Guernica

by Margery Parsons / November 10th, 2024

A beast in the shape of a Minotaur,
half bull, half human,
glowers from Picasso’s “Guernica.”
a fitting metaphor
for fascism.
No aspersions on bulls.
Humans of an inhuman order
ordered the mass slaughter
of the people of Guernica,
ingesting them
in infernos from the air.
Only an artist, with anguish
and love supreme
could capture the carnage:
women scream
with heads thrown back
in deathly agonies,
even their pleading hair
indicts the atrocities.
One of them cradles a dead baby.
There are dismembered bodies everywhere.
A lightbulb above all
illuminates the torture,
bestial, heartless, cruel
of innocent humanity.
A woman reaches in with a candle.
Does she stand for Picasso
with his mural,
a witness to infamy
to warn and to remind us?
Through many struggles
against many iterations
of enslavement, of tyranny
we must fight for a world
where we are fully human,
with all of this madness
behind us.

Margery Parsons is a poet and advocate for a radically different and better world. She lives in Chicago and in addition to poetry loves music and film. Her poems have been published in Rag Blog, Poetry Pacific, Calliope, New Verse News, OccuPoetry, Rise Up Review, Haiku Universe, Madness Muse Press and Illinois Poetry Society, with a forthcoming poem in Plate of Pandemic. Read other articles by Margery.

This article was posted on Sunday, November 10th, 2024 at 8:00am and is filed under Poetry.