Over Thanksgiving of 2024 my granddaughter Katie, who was studying at Colorado College under Eiko Otake, asked me to watch a performance dance video her instructor had made and comment on it, discuss it with her. This was an assignment over the break, to find an older person and talk about the dance. Since the performance was about both the Nagasaki atomic bombing and the 9-11 destruction of the Twin Towers, that made sense. I was 88 then, old enough.
Eiko Otake's performance on 9-11-2021 at 7 a.m. is the first recording you can find here with this description:
Commissioned by NYU Skirball
Produced by Battery Park City, Lower Manhattan Cultural Council, and NYU Skirball.
Performed at 7AM and 6PM at Belvedere Plaza in Battery Park City by the Hudson River, directly west of where the Twin Towers once stood.
I needed to watch it repeatedly and make notes. Quite confusing for me. There is her strong accent for one thing, and it took me awhile to figure out why the people sitting around are wearing headphones since I didn't notice her microphone at first. And confusingly, there are early morning joggers and walkers-by who appear to know nothing of the performance.
After I'd watched Eiko's performance maybe three times, I jotted down some quick notes on my cell phone. Katie and I had our talk about the dance/talk/film performance and returned our separate ways, she to college and I back to my home. There I came across those notes and sent them per WhatsApp. (I love the name of the app, and it's the family's main text and talk gizmo.) She got back to me to say they amounted to a poem, something I'd given no thought to at all. So now I've removed a line or two from the original notes and made them into what I do think of as a poem. It's about the dance/talk/film, which is about Nagasaki and 9-11 and people affected in those world-class disasters, and in others more local and less noticed over here.
There is the random.
You leave the house.
Someone planted a land mine just there
Your leg is severed at the knee.
The birds mostly were not watching,
but the crow makes that sound.
After this you do not live the same life.
The others do. Buy your frozen biscuits.
Today you save seventy cents.
You remember that day.
And there is the pattern.
There was war. And after that there was war.
And we go ahead and save seventy cents.
And after this there will be war.
Sometimes the birds are watching.
The crow sees it always.
And makes that sound.
