PARENTS Oh Brother!

Wislawa Szymborska, 1923-2012

Identification

It’s good you came—she says.

You heard a plane crashed on Thursday?

Well so they came to see me

about it.

The story is he was on the passenger list.

So what, he might have changed his mind.

They gave me some pills so I wouldn’t fall apart.

Then they showed me I don’t know who.

All black, burned except one hand.

A scrap of shirt, a watch, a wedding ring.

I got furious, that can’t be him.

He wouldn’t do that to me, look like that.

The stores are bursting with those shirts.

The watch is just a regular old watch.

And our names on that ring,

they’re only the most ordinary names.

It’s good you came. Sit here beside me.

He really was supposed to get back Thursday.

But we’ve got so many Thursdays left this year.

I’ll put the kettle on for tea.

I’ll wash my hair, then what,

try to wake up from all this.

It’s good you came, since it was cold there,

and him just in some rubber sleeping bag,

him, I mean, you know, that unlucky man.

I’ll put the Thursday on, wash the tea,

since our names are completely ordinary—

It Has A Shadow

by Amitav Ghosh

"But he knew that the clarity of that image i his mind was merely the seductive clarity of ignorance; an illusion of knowledge created by a deceptive weight of remembered detail"

"I could think of no answer, except that it is because that state, love, is so utterly alien to that other idea without which we cannot live as human beings- the idea of justice. It is only because love is so profoundly the enemy of justice that our minds, shrinking in horror from its true nature, try to tame it by uniting it with its opposite...if we apply all the metaphors of normality, we shall, in the end, be able to approximate that state of metaphorically."

"We did not know whether we were going home or not. The streets had turned themselves inside out: our city had turned against us."