Poem by David Eberhardt
Photograph by Jed Sarmiento. Art by Greg Bokor
Greg Bokor: Erasing Gun Violence. The highly detailed 6m x 2.5m drawing of an AR-15 assault rifle, done entirely in graphite pencil, took Bokor approximately 300 hours to render. The piece was installed with an enormous stack of erasers next to it, each bearing the name and age of a young gun violence victim. Viewers used them to physically erase the illustration.
David Eberhardt: Website here. (A “romantic communist” like Nazim Hikmet) was born March 26, 1941. As a peace protester, he was incarcerated at Lewisburg Federal Prison in 1970 for 21 months for pouring blood on draft files with Father Philip Berrigan and two others to protest the Vietnam War. He is retired after 33 years of work in the criminal injustice system as a Director of Offender Aid and Restoration at the Baltimore City Jail. He has published three books of poetry: The Tree Calendar, Blue Running Lights, and Poems from the Website, Poetry in Baltimore. He is at work on a memoir: For All the Saints , influenced by Thoreau, Nabokov, Mailer, Agee, Thomas, and Cousteau…
Rain fell in Aurora
Rain fell in Aurora, Colorado today,
It fell for the
Victims and
Executioner as well.
It smiled at the dawn references
That news reporters made re the name,
Although none of them made any;
It smiled at the
Lack of reporting
On Colorado gun laws…
It forgave and forgave.
If you listened closely you
Might have heard how it said:
Forgive and forgive.
Seek no vengeance, work for peace.
It said, I washed the blood off
Forever battlefields and
I can wash this off.
Press on, it said but it said it like this:
Ssssh, ssssh…
Peace…peace.
…..the idolatry of weapon worship in america (my mentor, Father Phil Berrigan always mentioned it) – the nuclear bomb, the drone, the ar assault weapon, the glock- why do so many americans choose to be killers? did the more normal ones stay behind in england?
i think coloradans also bought more guns after columbine- where did that get them?
I wonder abt american men- and i am one- makes me ashamed, really- but for the fact that i am not like these men- no- I’m like Dan Gross of the Brady Group or Ladd Everitt of the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence
We can analyze the individual until we’re blue in the fact- we need to change the culture, the society of violence- It’s the guns stupid