In 1512, the public got its first look at the artwork on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Carl “billions and billions” Sagan, famed astronomer was born today in 1934.

The poet Anne Sexton  was born on this date in 1928

On this date in 1938, the Nazis looted and burned synagogues and Jewish-owned stores and houses in Germany and Austria on Kristallnacht, the “night of broken glass.”

On this day in 1989, the Berlin Wall fell, and Germans from the East and West danced on top of what was left.

And at 11:35 pm, yours truly entered the world . . . the third (though first surviving) child of Jimmy and Ruthie Humes.

Here are two poems by Anne Sexton.  The first to honor Kristallnacht, and the second one a little less deadly in theme (okay, it’s about death too . . . I must be too aware of my own mortality today).

———-

After Auschwitz

Anger,
as black as a hook,
overtakes me.
Each day,
each Nazi
took, at 8: 00 A.M., a baby
and sautéed him for breakfast
in his frying pan.

And death looks on with a casual eye
and picks at the dirt under his fingernail.

Man is evil,
I say aloud.
Man is a flower
that should be burnt,
I say aloud.
Man
is a bird full of mud,
I say aloud.

And death looks on with a casual eye
and scratches his anus.
Man with his small pink toes,
with his miraculous fingers
is not a temple
but an outhouse,
I say aloud.
Let man never again raise his teacup.
Let man never again write a book.
Let man never again put on his shoe.
Let man never again raise his eyes,
on a soft July night.
Never. Never. Never. Never. Never.
I say those things aloud.

I beg the Lord not to hear.

———-

The Truth the Dead Know

For my mother, born March 1902, died March 1959
and my father, born February 1900, died June 1959

Gone, I say and walk from church,
refusing the stiff procession to the grave,
letting the dead ride alone in the hearse.
It is June. I am tired of being brave.

We drive to the Cape. I cultivate
myself where the sun gutters from the sky,
where the sea swings in like an iron gate
and we touch. In another country people die.

My darling, the wind falls in like stones
from the whitehearted water and when we touch
we enter touch entirely. No one’s alone.
Men kill for this, or for as much.

And what of the dead? They lie without shoes
in their stone boats. They are more like stone
than the sea would be if it stopped. They refuse
to be blessed, throat, eye and knucklebone.

———-

To purchase a book of Anne Sexton’s Poetry, click here.