If you are reading this, it means that your managing editor was able to pull through and persist in seeing out the creation and publication of this week’s paper despite the virtual collapse of the server used to host said paper. Don’t you just love technology?
Times like these make me wish I was born about 100 years earlier. I wouldn’t have missed out on much: in the 1920s, there was still decent careers in journalism for spunky college-educated women like myself, as well as good books and movies, not to mention speakeasies, bob haircuts, jazz, and conflict in the Middle East (known back then as British Palestine). Like I said, not too different from today but sans internet and pesky data servers.
Anyways, here are some poems for this week; hopefully things are back to normal at the Bryan County News Headquarters by next Thursday (Have we tried turning the paper on and off again?)
Passing Through, Stanley Kunitz
Nobody in the widow’s household ever celebrated anniversaries.
In the secrecy of my room I would not admit I cared that my friends were given parties.
Before I left town for school my birthday went up in smoke in a fire at City Hall that gutted the Department of Vital Statistics.
If it weren’t for a census report of a five-year-old White Male sharing my mother’s address at the Green Street tenement in Worcester I’d have no documentary proof that I exist. You are the first, my dear, to bully me into these festive occasions.
Sometimes, you say, I wear an abstracted look that drives you up the wall, as though it signified distress or disaffection.
Don’t take it so to heart.
Maybe I enjoy not-being as much as being who I am. Maybe it’s time for me to practice growing old. The way I look at it, I’m passing through a phase: gradually I’m changing to a word.
Whatever you choose to claim of me is always yours; nothing is truly mine except my name. I only borrowed this dust.
The Fates, Christian Gullete
Propped on a pillow, sprained and swollen, I press an ice-filled Ziploc to my ankle, wrap the bag in a tea towel.
My Swedish host insists; ice might burn my skin, laid up in a guest room binge-watching a remake of War and Peace.
A picture of their lost son —poster-size—overlooks my sickbed.
I’m here to translate poems about him, but I cannot move.
This mini-series finds scant comfort in fate.
Even gods must obey what’s drawn from Urd’s well, one of three Norns spinning life’s length.
My host’s son died in a tsunami.
His wife survived.
I’m reluctant to ask for help, but after learning to wrap a bandage, I worry about lost time, I start to heal.