Be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books that are now written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.
Rainer Maria Rilke 1904 letter
My Life As A Polish Nun During WWII
by Anna M. Evans
We ran an orphanage in old Gdansk,
which overflowed in nineteen thirty-nine.
Daily, the Germans rolled by in their tanks.
We kept our heads well down and toed the line.
But any child that came here in the night,
no questions asked, was never turned away–
starving, beaten, sick, half-dead with fright,
Christian or Jew–with orphans, who can say?
We had to teach the Jewish ones the creed,
so the Gestapo wouldn’t know our game.
The irony of sowing that small seed,
it wasn’t lost on me, though not our aim.
Children are dear to God, gentile or Jew.
We wanted to save them all; we saved a few.
Something is Coming Toward Us
By Alli Warren
Flaunting in the atrium, ostentatious at the gates
I saw a shooting star thru a window on Alcatraz Ave
& cladding struck up against those who demand
We stomach the stick and tend the commode
They’re selling trees in the paint store! trees in the paint store
Datebook chips in the soft skin of our wrists
On NBC, CNN, and NPR broken windows are weeping
We’ll have 35 apples and shrieking in the thickets
Aloft in the air golden and golden the dial among the mounds
So much is stunted in understanding of what a light can be
They storm the scrimmage line and clear-cut bran and germ
We want the petal unto itself, the unalterable vessel
The arc end of the precipice grows 1.9% annually
What was popular music like before the crisis?
Fourteen Lines 