Sandy Solomon: On “Adlestrop”
“Adlestrop” is a poem which, though written in a time of war, takes place during that last, long, beautiful Edwardian summer. The speaker is describing a prewar train journey in full consciousness of the disruption that is soon to follow.
Sandy Solomon — Little Letter to the Future: Die Off
From the new year, dolphins began dying
by the thousands, and those were the ones we saw,
their bodies washed up on the beaches…
Sandy Solomon: Reading Suite Française
“Remove your yellow star.
Head for Switzerland or try
for Nice. Don’t write your will
Don’t imagine what the Germans feel.”
Sandy Solomon: Grammar Lout
Liz thinks we ought to have a day
devoted to apostrophes
In which we add or rub them out
in bands of roving grammar louts.
Sandy Solomon: Vaquitas
The number of vaquitas left was around 30 in early 2019. — . Today, news about small dolphins: Only sixty vaquitas left. Two years back, they numbered some one hundred “individuals,” living … Continue reading
Sandy Solomon: Yalding, Kent
Inside my friends’ house (in the 18thcentury, a shop), I wake to the clank, clank, clank of the blacksmith’s hammer hard against iron, yellow orange, I imagine, from the forge. . … Continue reading
Sandy Solomon: Sophie Scholl from diary, letters, pamphlets
21-year-old Scholl, with her older brother Hans, was guillotined on 22 February 1943 for being part of the White Rose, a group of students arrested for distributing anti-Nazi flyers. — … Continue reading
Sandy Solomon: Poison
The red-faced guard, his scant hair pressed like a wish against his boney pate, sat uniformed at the library gate sternly blocking the un-elect like me. After just a … Continue reading
Sandy Solomon: Disputation
He argued like a champ, best of breed. You gave him his assumptions, you were dead. Or later claim he’d said something daft and he’d repeat verbatim, first to last, … Continue reading
Sandy Solomon: Waiter Taken at Noon, Buenos Aires, 1976
And you, who have not left your country because you must; you, untested by the state’s intent to harm; you, a lucky one, whose only life fattens and lazes on … Continue reading
Sandy Solomon: Little Letter to the Future I
In our time we reckoned our dead in firearms— handguns, rifles, automatic weapons; in much-parsed constitutional clauses; in politicians bought by lobbyists and salesmen. In our time, we objected most … Continue reading
Sandy Solomon: Demonstration, Summer 1992
Serbian men outside her house, her cousins shot, her sister raped repeatedly: the woman from Kosovo told this story as she cupped a candle to shield its fuddled flame. Elbow … Continue reading
Sandy Solomon: Three Pines
From a house in L’Aguiole, France, built in 1911 by a farmer, later a decorated sapeur-pompier in the Great War . Casement swung wide to receive the full moon and … Continue reading
