November 30, 2008
Sunday Poem
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Some People
Wislawa Szymborska
Some people flee some other people.
In some country under a sun
and some clouds.
They abandon something close to all they’ve got,
sown fields, some chickens, dogs,
mirrors in which fire now preens.
Their shoulders bear pitchers and bundles.
The emptier they get, the heavier they grow.
What happens quietly: someone’s dropping from exhaustion.
What happens loudly: someone’s bread is ripped away,
someone tries to shake a limp child back to life.
Always another wrong road ahead of them,
always another wrong bridge
across an oddly reddish river.
Around them, some gunshots, now nearer, now farther away,
above them a plane seems to circle.
Some invisibility would come in handy,
some grayish stoniness,
or, better yet, some nonexistence
for a shorter or a longer while.
Something else will happen, only where and what.
Someone will come at them, only when and who,
in how many shapes, with what intentions.
If he has a choice,
maybe he won’t be the enemy
and will let them live some sort of life.
Poems New and Collected, 1957-1997(Harcourt, Brace & Company, 1998),
translated from the Polish by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh.
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Posted by Jim Culleny at 08:15 AM | Permalink
Comments
Something almost unspeakable happened in New York on Friday, to which this poem or other posts here could apply. I requested one of the numerous articles decribing this criminal violence be posted to no avail.
http://www.nydailynews.com/ny_local/2008/11/28/2008-11-28_worker_dies_at_long_island_walmart_after.html?page=1
It is funny how violence half way around the world goes beyond "news" but when it is one's own backyard only editorial silence is the response. "Worker dies at Long Island Wal-Mart after being trampled in Black Friday stampede." by Joe Gould, Clare Trapasso and Rich Schapiro, New York Daily News, however this incident was reported in most major newspapers throughout the country.
"A Wal-Mart worker died early Friday after an 'out of control' mob of frenzied shoppers smashed through the Long Island store's front doors and trampled him, police said."
"The Black Friday stampede plunged the Vllen Stream outlet into chaos, knocking several employees to the ground and sending others scurrying atop vending machines to avoid the horde."
"When the madness ended, 34 year old Jdimytai Damour was dead and four shoppers, including a woman eight months pregnamt, were injured."
"'He was bum-rushed by 200 people' said Wal-Mart worker Jimmy Overby, 43."
"They took the doors off the hinges. He was trampled and killed in front of me."
"They took me down, too...I didn't know if I was going to live through it. I literally had to fight people off my back."...
"'They pushed him down and walked all over him' Damour's sobbing sister, Danielle, 41, said, 'How could these people do that?'"
"When they were saying they had to leave, that an employee got killed, people were yelling, 'I've been in line since Friday morning!' Cribbs said. 'They kept shopping'."
"In a news conference after the incident, Nassau County police spokesman Lt. Michael Fleming described the crowd as 'out of control' and the scene as 'utter chaos'. He said Wal-Mart did not have enough security on hand."
"Fleming said criminal charges were possible but that it would be difficult to identify individual shoppers in surveilance videos."
If this had been another 9/11 attack, the police would have arrested everyone at the scene, but this is just another shopping day in New York isn't it? Those people who took this innocent life for nothing are no less than degenerate savages with no appreciation for human life. If any of them ever had any "education", higher or otherwise, it was obviously a total failure. Shame on the editors of 3 Quarks for the failure to post this vital story about terrorism at Wal- Mart at Christmas time in New York! There are not enough police in any police department to defend against basic moral violations of moral rules by citizens. This was not a failure of Wal Mart or the police, but total failure of certain degenerate criminal thugs in New YOrk. The only failure of the police was in not arresting everyone involved and bringing the perpetrators to justice.
Posted by: Winfield J. Abbe | Dec 1, 2008 3:26:56 AM
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