And I'll read a few sections from the title
poem, "Genius Loci."
This poem is set in Prague and it
moves through different places and scenes
and different periods in history.
But the one motif you have to know about,
if you don't have the book in front of you,
is that it includes little excerpts of poems that were
written by the children who died at Terezín.
Terezín, as many of you know, was a ghetto in Bohemia,
where many Jews and others were taken and made to live before
they were sent to the death camps.
And there were schools there where
the children were taught painting and drawing
and wrote poems.
So almost all of the children who were sent there
were executed or died from the illnesses
and the poor conditions of the ghetto.
But their art survived.
And so there are some fragments of their poems
that scatter through this.
It's a long poem, I'm just going to read some of the sections.
Give you a feel for it, but it's way too long to read here.
So each little section has a kind of subtitle, Genius Loci.
"River."
"Rocks have the oldest knowledge on Earth.
Rivers have the oldest names and determine
where the cities shall be built and what shall be their shape.
The Vltava here, sinuous and slow, so the city
turns and turns back in two and against itself.
Streets winding like folds of the brain,
so that finding your way means getting lost.
Arch, alley, cobblestone, the angels and demons
descended to perch on rooftop and balustrade
enjoying the beauty and soot that only mortals can
construct.
The salmon are lost, gone half a century.
Who counts fish when half-track tanks roll into town.
But the river still does its work, harboring coots, grebes,
and mute swans.
The river keeping its own clock, doing
its commerce of moving silt and gravel, rafting birds
downstream.
Here the weak die easy as a feather.
And when they die, they die forever."