Remember that you were strangers* in Egypt.

*slaves

Verses

Excerpt from Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain, 1927 (trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter)--

"This being carried upward into regions where he had never before drawn breath, and where he knew that unusual living conditions prevailed, such as could only be described as sparse or scanty--it began to work upon him, to fill him with a certain concern. Home and regular living lay not only far behind, they lay fathoms deep beneath him, and he continued to mount above them. Poised between them and the unknown, he asked himself how he was going to fare. Perhaps it had been ill-advised of him, born as he was a few feet above sea-level, to come immediately to these great heights, without stopping at least a day or so at some point in between. He wished he were at the end of his journey; for once there he could begin to live as he would anywhere else, and not be reminded of this continual climbing, of the incongruous situation he found himself in. He looked out. The train wound in curves along the narrow pass; he could see the front carriages and the labouring engine vomiting great masses of brown, black, and greenish smoke, that floated away. Water roared in the abysses on the right; on the left, among rocks, dark fir-trees aspired toward a stone-grey sky.The train passed through pitch-black tunnels, and when daylight came again it showed wide chasms, with villages nestled in their depths. Then the pass closed in again; they wound along narrow defiles, with traces of snow in chinks and crannies. There were halts at wretched little shanties of stations; also at more important ones, which the train left in the opposite direction, making one lose the points of the compass. A magnificent succession of vistas opened before the awed eye, of the solemn, phantasmagorical world of towering peaks, into which their route wove and wormed itself: vistas that appeared and disappeared with each new winding of the path. Hans Castorp reflected that they must have got above the zone of shade-trees, also probably of song-birds; whereupon he felt such a sense of the impoverishment of life as gave him a slight attack of giddiness and nausea and made him put his hand over his eyes for a few seconds. It passed. He perceived that they had stopped climbing. The top of the col was reached; the train rolled smoothly along the level valley floor."

Verses

In a poetry class in undergrad, my professor encouraged us to make "collages" out of certain poet's work by skimming a volume, drawing out favored lines, and building them into poems of our own(ish). I was looking for a poem by Olena Kalytiak-Davis to post here, but found that I liked my version best. The following is mixture of us two:

In the new mess of morning light
Jameson
And his two sons
Really
Each man, with a car and a wife
His tie, his waistcoat

The dinner conversation moves,
To my first hotel room
Sure, I’m unnerved, but I’ll listen
I listen to myself
Trying not to sound desperate, but beginning to repeat things

Caesar’s Palace.
The way life keeps splitting itself in two

I’ve left rooms saying: Fuck you
And you, and you
And then, made resolutions in a parked car
In a parking lot
In a strange city that is already too familiar

This strip, this city
My memory
Of myself and someone
Translucent, crazy, awake only at night
The panic of birds
At dawn
The mattress that murmurs from underneath me
Hey precious, listen
You should give up

But you don’t recollect like that