(a response to a film at the Menil Collection)

Good zeal and virtuous intentions
Forge the bone of youthful content.
Understanding acquires wisdom
By making it meaningful.
In other words,
In our youth we build our dreams
Through our aspirations and actions,
Only later reflecting
On how it all unfolded,
How the past informs the future.

In the twilight hour of our days,
The Hour of the Dog
We gather the fragments,
Searching for what wisdom emerges
From the bowels of our suffering.
Our natural inclination
Is to make some sense
Of this relentless hurling
Between darkness and light,
Shadow and substance.

We process our collective stories
Through the lens of experience,
Filtering them through perspective,
Through images, art, and witness.
Looking for those hidden truths
That give shape to memory,
Trying to understand
How one moment becomes history,
How history becomes inheritance,
How inheritance becomes us.

Separated by differences,
Yet united in our sameness
Light and dark,
Morning and night,
Birth and death,
Creation and destruction,
Spark and ash,
Innocence and cynic.
The years keep asking
Which side we believed we served.

Watching yesterday’s certainty
From today’s distance,
Even villains imagined
They stood with justice.
Heroes carried doubts.
The free and the oppressed
Shaped one another
Through force and friction,
Place, power, and privilege
History remembers unevenly.

Could you still center yourself in love
Despite all that is broken and unjust?
When heroes and villains
Are draped in the same capes?
Could you find the balance between
Compassion and discernment?
Could you recognize
The hour between uncertainty and knowing,
When the world is mostly twilight,
And every soul casts a shadow?

After all this human experience,
Can our eyes still see beauty?
Can our voices still speak wonder?
Can we find ecstasy in agony,
The miracle in pain?
Can we hold another’s story
Without abandoning our own?
Can wisdom become compassion?
Can memory become healing?
Can love remain our final witness?