It was disconcerting
The madness of music
Demanding its moment

Demanding its fragipanic
Its raw eternity
In photo-painting

Primal colors flooding
The Garden District
Shame-shaping Stonehenge Ballet

Primal man knifing air
Killing spirits killing him,
His face an Easter Island rock

Fourteen cop-columns circle
This mute trauma
Fourteen cop-columns contain
A violent self-destructing, a yellow rose bleeding at noon

Jerry W. Ward
from his book The Katrina Papers
University of New Orleans Press, 2008

used with permission of the poet