The Steps of Montmartre
– after Brassai’s 1936 photograph
On the steps of Sacre Coeur
Cathedral, in that same winter
when junge leute filled Bavarian
beer-gardens, ten years before
Adorno proclaimed that there
could be no art after Auschwitz,
Brassai captured his flawless
image. Through the tunnel
formed by the parting trees,
battalions of lamp-posts advance
and retreat in the morning mizzle,
clamp chain-link handrails hard
into sunwashed cobbles. In less
than a year, the corpseless heads
on Nanking’s walls will coalesce
with Guernica’s ruined heart, mal
du siècle will become Weltschmerz,
and the irresistible symmetry
of a million clacking bootheels
will deafen half a continent.
The red brush never dries -
adagio leads finally to fugue,
haiku to satori, and the image
fixed in silver to remembering.
– alex grant
This poem first appeared in The Sow's Ear Poetry Review and was a runner-up in the annual contest.