Life and What About it:

"Two contradictory impulses meet in poetry..." Louise Steinman

Her sister is in a safe room in Tehran. His mother is in a safe room in Tel Aviv. There are dead schoolgirls in Minab, their desks overturned. Nothing beautiful about these sentences. Nothing ecstatic about these images. The brother and the mother are in separate countries, countries now at war. The siblings are united by concern for the safety of their families. The Iranian schoolgirls will not grow up to make art, write novels, give birth.

The Kurdish woman in the Bielowieza Forest on the border with Poland and Belarus gave birth alone. She died and fellow marooned migrants buried her and her baby. During the Holocaust, many Jews hid in the Bielowieza Forest. Mighty European bison roam the forest, and feral pigs, foxes, and lynx. A Polish naturalist named Simona Kossak lived in the Bielowieza forest in a wooden hut with no electricity for thirty years, her companions a wild boar, several jackdaws, and a lynx. Here comes the ecstasy. The smell of moss in the swamps, a mighty bison disappearing into the shadows of old growth trees. “Ecstasy is being able to accept the entire world. Irony knows the world is tragic and sad,” wrote Zagajewski. I’m not sure what the difference is; though irony questions everything, has doubts, even about poetry. The ecstatic naturalist in the Bielowieza Forest, conversing with her jackdaws. The tragedy of a child in Tehran whose school has been bombed by the US. The Kurdish woman dying of hypothermia in the Bielowieza Forest, a dead infant under a pile of leaves. Hunted people, protected animals. Irony. Storks build their nests on chimneys. 

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