The Flamekeeper

You asked how to survive in a ruined world. Your answer was a series of confrontations: with experience, with history, with the paradoxes of humanness. You would hunt these, not to eat but to offer as food upon your return. If writing is faith, how can you do it amidst the screams of the tortured, the imprisoned, the babies? You meant to answer, keeping witness with your pen in the faint light of your constant faith in a city without a name, writing a song for the end of the world. In times of crisis, you said, everyone becomes a poet.

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Inspired by the life and work of Czeslaw Milosz.

Author: Stacey C. Johnson

I keep watch and listen, mostly in dark places. View all posts by Stacey C. Johnson