Before-After - June 2008

© Ben Heine || Facebook || Twitter || www.benheine.com
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Update: The above montage mainly shows older photos, please see THIS VIDEO
featuring the "before" and "after" versions of some 70 of my most recent photos
from 2010, 2011, 2012 (with original music).

I thought it might be interesting to post this (click on image or download to enlarge).
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For more information about my artwork: info@benheine.com
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The Light by its Creation

A poem by Joanne Monte

from the beginning,
was meant to douse the darkness
as it did then in that year;

to sparkle the snowflake
that caught the fringe
of a child's eyelash in the Urals of winter

as it backlit
the blue in his mother's tears;

meant to splash
into the bucket of reindeer milk

as it splashed on the shoulders of peasants
toiling in the fields of revolution
that they, themselves, had plowed;

to creep without reservation
into the blacksmith's shop in Bukhara,
past old city walls;

meant to warm
the bread at supper, the bowl
of sunflower seeds; the sleeping children
in their utopia, snug in blankets
loomed with parrot and peacock feathers
and red squares. But this

had been a dream of light,
and by its creation,
meant to reveal what had been done
in darkness behind the barbed wire,
sharpened by secrets;

the brine pits where men were beaten
into their labor, ankle-deep in mire;
their hands stung by salt water
and the pull of cabbages;

meant to glisten
the sweat on their backs,
and in the beards of Old Believers
wishing to go back before the slaughter,
the forced starvation, the mass graves;

before the light
was meant to pour down the throat
of the iris, choking on its stalk;

before it poured across the canvas
on which Goya painted Saturn
Devouring His Children.

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Poem's source : www.poemsabout.com