I wish the world were different, but… here is section 12 of “Mundus et Infans” from People Once Real, 2023
12. SEER In Euripedes’ dour version,Artemis, to whom men prayfor permission to kill wildcreatures of her forests, spirits Iphigenia away to Tauriswhere she makes prophecyof the single thing she knows,denied by all who seek her: children will be sacrificedfor advantage, for victory.What she knows is always so.It’s almost too easy. Almost. Hardest are the armored […]
Another bit of commentary, from Emblem, 2011
BEST PICTURE Everyone agreed, it was the greatest movie of the year,comprised of footage of thousands of separate eventsrun backward, to a sound track of simple birdsong. World leaders who had stormed out of meetingafter meeting expertly retraced their steps, backwardswith a little bounce in contrapuntal rhythmto their previous aggressive certainty. Scene after scene of […]
Again, in heartbreak. This is a poem from Emblem, 2011
After Guernica we believed we’d seen it and seen itclearly: sociopathy and its rationale,the need of the state, protection racketthat gives the bullies not only somethingto do, but something to do withoutaccount, with impunity. Over the doornot the blood of the lamb but the wordWAR: so that now in that house deathis welcome, invited, as […]
Today, some prose, from Love & Fury, 2014
Soon after that I had a dream: I was in a room with a giant map of the world on the wall. I held a long wooden pointer with a black rubber tip like the nuns used to use in school. My father was sitting on a kind of black leather throne with a […]
Could we remember…
Today a short poem from People Once Real, 2023: O There is a moment of such pain, beside an open grave, when someone must hold you up, when the only difference that matters is between the living and the dead: Could we remember, O, what hatred could survive?
Speechless in the face of the Unspeakable
Faced with the enormity of atrocity and feeling useless, the blank page a rubble running with blood, it’s clear to me that I have been writing about this moment for fifty years. In one way or another, the long shadow of war, the threat of it, the terror of it, and the moral failure it […]
PLEASE NOTE
The time for my event at Copper Dog Books in Beverly this Thursday, October 12, with Melanie Brooks, is 6pm, not 7, as I had earlier listed it. Do come! I will be talking with her about her fabulous memoir A Hard Silence: One Daughter Remaps Family, Grief, and Faith When HIV/AIDS Changes It All
RICHARD HOFFMAN 
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