This past week has been a beautiful one, at least in the Red River Valley where I live. I've been working on a farm, I helped another farmer plant trees over the weekend. And yet my facebook feed is full of scenes of violence. I can feel the cold pressure of a gloved hand on my throat. I feel like a soldier in a trench, my unit held in reserve, staring at a wall of wood and mud, listening to the screams and shells exploding a hundred feet and a world away. 

 

Poetry is a bridge, I've always thought, connecting the reader to a specific emotional or literal moment. Lynda Hull's Love Song During Riot With Many Voices captures the kinetics and emotional churn of a city in conflict. It has served as a strangely grounding text in these wildly unsettled days.

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Portland local David Rovics has a lot of good musical medicine, his song Behind the Barricades seems particularly resonant right now. 

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As far as images go, I think we've all been pretty well saturated with them.

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I wrote a song after the first couple nights of the uprisings in my hometown of Minneapolis;