Mathematics

 

 

I have envied those   

who make something   

useful, sturdy—

a chair, a pair of boots.

 

Even a soup,

rich with potatoes and cream.

 

Or those who fix, perhaps,

a leaking window:

strip out the old cracked putty,

lay down cleanly the line of the new.

 

You could learn,

the mirror tells me, late at night,   

but lacks conviction.

One reflected eyebrow quivers a little.

 

I look at this

borrowed apartment—

everywhere I question it,

the wallpaper’s pattern matches.

 

Yesterday a woman

showed me

a building shaped

like the overturned hull of a ship,

 

its roof trusses, under the plaster,

lashed with soaked rawhide,

the columns’ marble

painted to seem like wood.

Though possibly it was the other way around?

 

I look at my unhandy hand,

innocent,

shaped as the hands of others are shaped.   

Even the pen it holds is a mystery, really.

 

Rawhide, it writes,   

and chair, and marble.

Eyebrow.

 

Later the woman asked me—

I recognized her then,

my sister, my own young self—

 

Does a poem enlarge the world,   

or only our idea of the world?

 

How do you take one from the other,   

I lied, or did not lie,   

in answer.

 

~ Jane Hirshfield

 

 

 

Australia is in the grip of an anti-Semitic nightmare - spiked

 

Trump’s inauguration revealed the exhaustion of the Democrats - spiked

𝗧𝗵𝗼𝘀𝗲 𝗪𝗶𝗻𝘁𝗲𝗿 𝗦𝘂𝗻𝗱𝗮𝘆𝘀

Sundays too my father got up early

and put his clothes on in the blueblack cold,

then with cracked hands that ached

from labor in the weekday weather made

banked fires blaze. No one ever thanked him.

I'd wake and hear the cold splintering, breaking.

When the rooms were warm, he'd call,

and slowly I would rise and dress,

fearing the chronic angers of that house,

Speaking indifferently to him,

who had driven out the cold

and polished my good shoes as well.

What did I know, what did I know

of love's austere and lonely offices?

- Robert Hayden -

 

“Parents rarely let go of their children, so children let go of them.
They move on. They move away.
The moments that used to define them are covered by
moments of their own accomplishments.

It is not until much later, that
children understand;
their stories and all their accomplishments, sit atop the stories
of their mothers and fathers, stones upon stones,
beneath the water of their lives.”

― Paulo Coelho