Elegy for Walter Benjamin
For forty years we bore the words on our backs.
Carved into calfskin and carried them
step
by
blistering
step
through the desert.
Yet you lasted forty hours in the Pyrenees with a broken heart.
Timing everything—ten minutes walking, one rest—on your pocket watch.
Spent on an escarpment like an immolant to your briefcase.
“The manuscript is more important than I am.”
Lost.
Nothing but the planet will be anymore
because now we copy and paste.
Click Send.
If only we could you then or
Backspacebackspacebackspace over the whole debacle
Arendt: “One day earlier Benjamin would have got through without any trouble. Only on that particular day was the catastrophe possible.”
How absurd.
Benjamin, benoni, son of my pain.
The last zion out of Yakov and Rachel—or tried try to—too late.
Binyamin, spirit man, twenty-first century spook,
ectoplasmic love machine, alive in the multiplication of your texts.
These pulpy pilpul, digital doppelgangers reduced?
to zeroes and ones.
For forty years we bore the words on our backs.
Carved into calfskin and carried them
step
by
blistering
step
through the desert.
Yet you lasted forty hours in the Pyrenees with a broken heart.
Timing everything—ten minutes walking, one rest—on your pocket watch.
Spent on an escarpment like an immolant to your briefcase.
“The manuscript is more important than I am.”
Lost.
Nothing but the planet will be anymore
because now we copy and paste.
Click Send.
If only we could you then or
Backspacebackspacebackspace over the whole debacle
Arendt: “One day earlier Benjamin would have got through without any trouble. Only on that particular day was the catastrophe possible.”
How absurd.
Benjamin, benoni, son of my pain.
The last zion out of Yakov and Rachel—or tried try to—too late.
Binyamin, spirit man, twenty-first century spook,
ectoplasmic love machine, alive in the multiplication of your texts.
These pulpy pilpul, digital doppelgangers reduced?
to zeroes and ones.
- © Lewis Braham 2021
Lewis Braham is a graduate of Brooklyn College's MFA program in creative writing. His work has appeared in the Ekphrastic Review, Tuck Magazine, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Reuters and Bloomberg.
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