Weekly Edition #19
A Man Doesn’t Have Time in His Life by Yehuda Amichai
A man doesn’t have time in his life
to have time for everything.
He doesn’t have seasons enough to have
a season for every purpose. Ecclesiastes
Was wrong about that.
A man needs to love and to hate at the same moment,
to laugh and cry with the same eyes,
with the same hands to throw stones and to gather them,
to make love in war and war in love.
And to hate and forgive and remember and forget,
to arrange and confuse, to eat and to digest
what history
takes years and years to do.
A man doesn’t have time.
When he loses he seeks, when he finds
he forgets, when he forgets he loves, when he loves
he begins to forget.
And his soul is seasoned, his soul
is very professional.
Only his body remains forever
an amateur. It tries and it misses,
gets muddled, doesn’t learn a thing,
drunk and blind in its pleasures
and its pains.
He will die as figs die in autumn,
Shriveled and full of himself and sweet,
the leaves growing dry on the ground,
the bare branches pointing to the place
where there’s time for everything.
Art by Fairfield Porter
Other poems I read this week: (Click the links to read the full text) "I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox
It is
so much
easier
for me
to tell you this
in a note
rather than
in person" -This Is Just to Say by Julie Vick from William Carlos William Poems for Introverts "Some day people will look back
at the twentieth century and think
How backward they were
the way some look back now
at tribal societies and say
But primitive life was so dirty how
could you keep things clean?
not knowing that tribal people
lived in the Garden of Eden
comparatively speaking
That is they had more humanity
than later people
who traded theirs for technology" -What Are You On? by Ron Padgett "They will punish the poor for being poor.
They will punish the dead for having died.
Nothing can make the dark turn into light
for the cruel majority."
-A Poem for the Cruel Majority by Jerome Rothenberg "It is just our second date, and we sit down on a rock,
holding hands, not looking at each other,
and if I were a bull penguin right now I would lean over
and vomit softly into the mouth of my beloved
and if I were a peacock I’d flex my gluteal muscles to
erect and spread the quills of my cinemax tail." -Romantic Moment by Tony Hoagland
RIP Tony :( "Now I am grownup and literate, and I sit in my chair
as quietly as a fuse
and the jungles are flaming, the under-
brush is charged with soldiers,
the names on the difficult
maps go up in smoke."
-It is Dangerous to Read Newspapers by Margaret Atwood
Recommended Listening:
Wake Me Up Gently + Music To Wake Up To - Lee Rosevere
Asleep on the Train - Tom Rosenthal (what a lovely video!)
Pain and pleasure (The Power of Leverage)
Death in Midsummer - Deerhunter
Links of the Week:
New York Public Library Insta Novels
How Music Was Made On Super Nintendo
Anupama Chopra Interview with Darren Aronofsky | MAMI Masterclass
Why We Sometimes Don't Feel 'In The Moment'
Stories for Ways and Means is a new book that features original “grown up” children’s story collaborations by some of this era’s most compelling storytellers from the worlds of music and contemporary art.
This post is being sent from my room in Alipore, where this project began nearly four years ago.
Happy Diwali to all of you :) May you find the light within. Have a safe, quiet and smoke free one. Also, big hugs to everyone + all the creatures losing their sanity with each loud cracker being burst.
