A Toast for Inauguration Day 2017

From the poems of Anna Akhmatova,

I drink to our demolished house,
To all this wickedness,

[...]

The coarse, brutal world, the fact
That God has not saved us.

      (1934, Trans. by D.M. Thomas)

Expectations

The worst of all kinds
Of pain, I find
Is hope
That comes along and gives
Visions of happiness
That are not mine
Please God
Withhold it from me,
If you are there,
Give me instead
A taste of despair
So that sometimes,
Even often,
It might be that
That is disappointed

Cross-postings

My most recent contribution to the church newsletter:

December, 2016  

Recently, my thoughts have turned to an old movie– a Czech historical drama from 1967 called Marketa Lazarová. Set in a bleak and uninviting version of the Middle Ages, in which small clans war perpetually with one another, it is a meditation, among other things, on the brutality of un-restrained power in a lawless world. In the film’s closing scene, an omniscient narrator foretells that two “strapping boys” would be born to the heroine but that, “alas... cruelty and love [...] would contend for mastery of their souls.”

Poems y Poemas

Phone on Vibrate

Oh God! That sound – not again, have mercy!

Like a hornet, like a drill, I hear it, curse me!

Just ignore it, says a voice – devilish, winking

But I know by now I cannot do whatever

it is thinking

And already my shoulders droop, already

I wilt

For even once it’s gone, comes the new drone–

Of guilt!