Archive for January 16th, 2013
grisly alliance
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– photo by Mitch Waxman
Omens abound, here in the Newtown Pentacle, if only one is sensitive enough to notice their presence. It is not enough to merely cast off the callous of vision which develops during repetitions of the daily round, instead one must listen carefully to the suffering land of Queens which bears the terrible burdens of historical indignity and modern aspiration. Somewhere beneath the concrete devastations of industry and the vainglory of the urban planners exists a variegated and buried wetland.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
Once- salt meadows blessed with endless acres of coastal grass swayed in the Newtown breeze beneath the burning thermonuclear eye of god itself here, nourishing and maintaining a vast ecosystem. Birds existed in numbers great enough to blot out the sky, and the shallow streams and ponds sustained a teeming population of fish and invertebrates. When the Dutch came, they saw naught but swamps, and their English successors applied the term “Waste Meadows” to the place. It wasn’t until the period between the American Civil war in the 1860’s and the early 20th century, via the practice of landfill, that the area was fully opened for exploitation.
– photo by Mitch Waxman
This unfortunate avian, observed alongside the Sunnyside yard, would be viewed by the dross masses as merely another casualty of the modern age. Your humble narrator, with his eyes dilated by the absence of sleep and the concurrent intoxication of caffeine, sees dire portent instead. Mesmerized Valdemar, whom Poe described, might be able to offer some compact meaning to such omens- but one as wholly inadequate as myself is unfortunately incapable of such interpretation.
The Newtown Pentacle 