Someone Is Having an Argument
Text by Ann Fisher-Wirth
Photo by Wilfried Raussert
But why argue?
As the Dodo says, everybody has won
and all must have prizes.
So why not go out into the day
where, released from their cages,
doves soar into the sun, or the night
where the fox cries,
the night in which you are a speck
of a speck of a speck
in whirling light and space,
a flick of the fingers, pfuit!
vanished, like that, yet you breathe
and walk and love, and you stare
at the images sent by the Webb telescope,
the fierce and blinding splendor
of the cosmoses,
and it is given to you to be part of it.
Ann Fisher-Wirth is the coeditor of Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology and the author of the collaborative work Into the Chalice of Your Thoughts (U Guadalajara Press, 2023) and Paradise Is Jagged (Terrapin Books, 2023). The 2023 recipient of the Governor’s Award for Poetry by the Mississippi Arts Commission, Ann is a senior Black Earth Institute Fellow.
Wilfried Raussert is an internationally award-winning multidisciplinary artist and scholar who is currently the Head of the Cultural Studies Department at Bielefeld University, Germany. His photographs accompany Ann Fisher-Wirth’s poems in Into the Chalice of Your Thoughts.
Back to Table of Contents for Translation and Transition