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Dana Levin

Maybe

Poetry from NER 42.2 (2021)
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was about all that I could muster—on the question
of whether this world, which I prefer to think of in the past
tense, will flourish—though the first of the last fires hasn’t even
started yet—has it?
Maybe the past tense because it implies
survival—back then plus but now, as if the future
had already happened and you—you!—had made it out
alive—
into midday living room peace—
into two o’clock April light, you and a trailing
coleus—survivor too!—each leaf like a dab
of dried blood
on a scalloped pad
of green . . .
Sirens, in the distance, fading. Sirens
in the distance, above a wreck of ships, perched
where literature starts
with war, and lost men, heroes
enticed to death by birds
with the heads of girls, myth opening its blood—
drenched
wings—
Maybe it wasn’t Future Death hounding me but
Past Ends—not popular Apocalypse but
cracked Atlantis, golem
Ozymandias, all the millions millions really dead
in ruined capitals gone to ash and dream—Maybe it was my
mother’s mother’s
scapegoat trauma blood
keening—
And suddenly—I could see them!—every empire that ever
rose and fell spread out on discs
across an infinite plane called Absolute Now like
records spinning—all playing the same song,
track by track—Ruin
by Better Tech, Ruin by Hubris, Ruin
by Appetite Amok—and from this vantage History
looks like a choice, and I have to ask, now, in the present
tense, Why
choose the past
as the future—

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Jacek Dehnel

Literature & Democracy

Jacek Dehnel

“On the other hand, Polish society—under cultural pressure from the ‘rotten West’ (as Putin puts it)—is rapidly becoming increasingly tolerant. In short: the Church is losing the battle to Netflix.”

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