One Can Do Both
A golden shovel after Anne Frank
Look, dawn & dusk, / pass & fill, / love & look
at all of our community in lack & oppressed / at
how gripping hunger is, at how babies twist, how
a hope could fight against armies of days, still / a
single seed is not all that's needed. Yet one single
candle can still stand alight for the world. A candle
can melt & illuminate / fight & rededicate. Light can
both beam & be me. As one does. One can do both:
defy & decide / divest & deepen / rededicate to defy
& delight in the bright defiance, deign to redesign &
define your own ritual of care for you / world to define
the smiles in the shadows, the branches in eyes, the
darkness. Horizon melts skylit sums of blue darkness.
"Look at how a single candle can both defy and define the darkness." Anne Frank
“Where?”
A golden shovel after the Hebrew phrase-reference found on dreidels Palestine. Yes, the very one pogromed by a racist exiling apartheid ongoing— not great for Memory to be so selective, it's a Miracle Truth works. If Light shares what happened: ethnic cleansing is happening. Here/There. נֵס גָּדוֹל הָיָה פֹּה/שָׁם (nes gadól hayá po/sham, "a great miracle happened here/there")
— Adam Powers
The Golden Shovel poetic form was “devised recently by Terrance Hayes in homage to Gwendolyn Brooks” “The last words of each line in a Golden Shovel poem are, in order, words from a line or lines” — Don Share, from Poetry Magazine, Introduction: The Golden Shovel