Poetry at Sangam
Poetry at Sangam showcases poetry in English and translations as well as essays on poetics and news of new releases.
According to Hallmark, sympathy cards account for six percent of all total sales/tonight/caught in obscurity/she flips through the pages of a yellow book/wrapped in sheets/ buried in texts/ now grass grows deep on his grave yet she thinks the whole world still smells of corpses/ groundbreaking content analysis of American greeting cards finds the words death and dying are never mentioned/ she falls into language two thousand years old, consolations for each wail of grief/ philosopher Seneca advises Marcia, a Roman mother who has lost her son: Move On/in a shoe-box, under her bed, are time-stained cards, inside: Sorry for your loss. One day at a time. Thinking of you. Love/she would like to burn them, but does not dare/dark colors are never used. Pastels are prominent/ Seneca counsels Marcia: the price of birth is glory and loss, violence, outrage and cruelty/ on the greetings card website there are pre-printed messages, to select: My deepest sympathy for your loss. Cherished Forever. Heartfelt Sympathy. Never Forgotten/ Seneca declares: Fortuna is a fickle thing and really we are lucky to be alive/she realizes his words have been read, across the grieving centuries, for two hundred and seventy thousand days/ they are an architecture, a house for her mourning/ her old grief waits, inside the book /on sympathy cards, flowers are the symbol most commonly used, petals a visual aid illustrating the term sorry/ Seneca believes life is a vase that shatters from the smallest shake/ the flowers tumble, the water flows/historically, fragrant funeral flowers were placed on and around the casket of the deceased to perfume the area and ward off the smell of the decaying body/Seneca writes we should not count the lost years, but focus instead on the virtues, the gains and the beauty/ some sympathy cards are left blank for your own special message/ here as the night sky embraces the dawn, she closes the yellow book and calls his name to the sun. The sound of her cry makes the universe tremble /Seneca wrote nothing lasts forever/raising her arms to the sky, she shouts out, there is always something left to love.