WK Kortas is an itinerant civil servant living in the wilds of northern Pennsylvania; he lives and works by the maxim “Mediocre means better than some.”

Stravinsky 62
By WK Kortas

There are notions which prove impervious
To the forces of nature, the whims of politicians and philosophers
Perhaps even, in the final analysis, to time itself.
Tell me, what epiphany is realized
Through the parsing of prepositions from the Hebrew or Latin?
Why should we hoot and shake our fists in some battle to the death
Over some microtonal discord lurking behind a bassoon?
What is revealed in the lolling gait of the harlequinesque priest
Promenading down the aisle, incense burner clanking in time?
Observe, rather, the ancient, scarf-clad women among the muzhiks,
Bent as if entreating the very ground itself, as they feel, smell, taste the soil
(Finding what peasants and saints say are the fingerprints of God.)
What is revealed to them in that rudimentary and holy act
Is that which brings down Czar and prime minister,
That which exposes the proclamations and directives of commissars
As supercilious cant, the howling of a lost child into the wind.