Stephanie Strickland's The Red Virgin, a poem of Simone Weil

There Comes

If you do not fight it---if you look, just
look, steadily,
upon it,

there comes
a moment when you cannot do it,
if it is evil;

if good, a moment
when you cannot
not.


Gustave Thibon, How Simone Weil Appeared to Me/3

Kisses and embraces disgusted her.
I never saw her cry.
She loved tobacco.
Of all the things belonging

to material life, tobacco
was the only one
she was almost certain
to accept. This smoke

has been transformed into pages
covered with writing
in my copybooks, she said.
She was counting out one time

the money she had earned
harvesting grapes. I told her
I had no illusions about
the destination

of this sum, whereupon
she replied with disarming
spontaneity, But
I shall certainly also buy a few books.