In class, she said, “We writers are the raw nerve of the universe. Our job is to go out and feel things for people, then to come back and tell them how it feels to be alive. Because they are numb. Because we have forgotten.” In class, she said, “We have forgotten our rituals. Out […]
Monthly Archives: July 2018
The Silences That Move Us To Speak – Ilya Kaminsky’s Poetry
July 28, 2018 – 6:18 pm
Search Patrols I cover the eyes of Gena, 7, and Anushka, 2, as their father drops his trousers to be searched, and his flesh shakes, and around him: silence’s gross belly flaps. The crowd watches. The children watch us watch: soldiers drag the naked man up the staircase. I teach his children’s hands to make […]
When Death Came She Was Ready – A Deathbed Poem by Anna Swir
July 16, 2018 – 11:23 pm
Tomorrow They Will Carve Me Death came and stood by me. I said: I am ready. I am lying in the surgery clinic in Krakow. Tomorrow they will carve me. There is much strength in me. I can live, can run, dance, and sing. All that is in me, but if necessary I will go. […]
Life: Beautiful or Monstrous or Both? Three Poems by Swir, Mahon and Gilbert
July 16, 2018 – 8:28 am
Poetry Reading I’m curled into a ball like a dog that is cold. Who will tell me why I was born, why this monstrosity called life. The telephone rings. I have to give a poetry reading. I enter. A hundred people, a hundred pairs of eyes. They look, they wait. I know for what. I […]
A Poem for Andy – Waiting for Surgery on July 12th, 2018
July 10, 2018 – 10:34 pm
Waiting A sound so loud: a dry leaf falling. The ground littered with yellow silences. I walked here with you once, the Arbutus grove, their leaves dropping and their copper peeling, the new-skin green underneath. New skin. How many times dear Lord our new skin? Each green silence? Richard Osler, unpublished 2018 It is not […]