hidden pilcrow

My word processor struggles with the name Kyiv.
For some baffling reason, it suggests that I mean Vicky.
At least it does not mind a psychopath, a thug, terror, war,
or tragedy, because otherwise expressing the present reality
would become quite a challenge. The point is, I can quickly
fix my word processor by adding “Kyiv” to the dictionary.
If only it were that painless to fix the reality that drowns
the sovereignty and freedom inherent in this spelling
in the river of blood.

A bully gets bolder over time,
taking advantage of the passivity of decent people.
So now, as we wring our hands over Kiev,
we can only regret that we shrugged at the sight
of the little green men, and what is more,
we had a great time at the Luzhniki afterwards.
Except that this is not the time for vain regrets,
because Kiev’s fate may cast a shadow over Taipei,
and nobody wants to get caught in the domino rally
of the nuclear-armed strong men.

Combattre aux côtés de nos amis polonais pour la défense commune de nos territoires, de nos biens, de nos libertés, c’est une perspective qu’on peut courageusement envisager, si elle doit contribuer au maintien de la paix. Mais mourir pour Dantzig, non!

Marcel Déat, “Mourir pour Dantzig”, L’Œuvre, 4 May 1939

Do you remember these words?
To fight alongside our Polish friends
for the common defence
of our territories,
of our property,
of our liberties,
this is a perspective
that one can courageously envisage,
if it should contribute
to maintaining the peace.
But to die for Danzig, no!

Do you remember what happened next?

Well-mannered people mince their words,
presumably so as not to hurt the feelings
of others. But when one casually mentions
“a pain in the neck,” does it not really refer
to the other end of the spine? Being a pain
would probably be intimidating enough,
so why the patronising neck thing then?

Nobody loves people like us.
Endearingly naive and possibly
just as self-centred, we crave
one more night, like a worn-out
pillow, still comfortably familiar
but not so comfortable any more.
We even forget the moment when
we conveniently started pretending
nothing had happened, because
nobody loves people like us,
not even us.

First, there was the ancient lyrical cadence
of handclapping, which scared the gulls
and attracted the eyes of rare passers-by.
It guided a group of young men through
the sound of the winter sea. Their faces,
carved by the one hundred and twenty-day
wind, burst out with the joyful laughter
of their youth, as they slowly walked away
towards Fittie. But then the poet noticed
a pensive old woman among them
and wondered if she would have given up
everything for the cold granite walls
of an old fishing village if there had been
no cadence warmly embracing her steps.

“Let’s talk about Friday night.”
“You know, it’s only Tuesday morning?”
“That’s exactly my point.”
“What? To face that night over the morning coffee?”
“To withstand all the morning coffees that come out of that night.”

Solitude requires concentration. It all starts the day before, in the evening,
with the effort of setting the alarm clock, until “effort” and “time” stop
being synonyms. The vocabulary soon expands to include a new definition
of “necessity.” And there are many other words that cannot be ignored.
All this to find a better term for a calendar in which the day after yesterday
is not always the day before tomorrow.

“Your dinner is in the microwave.” He stared at an old plastic container
with a misshapen lid, filled with a random mix of vegetables, some fresh
and some canned, and water with a dash of olive oil. Dinner has always
been a challenge. Not that he worried too much about it. After all, it was
just body fuel, a tad of an annoying necessity in the nature of things, like
the yolk-coloured cover of a book in his hand.