R.L. Swihart's Blog, page 12

R L Swihart's The White Bird

My fourth book of poetry, The White Bird, is now available at Amazon. Thus far: only the Kindle eBook is available (the paperback is still in the oven but will be out soon). The eBook will be free to download from Friday, March 21 to Tuesday, March 25. Thanks to Jen Webb (Meniscus) for the blurb: She's described The White Bird to a T.

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The Road

Yes you do. You know how to say thank you. The boy sat staring at his plate. He seemed lost. The man was about to speak when he said: Dear people, thank you for all this food and stuff. We know that you saved it for yourself and if you were here we wouldnt eat it no matter how hungry we were and we’re sorry that you didnt get to eat it and we hope that you’re safe in heaven with God.

The Road

They stood on the far shore of a river and called to him. Tattered gods slouching in their rags across the waste. Trekking the dried floor of a mineral sea where it lay cracked and broken like a fallen plate. Paths of feral fire in the coagulate sands. The figures faded in the distance. He woke and lay in the dark.

Cormac McCarthy's The Road

He knew only that the child was his warrant. He said: If he is not the word of God God never spoke (The Road)

From Jenny Erpenbeck's Not a Novel: A Memoir in Pieces

This compulsion for transformation is still with me today, as if the decay of everything in existence were simply the other half of the world, without which nothing could be imagined.

From Judas

“Abravanel was never impressed by nationalism. At all. Anywhere. He was totally unimpressed by a world divided into hundreds of nation-states, like rows and rows of separate cages in a zoo. He didn’t know Yiddish—he spoke Hebrew and Arabic, he spoke Ladino, English, French, Turkish, and Greek—but to all the states in the world he applied a Yiddish expression: goyim naches. Gentiles’ delight. Statehood seemed to him a childish and outdated concept.”

From Judas

The neighbors called him an Arab-lover. They called him Haj Amin, the Grand Mufti. And some people called him a traitor, because he justified, to some extent, the Arab opposition to Zionism and because he fraternized with Arabs. And yet he always insisted on calling himself a Zionist and even claimed he belonged to the small handful of true Zionists who were not intoxicated with nationalism. He described himself as the last disciple of that Zionist visionary Ahad Ha’am. He had known Arabic since his childhood, and he loved to sit surrounded by Arabs in the coffeehouses of the Old City and talk for hours on end. He had close friends among the Muslim and the Christian Arabs. He pointed to a different way. He had a different idea altogether. I argued with him. I stuck to my view that this war was sacred, a war of which it is written, ‘Let the bridegroom go forth of his chamber,’ et cetera. My child, Micha, my only son, Micha, might perhaps not have gone to this war had it not been for his father’s talk of a sacred war: I had brought him up from an early age on tales of the heroic defenders of Tel Hai and Orde Wingate’s Special Night Squads and the brave guards of the Jewish villages and the need for the courageous ancient Hebrew warriors to come back to life. I programmed him. Not just me. All of us.

"Completely Possible" by R L Swihart

 

A bit of a tease: you'll have to go to the Poetry Foundation to read the whole poem (see link below). PF has posted two of my poems now ("Totem" and "Completely Possible," both previously appearing in Quadrant Magazine).
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem...
#rlswihart#poetry#completelypossible#poetryfoundation#previouslypublishedinquadrant

From Judas

Judaism and Christianity, and Islam too, all drip honeyed words of love and mercy so long as they do not have access to handcuffs, grills, dominion, torture chambers, and gallows. All these faiths, including those that have appeared in recent generations and continue to mesmerize adherents to this day, all arose to save us and all just as soon started to shed our blood. Personally I do not believe in world reform. No. I do not believe in any kind of world reform. Not because I consider that the world is perfect as it is—certainly not, the world is crooked and grim and full of suffering—but whoever comes along to reform it soon sinks in rivers of blood.

Amos Oz's Judas

“There’s no such thing as women’s mysterious preferences. Where did you hear such nonsense? I have no idea why couples separate, because I have no idea how they get together in the first place. Or why. In other words, it’s no use asking me about women’s preferences. Or men’s, for that matter. I have no womanly insights to offer you. Maybe Wald—maybe you should talk to him about this. He’s an expert on everything, after all.”