Volume 78, 2026
DOI: 10.18422/78-2721
© Göttingen University Press

Falling Sonnet XIII.

Eugene Ostashevsky

This army is humane but those people are human.

Human means made of humus. Humus is made by decomposition of plant
and animal matter.

These people have been inhumed but those people have been exhumed.
Such is our humor.

We are a humored people. Today our humor is sanguine.

We like having our funny bone tickled. The funny bone is called the
humerus.

We like having a home. Home means never having to say you’re sorry.

The adjective ‘sorry’ seems to be but is not a relative of the verb ‘sorrow.’

Sorrow sorrow sorrow. Sorrow is for tomorrow.

He found her by a fountain of water in the wilderness and said.

Whence camest thou? And whither wilt thou go? And she said, I flee
from the face of my mistress Sorrow.

And he said to her, return. For a borrowed sorrow shall return tomorrow.

These people are infantile. That army is inhumane but these people.

They are soiled. How did they get that way. They have soiled themselves.

They have inserted themselves in the soil. In sorrow shalt thou eat of
this soil all the days of thy life.

About the author

Eugene Ostashevsky is a poet and translator whose writing is described as “translingual” because of its focus on linguistic multiplicity and interference. His latest poetry collection, The Feeling Sonnets (Carcanet / NYRB Poets, 2022), examines the effects of speaking a non-native language on emotions, parenting, and identity. An earlier book, The Pirate Who Does Not Know the Value of Pi (NYRB Poets, 2017), discusses communication difficulties between pirates and parrots. Translated into German by Uljana Wolf and Monika Rinck as Der Pirat, der von Pi den Wert nicht kennt (KookBooks, 2017), it won the 2019 Preis der Stadt Münster für Internationale Poesie. He first moved to Berlin as a fellow at the 2013 DAAD Berliner Künstlerprogramm.

This work is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International.