“On Good and Evil”It is obvious to me
Who the good guys are in this one
And who the bad guys are.
The bad guys are the ones
Who say Israel is a stinking corpse,
And should be wiped off
The face of the earth.That’s not a good guy.
— Sarah Palin (To K. Couric, CBS News, Sept. 25, 2008)
You can read other poems by Palin here.
Poetry Bailout Will Restore Confidence of Readers
Cultural leaders have come together to announce a massive poetry buyout: leveraged and unsecured poems, poetry derivatives, delinquent poems, and subprime poems will be removed from circulation in the biggest poetry bailout since the Victorian era. We believe the plan is a comprehensive approach to relieving the stresses on our literary institutions and markets.
Let there be no mistake: the fundamentals of our poetry are sound. The problem is not poetry but poems. The crisis has been precipitated by the escalation of poetry debt—poems that circulate in the market at an economic loss due to their difficulty, incompetence, or irrelevance.
Enigmas
by Pablo Neruda
You’ve asked me what the lobster is weaving there
with his golden feet? I reply, the ocean knows this.
You say, what is the ascidia waiting for in its transparent
bell? What is it waiting for? I tell you it is waiting for time, like you.
You ask me whom the macrocystis algae hugs in its arms?
Study, study it, at a certain hour, in a certain sea I know.
You question me about the wicked tusk of the narwhal,
and I reply by describing how the sea unicorn with the
harpoon in it dies.
You inquire about the kingfisher’s feathers, which tremble
in the pure springs of the southern tides? Or you’ve found
in the cards a new question touching on the crystal architecture
of a sea anemone, and you’ll deal that to me now?
You want to understand the electric nature of the ocean spines?
The armored stalactite that breaks as it walks? The hook of the
angler fish, the music stretched out in the deep places like a thread
in the water?
I want to tell you the ocean knows this, that life in its jewel boxes
is endless as the sand, impossible to count, pure, and among the
blood-colored grapes time has made the petal hard and shiny,
made the jellyfish full of light and untied its knot, letting its musical
threads fall from a horn of plenty made of infinite mother-of-pearl.
I am nothing but the empty net which has gone on ahead of human
eyes, dead in those darknesses, of fingers accustomed to the triangle,
longitudes on the timid globe of an orange.
I walked around as you do, investigating the endless star,
and in my net, during the night, I woke up naked and
the only thing caught was a fish trapped inside the wind.
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