Postcards from Babel

Abstract

Postcards from Babel Samuel Beckett Taylor (bio) Samual Beckett Taylor, poetry Is it coincidence that Warsaw saw the worst of the war?Or that all the shrapnel of the heart lies scattered in the earth?Mostly the world is not happening in our language.Beside a fountain in a hillside park in Catania, Sicily,a boy and girl face each other in a dialect of the sea.As he steps toward her smiling, she steps back, uphill,pushing his hands away without quite letting go, a smilebreaking like a wave across her censure. Mirrored in words,a pantomime, they will walk her step by step uphill backwardsso slowly the curving six-meter path around the fountainit will take five minutes before they disappear into the horizonof what was I saying? The old ladies on a bench outsideSoviet-era towers on the outskirts of Moscow traffic hidememories in sounds strange as acorns, but they mightjust be praising Putin or calling all the young girls whores.We forget, or never knew, there were 300,000 axis soldierson the small island of Sicily in the Summer of 1943.Only in Italian and Spanish does the word for Winter so closelyresemble the word for Hell. And only`in English does the soundused to raise a neighbor's barn also raze a city to the ground.In Poland, the worst of the war was najgorsze z wojna,and could have been anywhere. I walked through Warzawa,its old town rebuilt from 18th century paintings of Belloto(after the Germans turned every block of uprising to rubble)to where the trains parked at the edge of the walled ghetto.In the tenth century, when the exiled Jews first enteredthe fertile valleys of the Vistula, they kept hearing the word"Polin" on everyone's lips, which in their own languagemeant "rest here." And there they would. [End Page 77] Samuel Beckett Taylor samuel beckett taylor is the author of two books of poems, Body of the World and Nude Descending an Empire. He is an associate professor in the MFA program at Wichita State University. Copyright © 2019 The Massachusetts Review, Inc.