7' x 11'
oil glaze on canvas
by Joseph Luis Ramirez
Installed on south wall of Suite
C, 621 Madison Street, Evanston, IL, on May 25, 2000
underway,
the prow of your consciousness
breaks the waves of the seeming and the real,
batters the shoals of a spreading wrong;
witness, if in rippled depths you know
your self the mettle, equal and wild,
to keep this wrong from wronging on
but run from the army of protest holy–
here caught! on brambled failure
the garment of your human passage snagged,
and you, deserter, sealed fast now belong
to every wrong that stains this world still
Free-worked or remade verse translation by Eliezer Margolis of a fragment of
a commentary
from the Babylonian Talmud (Tractate "Shabbos". Ch.
5, p.54/B-3)
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