i never read poetry until wordpress. i had a few poetry books and tried to to read whitman and liked what i read, but never made it through that entire leaves of grass and i read a few baudelaire poems from this book i got that has the french on one side and english on the other side…..a great idea to help us learn french. i like baudelaire like that poem Anywhere Out of the World and i like Bob over at naive haircuts and owe a great deal to him because it was his poems that inspired me to read more poetry, his poetry (link on sidebar) and now https://maggiemaeijustsaythis.wordpress.com/ wordpress poet and she had a quote a few months back to introduce her poem and it was a quote from Etty Hillesum and i can’t remember the exact quote but it was something to the effect that she wanted to love life even under the worst of conditions. it was much more poetic than that, but anyway, thanks to maggiemae and a local library, i found one of etty’s books, the diaries, written between 1941 and 1943, before she was murdered by nazis at Auschwitz and i told maggiemae i’d write a dedication to the book or a report or a review or something but i’m no good at that so i’ll just include a segment from the book An Interrupted Life: The Diaries of Etty Hillesum and wonder what might have been…and how difficult to find one quote because there are so many. In fact, i keep erasing one and adding another as i’m reading. This is just the last one I read before writing this post. This is the kind of book you can pick any page, any paragraph, any sentence and begin like any diary i guess with every day being so totally different than any other, every moment too. it’s like they say a child is born just about every second and someone else slips away.

“Last night when I cycled home from S., I poured out all my tenderness, all the tenderness one cannot express for a man even when one loves him very, very much, I poured it all out into the great all-embracing spring night. I stood on the little bridge and looked across the water; I melted into the landscape and offered all my tenderness up to the sky and the stars and the water and to the little bridge. And that was the best moment of the day.

And I felt this was the only way of transforming all the many and deep and tender feelings one carries for another into deeds : to entrust them to nature, to let them stream out under the open spring sky and to realise that there is no other way of letting them go.”

Etty Hillesum

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