Do not go gentle into that good night,
Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Though wise men at their end know dark is right,
Because their words had forked no lightning they
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright
Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,
And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight
Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
And you, my father, there on the sad height,
Curse, bless me now with your fierce tears, I pray.
Do not go gentle into that good night.
Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
Genny Lin has a unique way of describing life in the North Beach neighborhood of San Francisco. “Winter Place” has a kind of gritty-flashy feel to it, but I especially like the imagery at the end of her poem:
It ain’t so bad
the Coolies reasoned
as they jumped ship only to
sweat in baskets
with pickaxes and dynamite
twenty thousand feet in the Sierras
like wet human laundry
A strange and sometimes violent movie, OldBoy sprinkles dark humor in among the scenes of torture and fist-fights to lighten things up now and again. I couldn’t help but chuckle when a man found three chopsticks on his meal tray and opined (roughly translated):
All I could think now
was that my neighbor next door
ate with one chopstick
The production is Korean, but it’s definitely a Japanese story. Perhaps most interesting, at least from a security perspective, is that the protagonist is suddenly free from solitary confinement after fifteen years but entirely unsure about who or why he was imprisoned in the first place. Like Kafka’s Joseph K, he sets out to figure out what his crime might have been and in the process continuously stumbles into the question of whether to trust anything or anyone.