Simone Weil 51

A page covered with pencil strokes is not a more beautiful object than the universe; but it is an object cut to our measure. Bryant cuts Radhika's hair, whose orange ends fall on white tile. She and her sister are cut from the same cloth, pushing that metaphor from blood to fabric. Sangha brings me the ginger cat, but she wanders away. If universe is dogma, the pencil cuts with more minute precision. A screeching myna and the gospel-singing thrush run counter-point. What we do while the world ends is our business, not the world's. A saw re-sounds across the condo's green lawn, bleeds into traffic sounds from the highway. At 7 years of age, he says, he thought the world was out to destroy him. Felt it most keenly at 4 a.m. when he ate Frosted Flakes with his dad, then returned to bed. The first version of this poem was about a post-Holocaust sculpture of shit. To each turd its own podium. So particular, and yet so true. What I cannot smell shall give me hope.