I cannot write about art, poetry, beauty today, when those I love have no electricity, meat, coffee, bread. When, one year after the explosion, some people still cover shattered windows with sheets of plastic, knowing in a few months, it will be winter.

Or, perhaps I should write about art, poetry, beauty, because beauty is a necessity, an

“an absolute necessity. I don’t think it’s a privilege or an indulgence, it’s not even a quest. I think it’s almost like knowledge, which is to say, it’s what we were born for … I don’t think we can do without it anymore than we can do without dreams or oxygen.”

Beauty, then. Poetry, but not mine. I cannot. Hemingway, on love and loss and world. He does it better:

“I had an inheritance from my father,
It was the moon and the sun.
And though I roam all over the world,
The spending of it’s never done.”

― Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls