We Shall Bring Forth New Life

We Shall Bring Forth New Life

It was the night in the basement of a broken building.
Victims of the atomic bomb
Crowded into the candleless darkness,
Filling the room to overflowing --
The smell of fresh blood, the stench of death,
The stuffiness of human sweat, the writhing moans --
When, out of the darkness, came a wondrous voice.
"Oh! The Baby's coming!" it said.
In the basement turned to living hell
A young woman had gone into labor!
The others forgot their own pain in their concern:
What could they do for her, having not even a match
To bring light to the darkness?
Then came another voice: "I am a midwife.
I can help her with the baby."
It was a woman who ha been moaning in pain only moments before.
And so, a new life was born
In the darkness of that living hell.
And so, the midwife died before the dawn
Still Soaked in the blood of her own wounds.
We shall give forth new life!
We shall bring forth new life!
Even to our death.

Sadako Kurihara

"Marginalia"

I was reading "Book Lovers Fear Dim Future for Notes in the Margin" and I thought back to how my friends use to (they still do!) chide me for writing in the margins! And how even my colleagues gave me dirty looks of disgust when I confessed that sometimes, I scribble my thoughts in the margins. But hey, now there's a magnifique article published and written by authoritative source citing people in the book lovers who are lamenting the demise of "notes in the margin".  ah-ha!

Marginalia

Sometimes the notes are ferocious, skirmishes against the author raging along the borders of every page in tiny black script. If I could just get my hands on you, Kierkegaard, or Conor Cruise O'Brien, they seem to say, I would bolt the door and beat some logic into your head. Other comments are more offhand, dismissive - "Nonsense." "Please!" "HA!!" - that kind of thing. I remember once looking up from my reading, my thumb as a bookmark, trying to imagine what the person must look like why wrote "Don't be a ninny" alongside a paragraph in The Life of Emily Dickinson. Students are more modest needing to leave only their splayed footprints along the shore of the page. One scrawls "Metaphor" next to a stanza of Eliot's. Another notes the presence of "Irony" fifty times outside the paragraphs of A Modest Proposal. Or they are fans who cheer from the empty bleachers, Hands cupped around their mouths. "Absolutely," they shout to Duns Scotus and James Baldwin. "Yes." "Bull's-eye." "My man!" Check marks, asterisks, and exclamation points rain down along the sidelines. And if you have managed to graduate from college without ever having written "Man vs. Nature" in a margin, perhaps now is the time to take one step forward. We have all seized the white perimeter as our own and reached for a pen if only to show we did not just laze in an armchair turning pages; we pressed a thought into the wayside, planted an impression along the verge. Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoria jotted along the borders of the Gospels brief asides about the pains of copying, a bird signing near their window, or the sunlight that illuminated their page- anonymous men catching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting than themselves. And you have not read Joshua Reynolds, they say, until you have read him enwreathed with Blake's furious scribbling. Yet the one I think of most often, the one that dangles from me like a locket, was written in the copy of Catcher in the Rye I borrowed from the local library one slow, hot summer. I was just beginning high school then, reading books on a davenport in my parents' living room, and I cannot tell you how vastly my loneliness was deepened, how poignant and amplified the world before me seemed, when I found on one page A few greasy looking smears and next to them, written in soft pencil- by a beautiful girl, I could tell, whom I would never meet- "Pardon the egg salad stains, but I'm in love." Billy Collins