Poem of the Week, by Stephan Pastis
We used to call them the funnies, and I have a memory of sitting on my dad’s big lap while he folded the newspaper in half, then quarters, so he could read them to me. This would have been on a Sunday, because I remember the strips as being full-color. I still read the daily comics, even though most of them are terrible – tired, unfunny, boring, and retreading the same exact ground for decades on end. Once in a while a strip comes along that’s electrifyingly good –Calvin & Hobbes, Boondocks, Cul de Sac–but they don’t last long, usually because their creators have the courage to cancel them when they’ve run out of steam. So I read out of habit, with no expectation of transcendence. But every once in a while one of them pierces my heart, like today’s Pearls Before Swine, by Stephan Pastis.
Tree Stump o’ Deep Thought You’re Not Usually Capable Of, by Stephan Pastis
No one knows what we’re doing here.
Some have faith that they do, but no one knows.
So we are scared.
We are alone.
We end.
And we don’t know where we go.
So we cling to money for comfort.
And we chase awards for immortality.
And we hide in the routine of our days.
But then the night.
Always the night.
Which, when it has you alone, whispers that
maybe none of this has any significance.
So love everyone you’re with.
Because comforting each other
on this journey we neither asked for
nor understand
is the best we can do.
And laugh as much as you can.
Long ago, only fifteen years after they were first discovered by farmers digging a well near Xian, I went to see the terracotta warriors. The memory haunts me. The place wasn’t well organized back then – you sort of stumbled around and then down into the ground, where the clay soldiers, thousands of them, stood at attention. Signs: “No spitting. No taking pictures. No taking artifacts.” The guy we had hired to drive us out to the site bent down at one point and scraped up some clay dust and dropped it right into my pocket. No taking artifacts, I whispered to him, and he shrugged and laughed and said, Now you’ve got some 10,000 year old dirt to take back to America. It was the soldiers that haunt me, though. Their faces, their bodies, their height and weight, the breadth of their shoulders: All different, like looking at an army of real men frozen in time. I stood looking at them, wondering about their lives. This poem by Lisel Mueller makes me remember them all over again.
Alison McGhee 