You may have noted many old persons in photos from the Tōhoku ("northeast")region, a geographical area of Japan. It occupies the northeastern portion of Honshū, the largest island of Japan. The population estimate of Tōhoku as of 2008 was 9,708,257. The region consists of six prefectures: Akita, Aomori, Fukushima, Iwate, Miyagi and Yamagata. Sendai ,is the capital city of Miyagi Prefecture, and the largest city in the Tōhoku Region. The city of trees was founded in 1600 by the daimyo Date Masamune. Here, abstracted from “Fourteen elderly die after evacuating Japanese hospital,” by Associated Press medical writer Margie Mason (March 17, 2011), is news:
First came the tsunami, which killed many elderly people unable to flee their homes. Then came the radiation, which forced a hospital to evacuate some 100 older patients. Fourteen did not survive.
The earthquake-spawned tsunami and the nuclear crisis it created have taken a particularly heavy toll on the elderly in this rapidly aging nation. Many have already died and now those who lived are struggling to survive in cold emergency centers or hospitals without electricity or water and shortages of everything from medicine to adult diapers.
Many of the rural, seaside towns hit by the tsunami were in economic decline and had seen an exodus of young people, who moved to major cities for work. That may explain why many of those staying in temporary shelters are elderly. At one, a junior high school in the city of Kesennuma (Miyagi Prefecture), a few ointment tubes, bandages and boxes of aspirin and stomach and cold medicines were stacked on a table at a shelter at a junior high school.
"There's not enough," Keiko Endo, a 58-year-old nurse, said. "It's a problem." Nearby sat a group of elderly men and women, a single kerosene heater doing nothing to warm a large drafty gym in chilly, often snowy weather.
"The consequence of the earthquake, but more the tsunami, has caused the loss of their prescriptions," he said. "Some don't remember what they were taking, how much, and what was the exact prescription. So that makes things a little more complicated."
Read: Martin Fackler’s "For Elderly, Echoes of World War II Horrors" (New York Times, March 15, 2011).
A composition in verse rather than in prose.
Poetry is a literary genre. Two of my favorite American poets, from two different centuries, as different as can be, are Dorothy Rothschild Parker (1893-1967) and Emily Elizabeth Dickinson (1830-1886). Parker is best known for her caustic wit and sharp eye for contemporary urban foibles. Truth is Dickinson’s all. Her mysterious verse and perception hold enormous meaning.
Parker wrote in all genres: poems, short-stories, novels, reviews, screenplays, newspaper columns and reports. Because of the things she said/wrote and how she lived/died, at 74, she is seen variously as clever, witty, offensive, ambitious, unacceptable. Blacklisted in the 1940’s, she left most of her estate to Martin Luther King, Jr.. “Resume” is from her best-selling (unusual for poetry) collection, Enough Rope, published in 1926.
Razors pain you;
Rivers are damp;
Acids stain you;
And drugs cause cramp.
Guns aren’t lawful;
Gas smells awful;
You might as well live.
The truth must dazzle gradually, wrote Dickinson, who lived until age 56. It is so apt that I have borrowed it for the title of my next book, an unpublishable memoir.
Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—
Success in Circuit lies
Too bright for our infirm Delight
The Truth’s superb surprise
As Lightning to the Children eased
With explanation kind
The Truth must dazzle gradually
Or very man be blind—
But Dickinson could also create sweet ditties, like
A Bird came down the Walk—
He did not know I saw—
He bit an Angleworm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw,
And then he drank a Dew
From a convenient Grass—
And then hopped sidewise to the
To let a Beetle pass—
He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all around—
They looked like frightened Beads, I thought—
He stirred his Velvet Head
Like one in danger, Cautious,
I offered him a Crumb
And he unrolled his feathers
And