Rachel Hadas: Holding on to hope is hard, even with the pandemic’s end in sight – wisdom from poets through the ages
As we begin to glimpse what might be the beginning of the end of the pandemic, what does hope mean? It’s hard not to sense the presence of hope, but how do we think of it?
Rachel Hadas: Camilla
Our newborn granddaughter is named Camilla
from Aeneid VII’s warrior maiden,
the speedy runner, skimming over wheat,
scouring the ocean, keeping her feet dry.
Rachel Hadas: Screen and Dream
It wasn’t a dream, but the experience was dreamlike: across the computer screen, one day last week, a photograph of my father, sent by some well-meaning distant acquaintance, flashed without warning. In this black-and-white photo, Moses Hadas is sitting at the desk in his office…
Rachel Hadas: Trying to Get to School
But making my way from A to B
could not be managed easily.
Locked courtyard, blocked alleys, a high wall –
I had to cross or climb them all.
Rachel Hadas: Tiger Stripes
Caught in a beam of morning sun,
massive transitions are going on,
each nation and each generation
vying for who will take possession
of the Hotel Anxiety
Rachel Hadas: Shouldering
The students’ questions pound relentlessly.
Dream father, bird of omen, oh tell me –
the lost, the hungry, the abandoned – who
will take care of them?
Rachel Hadas: February 29, 2020
An extra day, an ordinary day,
predictable even in being extraordinary –
a bonus day in the old dispensation
we couldn’t guess was close to termination.
When did we start to sense the great subtraction?
Rachel Hadas: Shopping Upstairs
Terror, stasis, glints of hope.
Ghosts of evils that came before,
plague and depression, civil war,
take on new life. So here we are.
Rachel Hadas: Do You Believe in Ghosts?
…now is the moment for this query,
when every encounter’s eerie
and we can only recognize
familiar faces by their eyes.
Rachel Hadas:’What goes around comes around,’ or what Greek mythology says about Donald Trump
When I studied and taught Sophocles’ tragedy “Oedipus the King,” the stress was on hubris, irony, blindness. What wasn’t emphasized is that the play was written during and is set in the midst of a plague.
