Anoushka

“In the make-up of human beings, intelligence counts for more than our hands, and that is our true strength.”
― Ovid, Metamorphoses

“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it, if it were not the earth where the same flowers come up again every spring that we used to gather with our tiny fingers as we sat lisping to ourselves on the grass, the same hips and haws on the autumn hedgerows, the same redbreasts that we used to call ‘God’s birds’ because they did no harm to the precious crops. What novelty is worth that sweet monotony where everything is known and loved because it is known?”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

“God! ... Isn't the sea what Algy calls it: a great sweet mother? The snotgreen sea. The scrotumtightening sea. Epi oinopa ponton. Ah, Dedalus, the Greeks! I must teach you. You must read them in the original. Thalatta! Thalatta! She is our great sweet mother. Come and look.”
― James Joyce, Ulysses

“Write it down. Write it. With ordinary ink

on ordinary paper: they weren’t given any food,

they all died of hunger. All. How many?

It’s a large meadow. How much grass

per head? Write down: I don’t know.

History rounds off skeletons to zero.

A thousand and one is still only a thousand.

That one seems never to have existed:

a fictitious fetus, an empty cradle,

a primer opened for no one,

air that laughs, cries and grows,

stairs for a void bounding out to the garden,

no one’s spot in the ranks.



It became flesh right here, on this meadow.

But the meadow’s silent, like a witness who’s been bought.

Sunny. Green. A forest close at hand,

with wood to chew on, drops beneath the bark to drink –

a view served round the clock,

until you go blind. Above, a bird

whose shadow flicked its nourishing wings

across their lips. Jaws dropped,

teeth clattered.



At night a sickle glistened in the sky

and reaped the dark for dreamed-of loaves.

Hands came flying from blackened icons,

each holding an empty chalice.

A man swayed

on a grill of barbed wire.

Some sang, with dirt in their mouths. That lovely song

about war hitting you straight in the heart.

Write how quiet it is.

Yes.”
― Wislawa Szymborska