By S. J. Litherland
Can we focus on the Strait of Hormuz where traffic was stopped.
In diagrams the little bits of boats and tankers were no longer skidding
around the corner like magnet filings, one or two stuck like a love
pair unaware of the phony war of proclamations, led by men
with megaphones, the standstill or the stand-off, well aware
that the world wasn’t paying them enough attention, on the sidelines,
they called a halt to what was not moving, the interval or interlude, they
have a point, the war mongers, like being stuck in the trenches,
they were stuck in posturing, threats and curses. No movement
like undeclared lovers stuck in the forever straits, the diagrams
of their hearts with no traffic. The men of war on the brink of retreat
remind us that brinkmanship is choreographed, almost a rite
of passage and no passage, they have to hold that delicate quantum
balance of defeat and no defeat. And what of would-be lovers,
as the world listens to its heart, the love poem has to admit
the evening has arrived after an afternoon of thinking. Time
has no momentum but is not frozen. What choreography
can say and unsay desire in balance like a pendulum?
Venus Disarming Mars, from the studio of Anthony van Dyck
