Updated: Nov 4, 2024
Laika in her flight harness
"Little Laika" died in heaven
on November 3rd in '57—
which is to say, Sputnik II
in low Earth orbit.
Aged between two and three,
she weighed about 5 kg.
A mongrel in a Moscow street,
her name was Кудрявка: "Curly."
She died of hyperthermia,
no kind demise—poor girly,
all by herself in outer space
(of course, most dogs die alone
—as do we all, if truth were known),
God in mercy lend her grace.
November 3, 2O24
Updated: Nov 14, 2024
Our doubts are traitors,
And make us lose the good we oft might win
By fearing to attempt.—Shakespeare, Measure for Measure
Come traitor doubt, you I embrace
In place of hope’s beguiling face,
The greatest traitor of them all
That draws despair up like a pall.
Evaded, we might have a chance
To dance at least a seemly dance,
Not cultivate some monkey creed
In whose foul name all life will bleed.
Where once we sailed the Seven Seas
To find new worlds to plunder, please,
We ought first to have asked the trees
And creatures of our native Earth.
These know full well what apes are worth
Who plot against the realm we've got.
November 2, 2024
Max Jacob by Modigliani (1916)
“The truth is always new.”
—Max Jacob, Le cornet à dés (The Dice Box)†
A Jew from Quimper in Brittany,
Max saw a vision of Christ
And converted (feeling a bit queer).
Picasso was his roommate on the Boulevard Voltaire.
Max taught him French.
In ’44, with his siblings en route to Auschwitz,
Max asked Sacha Guitry to help—
The famous playwright had some pull with the Boche.
They liked his comedies.
He'd saved others before—
Even the Gestapo enjoyed a farce!
Sacha tried, it seems, but failed.
“If it were him,” he said,
“I might have done something!”
[« Si c’etait lui, je pourrais quelque chose ! »]
Then it was Max’s turn.
« Eh bien, c’est moi, » he wrote from a railroad car at the Drancy deportation camp
[« par la complaisance des gendarmes qui nous encadrent. »].
He died a few days later.
† Poetic licence—this is not actually in Max’s collection of prose poems Le cornet à dés (1917), but the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan insisted that Max said it, so I shall imagine it there.
October 31, 2024