The poem allegedly was chalked on an alley wall where John Dillinger was shot
Stranger stop and wish me well,
Just say a prayer for my soul in hell.
I was a good fellow, most people said,
Betrayed by a woman dressed all in red
A third of the entire Bureau of Investigations (pre-FBI) budget in 1934 was spent on hunting Dillinger
A new song by Petr Putna, performed with Ondrej Havlik (three time national beatbox champion) at the Vaclav Havel Library opening.
The Prague Daily Monitor has more info:
“The song’s story corresponds to the content of the exhibition that divides Havel’s life into four periods – his capitalist extract, theatre, and his roles of a dissident and president. Of course, I didn’t want to create an ode or a monumental song, but to sum up with humour and in slight hyperbole the life of one of the most important personalities of the Czech history of the 20th century,” Putna says on www.vaclavhavel-knihovna.org.
by Ahmad Fawad Lamay, as quoted in a BBC South Asia report on modern Afghan poets
I’ll ask you in the presence of God,
That in order to go to heaven
Why did you orphan my children?
Why did you widow a sick woman?
Why did you kill the son of an old lady?
Why did you kill the only brother of a weak girl?
by Jill Bialosky
She brought a little of the country into the city
in the pots of impatiens she had planted.
The petals white, pure, the opposite of color.
She had transferred the impatiens from the garden,
digging her hands into soil two parts fibrous loam,
one part leaf mold and peat moss and pushing
the roots into the earth. Despite the quality
of the soil—its rich decomposition of life—
still they would not last. The plants were hardy
and tender, with thick stems and dark green leaves,
the seedpods inside waiting to release, the air
awash in pollen. She looked into the flower
as into a pair of beckoning eyes offering
sustenance independent of a body, free floating
and regenerative and wholly belonging
to what was impossible ever to touch.