Tsunami aftermath

Comprehensive, up-to-date information on the impact of the tsunami and how to help are available through a new blog. (Thanks to Watermark for the link.) The Wikipedia already has a great deal of information up as well, including an animation.

As with the big earthquake that devastated Bam, Iran exactly one year ago (to the hour, according to the USGS), I find myself reaching for Artur Lundkvist’s Agadir:

Words also crumbled, broke into pieces, scattered in shreds,
in vain I tried to find some still unharmed and usable
but found only splinters of metaphors, cracked, like a split mirror;
visions floated about, islands adrift in air as white as milk but thicker,
almost like molten, viscous marble,
trees floated about, torn up by the roots and turning slowly upside down upon themselves,
people floated like driftwood, many whole and outwardly unmarred, others cut in half or worse,
floating about in the white with eyes wide-open, hair streaming upward…

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