The NUMBERS that help us REMEMBER . . .

     Born in Lithuania, poet Czesław Miłosz (1911-2004) became fluent in Polish, Lithuanian, Russian, English and French.  He emigrated to the United States (to California) in 1960 and was the 1980 winner of the Nobel Prize in literature.  He was not fluent in the language of mathematics but his poem "The Titanic" -- written in Berkeley in 1985 and excerpted below -- illustrates the power of numbers in poetic description AND the circumstances of which numbers are remembered.

from    The Titanic    by  Czesław Miłosz

Events--catastrophes of which they learned and those others of which they did not want to know. In Johnstown, Pennsylvania, a flood in 1889 took 2,300 lives; 700 persons perished in the San Francisco earthquake of 1906.  Yet they did not notice the earthquake at Messina in Sicily (1908),

Counting those who grieve . . .

Each day's email brings me a Poem-a-Day from Poets.org and today's selection by Matthew Olzmann considers the tragedies from gun-violence in our news too often these days. Numbers are "objective" -- and count those who watch and grieve as well as the guns and shooters -- or are they?  Here is an excerpt from Olzmann's poem, "Letter Beginning with Two Lines by Czesław Miłosz":

          . . .   Did I say
          I had “one” student who

          opened a door and died?
          That’s wrong.

          There were many.
          The classroom of grief