Rehab's Words


Celia Farber's avatar
Celia Farber
Jun 19, 2025
Share

I don’t know her age, and I will never meet her, and if I did, I would probably not tell her that she is a poet, only because, that would be the absolute least of her concerns, having lost everything.

All these children who have lost their mothers, have lost everything.

James Elder reads Rehab’s words here, at the end.

I heard them, and they stayed in my mind for the next 24 hours, and were again on my mind this morning when I woke up, and again now.

They killed my mother.

I used to be beautiful. 

Now I cannot wash;

What do you want me to say?

--Rehab










They killed my mother.
I used to be beautiful.
Now I cannot wash.
What do you want me to say?
—Rehab

Poetry Knowers

There are guardians of poetry, as there are guardians of everything. They have conferences, grants, journals and panel discussions, to discuss what poetry is or is not.

I would be so curious how many of them would stop cold in the corridor upon hearing those four lines from a little girl, not trying to write poetry.

Would they say: “Wait— Read that again!”

Would they arrange an entire panel around the interval, the leap, between line 1 and line 2?

The mystery of poetry.

https://celiafarber.substack.com/

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

In Ancient Rome, Gladiators Rarely Fought to the Death

Image
Kyle Hoekstra 20 Aug 2024 Website Twitter   Image Credit: Those About to Die / NBCU While the bloodshed on film and TV adaptations might persuade us otherwise, leading speaker on  gladiatorial  life and historical consultant Alexander Mariotti insists that death in the ancient Roman arena was “an absolute rarity”. Joining Tristan Hughes on The Ancients, the consultant on Ridley Scott’s  Gladiator  and Amazon Prime’s  Those About to Die  (in which he even has a cameo) explains that deaths, when they happened, more often followed later from injuries. “Combat sports were very violent,” says Mariotti. “And gladiatorial combat is part of that pantheon of sports.” However the use of weapons made it particularly dangerous. “One of the reasons they don’t wear tunics is because the linen or the wool getting stuck in a wound would kill you [from] an infection.” Those About to Die Image Credit: Those About to Die / NBCU “But what we do find from modern forensics ...
Read more

Ginger and Cancer, Osaka University: Starves Tumor Cells

Image
  Medicine Study Finds Compound in Asian Ginger Stops Tumors by Sabotaging Cellular Fat Production Instead of Glycolysis Gianluca Riccio 12th June 2025 Share In traditional Asian medicine, kencur is said to be a “prayer for health.” Now modern science is discovering that it may not have been just a metaphor. The Japanese study on ginger and cancer revealed that this tropical relative of the common ginger has a unique mechanism of action against tumors. Its active ingredient, ethyl p-methoxycinnamate, does more than slow tumor growth; it creates metabolic confusion in cancer cells, causing them to expend energy inefficiently and eventually weaken. Kencur is not the ginger you know Kencur (Kaempferia galanga) belongs to the same family as common ginger, but grows exclusively in the tropical regions of Southeast Asia. Associate Professor  Akiko Kojima Yuasa  and his team of Osaka Metropolitan University  They focused on this exotic relative for a reason: it contains hig...
Read more

Psychology and God

Image
Religion and implicit and explicit language Matthew Follow 12 min read · Mar 14, 2025 Many of the great psychologists have come to the conclusion that religions are true. Not in a literal sense, since this could hardly be proved or disproved by a psychologist, but true in a heuristic sense: in many people, religious belief is a psychologically integrating phenomenon. This should make a lot of sense, the symbols of religion are only “made up” in the sense that they are cultural symbols that emerge in every society in the history of behavioural modernity, and so they reflect the psychology, conscious and unconscious, from which they come. If we take Richard Dawkins’ claim that religions are simply “memes,” it seems also logical to connect their success or failure with their ability to function as — with another term of Dawkins’ — a kind of extended phenotype, something that provides societal cohesion, individual ordering of experience, and integration between the two. Through the lens of...
Read more