excerpt from Fifteen Epigrams in Praise of the Tyrant (c)
1. Twice, three times may fate strike.
Thereafter it’s the numb beating the numb.
2. Take heart, Ovid, No sentence is longer than life.
3. Look, life has been constructed this way
to make sure
you won’t ever again yearn for this world.
4. Hades is an even worse place.
There aren’t any women there.
7. Before you ask for justice -
make sure that you won’t get it, just by accident.
8. The tyrant inspires small poems.
He
doesn’t understand what’s so special about him.
11. When the tyrant is young, everyone waits
for him to come to his senses.
Old. For him to die.
12. It has been proposed that the stars
should be removed from sight.
No one has been against that.
The proposal has already been accepted.
14. How decisively one’s brief moments
of clear insight
are ameliorated by a good, plausible ideology.
- Paavo Haavikko (b. 1931) Finnish