Literature
Reading Three Penny Review #103 last night,
I am stunned at the world in which these writers live
–
no unrelenting war in Iraq (and Afghanistan),
no threats of assassination by fundamentalist preachers
against the president of Venezuela, no catastrophes
in New Orleans or Houston, not a hint of Americans
killed and killing, no America refugees –
for that matter, no struggle over the courts,
the legal system, rights to marry or not, no Patriots’
Act, no Homeland Security, no silencing on tv, not
a hint about racism except for the review of James Brown .
I heard on the radio a woman denied housing for her
family because of a long-ago felony, meaning no New Orleans
refugees in the posh Texas complex, pool, fitness room barred to
refugees –
they asked for her birth certificate, social security
number, fill out the application, and she, without drenched
papers, ever-hopeful, told them the truth –
not that the literary world is absent pain, writers
age, their friends get cancer, they remember better and worse days, but
no barricades and shelters, no floods, no
fire from the sky. Mortality, promised at birth,
preoccupies hot house flowers.
Meanwhile, WW III rages on, the ocean heats up a degree
or two. Cancers erupt on those in the sun.
I wish I lived in the bubble, I certainly tried, as the President
suggested, to avoid the daily papers; no use, the price of
oil insists, refugees fly to Massachusetts, coffins of the Vermont
National Guard come home, Quakers wave rainbow flags near the
supermarket, the young man collecting money for AIDS research says, I
remember your wife, she once took me for coffee in Harvard Square.
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