawke There was something old world about his politics,  About his tea for lunch and his  Pronunciation of Edinburgh.  When he told me that the only revolution worth remembering  Was French,  That the only musicians worth knowing  Were German,  That the only bay worth seeing  Was the Bay of Biscay,  There was obviously some bias going on.  The only thing he had right was that  Tintoretto was truly a genius,  That reds and yellows blended in that way  Was as close as we could ever get to actual glory.  [Until Basquiat came along, anyway.]  For him, language was a monolith,  a gargantuan statue to add to another French museum,  to fall from the lips of men with eight more last names than they needed,  with tenuous claims to forgotten nobles and estates.  Women were to be neither seen or heard,  To be imagined only, as a Penelope or a Madonna,  Essentially, to weave or to give birth immaculately,  But never again to play a Joan of Arc. And so  It did not matter whether they spoke Spanish with a lisp  Like the true heirs of Aragon  Or whether they spoke it like those Dominicans.  It was in his perceptions of bastardization  That he found his rage.  That the idea of the white man’s burden,  The providence of European philanthropy to the  Uneducated curs of the Americas and Africa,  The giving of universal language to those with too many--  That this pure idea of compassion could come to be labeled imperialist,  Could become the ire of Europe in years to come, was  maddening.  And it was solely through men like Pericles  Who fought for the rights of the majority  That his culture was now muddied:  Spanish for the Latinos, Portuguese for the Brazilians,  French for the Africans, English for everyone.  German was his last major stronghold.  And whether it be partially out of pity,  Or partially out of brown sympathy,  I have decided to allow him to cling to memories of a life  He has never lived,  To walk through the great halls of Versailles all the while not reminding him  Of the Bubonic Plague, of the Dark Ages.  Essentially:  To live without knowing the beauty  Of the world in true color.  ---