Decomposition
I have a picture I took in Bombay
of a beggar asleep on the pavement:
grey-haired, wearing shorts and a dirty shirt,
his shadow thrown aside like a blanket.
His arms and legs could be cracks in the stone,
routes for the ants’ journeys, the flies’ descents,
Brain-washed by the sun into exhaustion,
he lies veined into stone, a fossil man.
Behind him there is a crowd passingly
bemused by a pavement trickster and quite
indifferent to this very common sight
of an old man asleep on the pavement.
I thought it then a good composition
and glibly called it “The Man in the Street,”
remarking how typical it was of
India that the man in the street lived there.
His head in the posture of one weeping
into a pillow chides me now for my
presumption at attempting to compose
art of his hunger and solitude.
– Zulfikar Ghose
This photograph is not of an emaciated beggar in India but of the home that someone has set up under a scaffolding shed beside an apartment building on Riverside Drive in NYC. The person is not in the picture.
When I was in the emergency room last year having busted my elbow, a nurse…
Most of us have done it at some point or another - accidentally locked ourselves…
Thanks to the #1970 Club, I've spent the spare moments of the past week immersed…
The #1970 Club is starting tomorrow (October 14th) and I'm prepared with some reading and…
How Do They Live with Themselves? This was the question Roger Rosenblatt asked in The…
View Comments
Heart breaking, poem and picture but what a powerful poem. What does it say about us that in today's world, people are still trying to exist like this.
Gwen.
Heart rending, both poem and picture.