Charles Simic Quotes
There are knives that glitter like altars
In a dark church
Where they bring the cripple and the imbecile
To be healed.
There's a woden block where bones are broken,
Scraped clean--a river dried to its bed
Simic, Charles. Dismantling the Silence. George Braziller, 1971.
His comment was particularly critical since he had been an early supporter of the military takeover of the government. See {595250}.
Although we think is grizzley and macabre that throngs of people should attend executions adn percieve the spectators to be gross and insensitive, there was a bizarre kind of morality operating in many counties. At all times in history executions tend to bet botched with terrible and unnecessary suffering inflicted on the victim. When executioners do that with drug coctails or other methods of dispatching death, we tend to make institutional complaints. But as this quotation shows, the executioner was often turned on by the mob and in some cases were actually themselves killed.
Charles Simic is a Serbian American poet and former co-poetry editor of the Paris Review. He received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1990 for The World Doesn't End, and was a finalist of the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for Selected Poems, 1963-1983 and in 1987 for Unending Blues. He was appointed the fifteenth Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress in 2007.
