WEBVTT

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Now I'm going to tell
you a little secret.

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It's not going to be
a secret in a minute.

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I've had an interesting
experience during the last six

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months, and this
experience has led

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me to open a lot of
boxes in my house.

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And in those boxes, there
are lots of bits of paper

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and manuscripts and books
and photographs and mementos

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and unfinished poems,
bad drafts, bad poems,

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lots of things.

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I've been battling
cancer for six months

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and going through
the usual things

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that we all go through
when we have to do that.

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And one of the things
that occurred to me

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was, among many
things, I thought,

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I better take care
of my boxes now.

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I better hurry up and do that.

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And so I began opening things,
and I found a lot of notebooks.

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It was rather beautiful
to find these things.

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And so I'm writing a memoir.

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I'm writing really fast now.

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I'm trying to write
poems and prose,

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and so I want to share
one little excerpt

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from a notebook with you.

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This is the last Beirut
poem, and it is from--

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my husband worked
for Time Magazine.

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He was a photographer
stationed in Beirut,

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and I was working for human
rights organizations in Beirut

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at the time.

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And we came under
shell fire for a week,

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so this was a little
bit of that time.

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It's a notebook entry, but
it might be something else.

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I'm not sure.

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So here it is.

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It's very immediate.

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It's not shaped.

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It's from a notebook, 1984.

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"This had once been a
nightclub in Ras Beirut--

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broken piano,
Scheherazade walls,

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women wearing veils but nothing
else, all with the same body.

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All night, then all night,
and the streets iced green

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by blown glass, a rack of
clothes in a fingering wind,

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staccato of an
occasional Kalashnikov,

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the initials of militia.

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This is my worthless identity
card, these my dying batteries.

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That one, drunk, is
tuning his shortwave

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into bits of world, Radio
Frankfurt, radio split, what

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was once Yugoslavia, Radio
Crete, what was Leningrad, no

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New York.

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February 11, the nuclear
weapons on the Sixth Fleet

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ordered to higher readiness.

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Cordite-laced wind, and
the one who would soon

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be chained to a
radiator is making

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notes to himself, Charlie
Glass, ABC News, and the one

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who shared satellite access with
me, Terry Anderson, Associated

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Press.

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And all night, the trees
burned so that birds

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couldn't land in them.

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There was no water
in the pool below us,

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so there could be no face.

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All night, we were shelled
where the sea could be heard.

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Many-storied apartment blocks
flattened into a pastry

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resembling what the French
called mille-feuille.

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Sandbagged hotel,
live telephone,

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taped glass, crates of
gold bullion, Kalashnikovs,

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and cognac, making these
notes by matchlight.

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It is as if I am not
here but in Paris,

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walking under the
sawed-off trees.

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What was worth this, a
prayer call, paradise?"

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