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Ahasuerus

Goenawan Mohamad

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Dreams

A famous dream—one that marks an era—is told of Baghdad in the 9th century:

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Roaming

WHAT does ‘roaming’ mean? In this time of pandemic isolation, ‘roaming’—which is always interesting, always full of problems, and thus constantly mentioned in literary imagination—is to leave a place and the past. Sometimes radically.

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Year Zero

Goenawan Mohamad

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Reality

“God tirelessly plays dice under laws which he has himself prescribed.”

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Turkey

GOENAWAN MOHAMAD

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Black

Goenawan Mohamad

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Independence

WHEN Chairil Anwar wrote

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August 6

AUGUST 6, 1945.

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Sacrifice

THERE is a story—fictional of course—from a kingdom in the Dakkhana hills of south western India in the first century CE, about Subhrata.

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A poem for Sapardi Djoko Damono

It’s the weekend And we’ve had enough of death

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America, America

WHAT kind of America is it over there in the west, sprawled between paranoia and optimism, between entropy and fantasy, with Donald Trump antagonizing all and sundry, and the cry ‘Let’s make America great again’ sounding like an old cracked record?

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Crusoe

WHO among us still reads Robinson Crusoe? Hopefully no one.

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July 5

THE past is like a Rorschach test: indistinct ink spots on pale paper which we interpret as we wish. These interpretations are used to make assumptions about our psychology.

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Einstein, God…

Galileo analyzed God’s creation using mathematics. Einstein observed it with wonder.

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Two Popes

A pope and a cardinal meet in the gardens of Castel Gandolfo. It is April 2011, a hot day, even at the papal summer residence outside Rome.

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Strange Fruit

Blood on the leaves And blood at the root Black bodies swinging in the Southern breeze Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees —Strange Fruit, sung by Billie Holiday, 1939

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The Decameron

Death changed in Florence in the 14th century. Plague plundered the famous Italian city like a foreign army wreaking wrath.

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Bureaucracy

“Official secrets are as shy as young girls.”—Kafka, in his novel The Castle

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Isolation

Life consists of various kinds of solitude. Every one of us sometimes has (or would like to have, or on the contrary is afraid of having) isolation.