Reality Demands - Szymborska 1st 15 lines
Reality demands
we also state the following:
life goes on.
It does so near Cannae and Borodino,
at Kosovo Polje and Guernica.
There is a gas station
in a small plaza in Jericho,
and freshly painted
benches near Bila Hora.
Letters travel
between Pearl Harbor and Hastings,
a furniture truck passes
before the eyes of the lion of Cheronea,
and only an atmospheric front advances
towards the blossoming orchards near Verdun.
Reality is.
Reality is fucked up,
we also need you to know that you've got to deal with it.
Its the same in Guyana, Trinidad, near the antiguan border and even
worse in jamacia and barbados.
There is a basketball court in Brooklyn and a small
corner store where one letter doesnt work
making the sign say Larys instead of Larrys
The mail man here moves on foot hoping the inhabitants dont take
his deliveries offensive.
I think the first draft handles a topic like "reality" because it unexpectedly claims that it will continue even though these horrendous things have happened.
Your draft shocks in the initial line but I don't know that it's entirely effective. You could definitely work with the remaining lines, though: showcase how awful life is all around not through big battles but, rather, the small, annoying details of the day.
Give us more about the Brooklyn basketball court. And keep the idea of Larry's, but take it out of it's prosaic(? prosey?) format. Maybe to play with the repetive/recursivity we've been talking about in class, you can make the mail man's name Larry...? That may be a bit confusing to read but it could always be cut if it's awful. And again, the last line (so far...because this needs to be expanded) is interesting, but it doesn't make sense structurally right now. If could just be a matter of making if "offensively" instead of "offensive," but I definitely want to know what he is delivering that may be offensive and to whom he is delivering them.
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