Homegoing
In the other room, Beulah started whimpering in her sleep. The child had night terrors. They came at unpredictable intervals: one month here, two days there. Some days they were so bad she would wake herself up to the sound of her own screams or she’d have scratches...
My Death
My death waits like a maid at night, At the swinging of the scythe, To gather up the time that passes. My death waits just like a princess At the funeral of my youthfulness, To remind me that time passes. My death waits like Maleficent, On the day that we wed, To...
In Patagonia
I left the Rio Negro and went on south to Port Madryn. A hundred and fifty-three Welsh colonists landed here off the brig Mimosa in 1865. They were poor people in search of a New Wales, refugees from cramped coal-mining valleys, from a failed independence movement,...
You, dead, are so much better than anyone else alive
The brilliant physicist and nobel laureate Richard Feynman lost his wife and high-school sweetheart, Arline, when she was 25, and he 27. This is the letter he wrote to her 16 months after her death. It was sealed and never opened until his own death in 1988. October...
A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings
On the third day of rain they had killed so many crabs inside the house that Pelayo had to cross his drenched courtyard and throw them into the sea, because the newborn child had a temperature all night and they thought it was due to the stench. The world had been sad...