Literature & Human Rights Poem by Camilla Keenan Koch

if I could do it all again
I'd do it much less seriously
I would concentrate my education
more practically
to learn what I wish I knew now

How to make fun
How to interrupt the stultifying embarrassment
of respecting seriousness in abstraction.
Our tongues wriggle;
our words die.

The hearts of our own lives that deny us.
We deny them, and they sneer at us,
silkily,
with superhuman venom.
Treacherously they contradict the good thing we long to be.
Suddenly we are oppressed by an imaginary
built for liberation.
for hope-

There is so much space between
aiming at a bullseye
And the measure by which the arrow missed

How shall I
Excise the confessional appendix
Invert the secum and
Give the patient time to recover
(It only falls to me only because I believe it is inflamed)

Weird is the egg in which the chicken hatches