My good friend the fantastic poet Jason Arthur Wood wrote this elegy for Yasser Arafat back in 2002 when he was under siege. While the circumstances of his death may be different, I think it still holds true today.

CITIZEN, DARKENING

April 16 -- 29, 2002





i.

Accept it -- a realignment from along-

side or against or without -- as necessary.  Witness 




action as gesture rendered 

upon itself.  Hope: for to bear witness; 

for to bleed; for to wait out this




summonsing.  Where this came to wake had been 

a wave in stalled motion, this land.  What formed within

only a membrane (stranded) felt as a flesh 

somehow (permeated in substance) multiplied 

with facets.  Then a retracting -- as if under-





ii.

scored.  Settled farther inland (this fullness of 

sound brought from the bed 

of a river, the back of a throat)  

then before (one voice).  Assumed form 

as only shapes, only emboldened gray shapes, 




calculating themselves, disguised 

by a sliding, themselves

into a direction, themselves becoming an allowance,




becoming a merging, as another 

awakening.  Only shaped (formed 

in the back of this throat), only folding





iii.

over onto itself only.  Then river only.  Then speaking with 

the dead (our dead).  Then soon-to-be-

storied-to-forget.  Withdraw, then

(I have grown impatient in this space)(there is no more space)

redoubt.  In these hands one thin voice takes hold.  Only




(legion, only)





iv

(an exacting of the observed)(neither desperation, neither hope)(from within the


 confines of a presence)(from one narrow eye)(watching another closed narrowing)
(from form entering into the walls)(can seem to hold)(no, cannot, not now)(exacting 


one slight eye to better)(one slight chording of vision)(these notes are not precise)


(these notes form)(from nothing)(fullness of voice)(formulate a promise, citizen,)

(darkening,)

 



v.

(as that which cannot be undertaken; your voice wanted in approach closer

to the back of your throat -- motion held down by this by action -- in impatient

waiting cast across an impatient spanning -- patiently make time wind through- 

out -- create space into the absence of which you can place only voice, only raised

in contagion, settled upon the press of wanting -- to do this only now, to make 

this count -- until wanting is beyond symbol, until wanting is the only 

column, is the wanting which has brought you here and brought you here 

again -- one man, blindly, given the chance they would watch you through this space,)




(always watch you crossing this space you have been reduced to, two walls, these 

sounds breaking, one floor upon which whichever one of you -- you, speaking; 

you, spoken -- they were looking for, drawn within a coiling, an emptied stair-

case, an arranging of cycles, hollow energy's hollowed gathering places, a reality 

designed of geographic, become an understanding stripped of incidence -- only by 

your name gathered in a superstition are these charges the air implicates)

 



vi.

then, on the seventh day, did you resist.  All along 

its wake -- waves crested in a a pass-

age -- you extended 

motion ("I hope I will be a martyr"), extended

one hand into one throat ("in the Holy Land.") and produced 




an avalanche of voice, one cacophony 

(these notes are not sounding) above all others (as

they were meant) as I have placed (to sound) ourselves 

here, where they cannot help




but find us.  Sleep -- as there is time to awaken, there is time





vii.

(upon the people so declared to be free to abstain from all violence)

(a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence)

(for the people shall not perish from the earth)



--Jason Arthur Wood