A Book is a Loaded Gun
a poem with audio commentary about political poetry
Article voiceover
Those who believe that words are violent are the same ones who'll cut off your tongue to keep you silent.
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Those who believe that words are violent are the same ones who'll cut off your tongue to keep you silent.
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I wish I could like this a thousand times. For those of us who had nothing but words with which to fight back the unanswerable horrors, to be silenced is a new refinement of terror. Around my parents table, in then Soviet Kiev, my parents and their friends knew that being found with the samizdat they were reading (tissue thin pages of illicitly copied books and poems by underground and sometimes murdered writers) was a death sentence. To see this particular flower finding soil in America’s left, makes my soul sink.
You can have any gun but not any book.
I am trying really hard not to swallow the horror that is the new censorship. I am not always successful.
I remember a film I saw maybe ten years ago. It takes place during the Third Reich and traces the lives of artists and all the ways that their repression is expressed as mental illness.
I also try to understand what it would feel like to be a high schooler now. The threat of violence packaged with extreme populist censorship has created such a terrifying potential future for the young.
Your simple poem says a lot.