The Burning of Paper Instead of Children
by adrienne rich
"I was in danger of verbalizing my moral existence"-Daniel Berrigan, on trial in Baltimore.*
1.My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, telephones me in a state
of violent emotion. He tells me that my son and his, aged eleven and
twelve, have on the last day of school burned a mathematics textbook in
the backyard. He has forbidden my son to come to his house for a week,
and had forbidden his own son to leave the house during that time. "The
burning of a book," he says, "arouses terrible sensations in me, memo-
ries Hitler; there are few things that upset me so much as the idea of
burning a book."
Back there: the library, walled
with green Britannicas
Looking again
in Durer's Complete Works
for MELANCOLIA, the baffled woman
the crocodiles in Herodotus
the Book of the Dead
the Trial of Jeanne d'ARC so blue
I think, It is her color
And they take the book away
because I dream of her too often
love and fear in a house
knowledge of the oppressor
I know it hurts to burn
(to be continued)
*Berrigan was a Jesuit priest, pacifist and wirter. He and seven others burned several hundred draft recors at a Selective service office...for which he was tried and imprisoned.
"I was in danger of verbalizing my moral existence"-Daniel Berrigan, on trial in Baltimore.*
1.My neighbor, a scientist and art-collector, telephones me in a state
of violent emotion. He tells me that my son and his, aged eleven and
twelve, have on the last day of school burned a mathematics textbook in
the backyard. He has forbidden my son to come to his house for a week,
and had forbidden his own son to leave the house during that time. "The
burning of a book," he says, "arouses terrible sensations in me, memo-
ries Hitler; there are few things that upset me so much as the idea of
burning a book."
Back there: the library, walled
with green Britannicas
Looking again
in Durer's Complete Works
for MELANCOLIA, the baffled woman
the crocodiles in Herodotus
the Book of the Dead
the Trial of Jeanne d'ARC so blue
I think, It is her color
And they take the book away
because I dream of her too often
love and fear in a house
knowledge of the oppressor
I know it hurts to burn
(to be continued)
*Berrigan was a Jesuit priest, pacifist and wirter. He and seven others burned several hundred draft recors at a Selective service office...for which he was tried and imprisoned.