This is "Tyranny of the Moths."
You know that sensation when you're
sitting on a screen porch at night or in a tent,
and moths are doing everything to persuade
you to make an opening.
Feathery Moths, flutter around the screen.
Unbearable sounds of summer.
Oblivious tonight that my reading light is not my day,
stout bodies, cut and bounce near a crack in the screen,
and beat inside a paper shade.
Sacraments of a monumental natural presence.
We are drawn forever by the moths to other lights,
to neighbors down the road.
I'll read one more as a tribute in memory
to Paul Celan powerful, imagistic poet, whose
great burden of tragic wisdom served in forced labor,
didn't serve, he was sent to forced labor and survived.
And as we all know, the survivors
have a special burden of memory.
Why me?
It's often a question raised.
And Celan was accused by another concentration camp, work camp
prisoner accused by his wife of plagiarizing her husband's
work.
A total lie and fabrication trying to bring attention
to her and to her husband.
He was not a skilled writer, and Paul Celan was--
it was a terrible envy at a time when any survivor was
terribly vulnerable.
And Celan committed suicide in the Seine River in Paris.
Paul Celan slow death of images, cities, seasons as war.
The unbearable clear sky, sudden storms of memory,
thunderous breaks of lightning that linger in the eye.
Summer teas, fire trace, stone, sorrow, black memory,
no rescues by irony, by prays over silence at the wall.
The wild, restrained by time, and copies of return.
Unwary, un-taught in stories, near the end.
The pleasure of masks, two scenes and wing nothing
is ever lost at night.
Ruby throated hummingbirds inspire
children to survive one more memorable afternoon by flowers.
Brown ants haunt an old man, bodies toad brothers,
the ashes of entire ancient families across a continent
on the portal.
Heavy snow, without a voice, covers the city in whispers.
Rumors of silence, trace of poetry by morning.
A mighty rain over the parapets and pinion bottles.
Black gates of Paris disguised by snow.
Fate shame, not our fate, a patient show of hands.
Snow mounds touch and shape the doors by memory.
Empty rooms, music in the beans, death in a key.
That lonesome turn of eyes at the door, the only sovereignty
Paul Celan inspires our resistance
by state and portrait extremes in the river, dark and cold.
Thank you very much.
[APPLAUSE]