The John F. Kennedy Center
for the Performing Arts and the Death of the Arts

For my brother, Richard, and those other
American artists never remembered

A closing down of words,
orchestras,
dancers.
Life shut down and shuttered
for the renovations announced—
that center of culture now set to decay along
the quiet Potomac River.
The Watershed III art installation
emboldened our lives—
seven shaped, sculptured canvases painted
with a mosaic of rich and vibrant color
bringing us closer to infinity
at the center for the American arts.

Will we remember the ballerinas
who danced there?
I remember the Soviet ballerina,
Maya Plisetskaya, dancing gracefully
her famous interpretation of “The Dying Swan”,
not dying as a frail swan in a dark lake
but as an eagle proudly defying death
and the dying of world cultures.
Past is the era of the arts
when they attempted to leap out
of our earth-bound lives toward the endless stars!

In the Concert Hall,
with its sublime cherry wood paneling
along the walls and balconies
and its seven crystal chandeliers,
where the National Symphony Orchestra
still haunts the air,
amidst the symphonic pipe organ
and the orchestra’s pastoral musical notes,
somber but with sonorous voices,
playing Beethoven’s 7th Symphony—
those flutes, violins,
bassoons and trumpets still haunting
the limbs and leaves of the ginkgo trees
with their small fan-shaped leaves
trembling in the golden light of autumn
along the Potomac River.
We are reminded
of what was once here in spirit.
Now, our young culture has been slaughtered
and we are complicit in its destruction.
The geometry and the art of our lives now recede
before a nation’s suicide.

 

Luis Lázaro Tijerina is a military historian and military theorist. He is a published author. Mr. Tijerina admit that he writes poetry and paints easel works as an outlet for the more intense work that he does from a professional position.