Sunday, February 20, 2011

Must Be Shared--So beautiful, so full of pain and hope...

Dave Eggers is one of my favorite writers...he also does some super cool stuff on the side.  One of the amazing things he does is edit the best collection of writing each year--comics, essays, short stories, band names, first lines of poem...lots of amazing hard to find material in a collection called The Best American Nonrequired Reading.  The is a volume that is published each year since 2000 (I think).  A group of high school students help him gather and choose material...they are called 826 Valencia.  The following comes from the 2010 edition, page 40.

This first part is written by Eggers, and then I share the poem that follows.  Damn, I love him and what he brings to my world.

The United States has spent more in the last ten years on war than it has on education in its entire history.  The fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan has claimed the lives of thousands of soldiers and civilians, and disrupted the lives of countless others.  Some of those soldiers and civilians have been writing poems drawn from their harrowing and varied experiences.  The poetry gathered here represents a fraction of that material.


When He Exploded


1.
When he exploded
Nobody fell
Nobody fled
Nobody cared.
So he collected his fragments
And disappeared, ashamed.


2.
The wounds
Grew into enchanted trees.
Whenever the wind shook their branches
Unbelievable fruits fell down.


-Salam Dawai
translated by Soheil Najm

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