A tanka, while reading the newspapers over lunch:

THE PRIME MINISTER ON ABORTION

If someone submits
a private member’s bill
and people want to,

then I would allow a debate.
It would be silly not to.

Later, as the day darkened, I stood outside watching the view, listening to recently-downloaded jazz, hearing a koala moan from its tree, sipping from a glass of champagne.

I thought that this is one of the highest-order, intensest points in a sentient animal’s life—these nodes of active-minded middle age.

Full of vexation come I, with complaint
Against my child, my daughter…
Thou, thou, Lysander, thou hast given her rhymes,
And interchanged love-tokens with my child:
Thou hast by moonlight at her window sung,
With feigning voice verses of feigning love,…
With cunning hast thou filch’d my daughter's heart,
Turn'd her obedience, which is due to me,
To stubborn harshness…

Her parents’ unwished yoke Georgia’s soul consents not to give sovereignty.

“The shadow of a well-uprooted beard on his paraffin face looked like a question of conscience” (Love in the Time of Cholera).

Ich hab’ ihn erblickt:
ich freue mich auf meinem Tod,
ich habe genug!