day FOURTEEN HUNDRED and TWENTY SIX

5. singularities

many cultures can succinctly emphasize
their worthy differences
in single words.

for instance, Pāli expresses Buddhism’s
very special precept of Mudita,
meaning Empathetic Joy

while Spanish summarizes a complicated
concept of Falling Out Of Love
in one breath, Desenamorarse.

on another hand, Inuits indigenous to Alaska,
northern Canada and parts of Greenland
now have gazillion sounds for White.



Bonus: Just Ask Jalāl ad-Dīn Muhammad Rūmī (1207-1273) [3]


Curfew earlyed up,
jackboots on firebrands’ necks,
what can word artists

do about menace
of unmarked police state thugs
pummeling citizens?

Here are our new rules:
break your wineglass & fall toward
the glassblower’s breath.

--Gerard Sarnat

Gerard Sarnat won San Francisco Poetry’s 2020 Contest, the Poetry in the Arts First Place Award plus the Dorfman Prize, and has been nominated for handfuls of recent Pushcarts plus Best of the Net Awards. Gerry is widely published including in Buddhist Poetry Review, Gargoyle, Main Street Rag, New Delta Review, Northampton Review, New Haven Poetry Institute, Texas Review, Vonnegut Journal, Brooklyn Review, San Francisco Magazine, The Los Angeles Review, and The New York Times as well as by Harvard, Stanford, Dartmouth, Penn, Chicago and Columbia presses. He’s authored the collections Homeless Chronicles (2010), Disputes (2012), 17s (2014), Melting the Ice King (2016). Gerry is a physician who’s built and staffed clinics for the marginalized as well as a Stanford professor and healthcare CEO. Currently he is devoting energy/ resources to deal with climate justice, and serves on Climate Action Now’s board. Gerry’s been married since 1969 with three kids plus six grandsons, and is looking forward to future granddaughters.