The Burning Cathedral The Burning of the Houses of Lords and Commons, J. M. W. Turner, 1834-35 Scenes from the Notre Dame Cathedral fire, CNN, April 15, 2019 Where is our Turner now? CNN video shows us the spire aglow and at a tilt as the scaffolds go up in the hell-dark heavens-high smoke, plume, viewing it, we do not feel will trip the carbon monoxide alarm on the cloud ceiling under Paradise. Where has our Turner gone? In the microwave broadcasts our gadgets catch, where is that brush’s own fiery awareness, stroke upon stroke to call witness alive in the air and the ash? No painter here sketches furious studies for canvas later, to capture that forest fire’s cratering up through the roof, the burn in our eyes till we hear the roar, the name of the beast beneath our medieval order. Blaze a beautiful terror, no Turner renders the old warhorse’s thorax and haunches, mane of flame now lighting the Seine. Our great Christian engine’s devotional pistons pulsing for centuries against the Saracens, awe’s vaulted technology buttressed by charrings of heretics’ flesh, smashing the lens on the shape of space-- where’s Turner and his eye to help us face it? A sandal-shod prophet offered his friends a soft-spoken treatise on love, and look what men made, grand and ornate. Where is our Turner to paint the burning cathedral of state? Jed Myers Jed Myers is author of Watching the Perseids (winner of the Sacramento Poetry Center Book Award), The Marriage of Space and Time (MoonPath Press), and four chapbooks, including Dark’s Channels (winner of the Iron Horse Literary Review Chapbook Award) and Love’s Test (winner of the Grayson Books Chapbook Competition). Recent recognitions include the Prime Number Magazine Award for Poetry, The Southeast Review’s Gearhart Poetry Prize, and The Tishman Review’s Edna St. Vincent Millay Poetry Prize. Recent poems appear in Rattle, Poetry Northwest, The American Journal of Poetry, Southern Poetry Review, and elsewhere. Jed is Poetry Editor for the journal Bracken. Find him at https://www.jedmyers.com/
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February 2025
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