Future Tense

Chaïm Soutine, Le poulet plumé /Plucked Chicken (1925), Musée de l'Orangerie, Paris

A hundred years from now,

if anything human still transpires then,

the IDF will be recalled in the same breath,

I suspect, as the Waffen SS.

Some may call this comparison obscene.

I call obscene the video on Instagram

showing a man holding a toddler with no head,

whose name, to which he would have answered in his toddler's way, was Ahmad—which means "Most Praiseworthy."

The bomb that killed him killed

his mother too—mercifully,

you might with a shudder think.

His father and two brothers lived

—the bomb droppers’ targeting,

it seems, was a little bit off that day.

Yes, this poem is obscene, too, I confess.

As any poem would necessarily be that evoked, for instance, Auschwitz and Babi Yar.

The one thing even more obscene, though,

is to pass over such things in silence.

For silence, don't they reckon, is consent?

See Anahid Nersessian, "Speaking the Unspeakable," review of [...] by Fady Joudah, New York Review of Books, October 17, 2024, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2024/10/17/speaking-the-unspeakable-fady-joudah/

Osage

With a Nod to Old Possum

In Amolosh’s book of impractical cats

Osage deserves a special page!

He’s ginger, large, and murderous of paw.

Is he just going through a stage

Driving his poor mistress bats

With horrid proofs of tomcat lore?

What else might he yet have in store,

Flaunting his orange underpants and more?

https://www.idyssey.online/post/osage

Moviegoing

Hiroshima mon amour was released in 1959.

I was just twenty at the time

And only saw it—at the Academy Cinema on Oxford Street—in 1962.

Now, over sixty years on, I’ve found it anew.

Has cinema in the meantime ceased to be an art?

Penelope Gilliatt in The Observer claimed it was no longer one.

(The screenplay for Sunday Bloody Sunday was her movie "moment in the sun.")

Pauline Kael, her great rival, played Devil's Advocate, the contrary part.

Now, naturally, they're both long dead and gone.

How best to put it? On connaît la chanson! †

But Penelope drank herself to death,

while Pauline presently had nothing new to say.‡

† "Same old story!"

,

‡ The New York Times called Kael's announcement in 1991 that she was retiring from regular film-reviewing "earth-shattering."