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comment by user-inactivated
user-inactivated  ·  1289 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Pubski: September 16, 2020

Got a text today from my mother that my grandmother had stopped breathing. She's breathing again now, but it's faint and it can't be much longer now. My mother and her sisters had to raise hell to be allowed inside the care home to see her, since visitors are officially not allowed in for two more weeks. She turned 90 last week, I tried to call her but she was unable to speak. I haven't been able to see her since Christmas because 2020, and now I'm 600 km away and will probably not be able to get there in time, I don't even know right now if I'm going to try. Last time I saw her she had forgotten how to read, her greatest joy in life, so together we read poems by Harry Martinson and Stig Dagerman. She only needed me to read a few lines before the rest of the poem came to her from memory. Before I had to leave, she grabbed my hand and recited from memory:

    No one can reinvent the world.

    Quiet your hurricane soul.

    A hand out held may be all you can offer

    to help make a broken man whole.

    But this, friend, is more than enough –

    a star's steady smile through the rain.

    One less human heart bound to hunger

    is a sister or brother we gain.

Edit: Just after I posted this my father called me to tell me she had passed away.





goobster  ·  1288 days ago  ·  link  ·  

What a lovely parting gift she gave you...

I have never seen that poem before, and I will now share it with my family. Thank you.

steve  ·  1289 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Sincere condolences friend. Thank you for sharing this part of your life with us.

kleinbl00  ·  1289 days ago  ·  link  ·  

I would love to know the rest of that poem.

user-inactivated  ·  1288 days ago  ·  link  ·  

That's all of it, and Dagerman never gave it a name. He wrote it for the Red Cross as a plea for compassion in the syndicalist newspaper Arbetaren, for which he wrote over a thousand daily verses from autumn 1943 until the day before his suicide 1954. He was an amazing writer, both verse and prose, and you can sort of see where those verses were coming from in his travelogue German Autumn from 1946:

    People demanded of those who were suffering their way through the German autumn that they should learn from their misfortune. No one thought that hunger is a very bad teacher.
g5w  ·  1288 days ago  ·  link  ·  

My condolences. I was lucky that I was able to be there when my father passed.