| Poem for Friday |
[Jan. 28th, 2005|12:29 am] |
Shema
By Primo Levi
Translated by Ruth Feldman And Brian Swann
You who live secure
In your warm houses
Who return at evening to find
Hot food and friendly faces:
Consider whether this is a man,
Who labours in the mud
Who knows no peace
Who fights for a crust of bread
Who dies at a yes or a no.
Consider whether this is a woman,
Without hair or name
With no more strength to remember
Eyes empty and womb cold
As a frog in winter.
Consider that this has been:
I commend these words to you.
Engrave them on your hearts
When you are in your house, when you walk on your way,
When you go to bed, when you rise.
Repeat them to your children.
Or may your house crumble,
Disease render you powerless,
Your offspring avert their faces from you.
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![[info]](http://www.deadjournal.com:8080/userinfo.gif) friede posted this poem. I was going to post one from I Never Saw Another Butterfly that was more directly about the ghetto and the camp but this one hit me so hard that I needed it today. I couldn't watch the news -- not because of the Holocaust coverage, but because of the Iraq coverage and, more to the point, the non-coverage of Sudan and places where saying "never again" on Yom Ha'Shoah always makes me feel like an enormous hypocrite. And I don't even want to get started thinking about Israel and Palestine tonight or I'll get too stressed out to sleep. I saw several people posting photos of memorials or flowers, but this is the image that sticks with me...actually this is the current, cleaned-up sanitized image. The actual images are not something I would post without a warning and cut, even though I think they absolutely have to be seen, because I have no words.
Am not ranting, as there is already more than enough of that around here. But I will rave. Surely you know the rules by now from other people's journals: Comment with any subject that you would like me to rave about (I reserve the right to reject certain topics out-of-hand, like what a great job Dubya is doing or why Kathryn Janeway is the greatest female Trek character ever). I don't swear to rave long, but I do swear to rave loud. *g*
Today was pretty quiet, other than lunch with my Mistress who has promised me more lunch and Harry/Draco recs next week if I behave, some necessary shopping in the mall where we met, the usual Thursday carpool insanity and sitting on younger son's head to get the spelling homework done this evening, after which I needed an hour of Dawson's Creek to decompress. Was depressed writing articles about UPN's future for TrekToday -- hadn't realized that Veronica Mars was being considered for cancellation, I thought they'd been talking about bumping it up to CBS because it was so good! Then tonight relatives called (ribby, will you forgive me? The phone was not free until nearly midnight!) Also, you know what a whiny bitch I was two days ago? I should have realized that it was PMS. I can't keep my own schedule straight these days. Ah well, from jenwrites:
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