Two short poems by John Rety: one on each person’s duty to stand on their own feet, the other on hoping to be understood by people with different understandings.
John Rety’s comic poem compares buying a philosopher with buying cheese, and links eating to the bodily distribution of matter, as in Bertrand Russell’s epigraph.
John Rety’s poem plays on two meanings of ‘occupation’, contrasting military occupiers who exploit with working people, and cites Catullus refusing to flatter Caesar.
