Angelus Novus

     after Paul Klee’s painting, or perhaps Walter Benjamin’s much quoted text,
or why do we need epigraphs…?
 
 
Why indeed? Epitaphs make more sense.
They provide a full stop, a final point
to this flow of words that would strike us
out from Beginning, to Never-end.
 
So here, one man paints an angel for us, he turns her
to face the past, and she stands there, still
as ice on a pond. Her eyes look out
to her left, our right.
                     But the other man tells us:
no, she’s waiting for a storm to touch land.
See, he says, how her wings are beginning to catch,
they have lost the rhythm of their beat.
 
Yet we know our angel can only be pushed onwards.
It is inevitable, even though her face looks away
from any future. Watch how she struggles
to make whole this growing mound
of debris, these fallen fragments of our past.
 

Fawzia Kane

in collection Tantie Diablesse, 2011, Waterloo Press,
ISBN 978-1-9067424-1-6