The Coughing Guns
The sound of guns arrested the silence
A mother is lost in her confusion
Drowning in her tears
Beholding a dismembered limb
Of a young corpse she once called a son
Yet the guns cough on
The buildings succumbed
In resistant compliance
Heavy concrete fall from buildings
Pressing on trapped bodies
And crimson blood rushing out
Shocked by a world it had never known
Held spellbound in an unfamiliar terrain
Consumed by an absorbing black hole
As more bombs fly from engines above
Into a bewildered city
Aerial Bombardment -- Tullio Crali
Filippo Tommaso Marinetti published the "Manifesto del Futurismo" as a preface to a volume of his poems in 1909, launching the Futurist movement in art that celebrated speed, machinery, violence, youth, and industry, and became closely associated with Fascism. Over the decades Marinetti issued many other Futurist manifestos, including "Perspectives of Flight" in 1929, launching the Aeropittura (aeropainting) phase of the movement. "The changing perspectives of flight constitute an absolutely new reality that has nothing in common with the reality traditionally constituted by a terrestrial perspective.... "Painting from this new reality requires a profound contempt for detail and a need to synthesise and transfigure everything." Crali, a self-taught painter, joined the movement the same year that the aeropittura movement was launched and became one of its leading practitioners. In 1932, the year he painted "Aerial Bombardment," airplanes aided the Italian naval bombardment of the Greek island of Corfu in which dozens of refugees and orphans were slain and injured; no Greek soldiers were killed. After extorting a huge indemnity from Greece, the Italians withdrew from the island a month later. The incident was Benito Mussolini's 1st successful international confrontation, a demonstration of the essential weakness of the League of Nations, and it led to the Italian annexation of the Dodekánisa islands in the southeastern Aegean sea in 1923.
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