to resist is not simply an act of refusal

 

[...] to resist is not simply an act of refusal, of holding back against a drowning tide; it is to act totally with love in a world of sinister complicity.

 

Frank O’Hara was right and in “times of crisis we must all decide again and again whom to love.”

What do we call the horror that stretches across our present age like a canopy, a kind of shadow violence, the sort we are all guilty of: violence of the ignored, utterly avoidable variety. The casual violence of cruelty. The violence of poverty, denial, lack of care, of turning our attention away from slow burning fires that we ought to be duty bound to watch and hold in our eyes. We are not innocents here, but shadow men, looking the other way while havoc is wrought in our silence.

Fatima Bhutto, A World on Fire
 

image: Rumpus Original Poetry: Three Visual Poems by David Joez Villaverde 

note: all material for the text in image is sourced from Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

repost from 10/08/2020