Childhood in the Seventies

Michael Weingrad's poem "Childhood in the Seventies" covers Sesame Street to Quincy.

from "A Tormenting Day"

"[W]hen they kill thousands, we say it is painful, inhuman, beastly; and when seven are killed we say almost the same thing. Where is the proportion? [. . .]

Not only have we lost everything else, now we have also lost our sense of proportion. We cry for 1,000 just as for 10,000. Did we then mourn less for the 30,000 annihilated Vilna Jews than for the hundreds of thousands of Warsaw Jews? . . .

As Heine says:

Jewry is not a people—it is a misfortune. We are drowning in that misfortune and forgetting what is white and what is black. Is it any wonder?"

~~ from The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939—1944 by Herman Kruk

Consider the bucket kicked

once again.

"Wilson" by Steve Hussy

"He touched my arm and something switched inside. He was suddenly inside my skin, my fingernails in my brain. He was no worse than other bosses, nothing special, no... he was just HERE. I felt hugely disgusted by everything about him.

"The way his grey eyes didn't blink enough. His plastic hair and the tiny suits he wore. The way he squinted when he fake smiled at me. His satisfied laugh, the noise it made in his throat. The smell of coffee and shit on his breath. His look of untroubled indifference."

~~ from "Wilson" by Steve Hussy in The Savage Kick Literary Magazine: The Early Years, Issues #1, #2, #3, #4

Americans are completely full . . .

"Because he lost money there, I agree with Mr. Kim. Egyptians are full of shit.

"So are Australians, Malaysians, and Indians. For that matter, Africans are full of shit. Especially South Africans. And Americans. Americans are completely full of shit. So full of shit it flows over their borders, filling Canadians and Mexicans with shit. It dribbles all the way down the continent: Nicaraguans and Panamanians are full of shit. It bleeds over the canal: Argentina, Brazilians are full of shit. Even in Antarctica, the penguins. The fucking penguins, I tell Mr. Kim, are totally full of shit."

~~ from "Toothpick Whore" by Peter Wollman in The Savage Kick Literary Magazine: The Early Years, Issues #1, #2, #3, #4

     

pleasantly calm

"It has been calm for a few days, even pleasantly calm. Nothing special has happened. Better and better news comes from the front. It grows clearer by the day that a big breakthrough is coming. The Germans are running away from the Caucasus. The Stalingrad-Rostov and Rzhev-Rostov fronts have bigger successes from one day to the next. Today, as I write these lines, the Reds are 120 kilometers from Kharkov and a few dozen from Rostov. Leningrad is liberated [from the siege], and the Germans are driven out of Kronstadt. Today Leningrad celebrates the liberation of the city. In short, it is calm in the ghetto, even pleasantly calm."

~~ from The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939—1944 by Herman Kruk

Police Will Collect Library Books

"There are subscribers to the library in the ghetto who do not return their borrowed books. Now such 'frozen' readers are put on a special list to be given to the police. The books of such subscribers are recalled by force.

"In especially malevolent cases, people will be punished for keeping library books."

~~ from The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939—1944 by Herman Kruk

a flower

"Outside, it is late autumn. I am not allowed to buy a flower in the street, although I am among the happy ones, who have the right to 'pass.' So I gather beautiful golden oak leaves. Instead of a flower, a leaf, a dried, yellow autumn leaf.

"It is autumn and sad in my soul. . . ."

~~ from The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania: Chronicles from the Vilna Ghetto and the Camps, 1939—1944 by Herman Kruk