Sifters

From "On The Quai At Smyra" by Ernest Hemingway:

The strange thing was, he said, how they screamed every night at midnight. I do not know why they screamed at that time. We were in the harbor and they were all on the pier and at midnight they started screaming. We used to turn the searchlight on them to quiet them. That always did the trick. We’d run the searchlight up and down over them two or three times and they stopped it. One time I was senior officer on the pier and a Turkish officer came up to me in a frightful rage because one of our sailors had been most insulting to him, So I told him the fellow would be sent on ship and be most severely punished. I asked him to point him out. So he pointed out a gunner’s mate, most inoffensive chap. Said he’d been most frightfully and repeatedly insulting; talking to me through an interpreter. I couldn’t imagine how the gunner’s mate knew enough Turkish to be insulting. I called him over and said, “And just in case you should have spoken to any Turkish officers.” 

“I haven’t spoken to any of them, sir.”

“I’m quite sure of it,” I said, “but you’d best go on board ship and not come ashore again for the rest of the day.”

Then I told the Turk the man was being sent on board ship and not come ashore again for the rest of the day.”

Then I told the Turk the man was being sent on board ship and would be most severely dealt with. Oh most rigorously. He felt topping about it, Great friends we were.

The worst, he said were the women with the dead babies. You couldn’t get the women to give up their dead babies. They’d have babies dead for six days. Wouldn’t give them up. Nothing you could do about it. Had to take them away finally. Then there was an old lady, most extraordinary case. I told it to a doctor and he said I was lying. We were clearing them off the pier, had to clear off the dead ones, and this old woman was lying on a sort of litter. They said, “Will you have a look at her, Sir?” So I had a look at her and just then she died and went absolutely stiff. Her legs drew up and she drew up from the waist and went quite rigid. Exactly as though she had been dead overnight. She was quite dead and absolutely rigid. I told a medical chap about it and he told me it was impossible. 
They were all out there on the pier and it wasn’t at all like an earthquake or that sort of thing because they never knew about the Turk. They never knew what the old Turk would do. You remember when they ordered us not to come in to take off any amore? I had the wind up when we came in that morning .. He had any amount batteries and could have blown us out of water but we would have blown the town simply to hell. They just fired a few black charges at us as came in. Kemal came down and sacked the Turkish commander. For exceeding his authority or some such thing. He got a bit above himself. It would have been the hell of a mess.

You remember the harbor. There were plenty of nice things floating around in it. That was the only time  in my life I got so I dreamed about things. You didn’t mind the women who were having babies as you did those with the ones. They had them all right. Surprising how few of them died. You just covered them over with something and let them go to it. They’d always pick out the darkest place in the hold to have them. None of them minded anything once they got off the pier.

The Greeks were nice chaps too. When they evacuated they had all their baggage animals they couldn’t take off with them so they just broke their forelegs and dumped them into the shallow water. All those mules with their forelegs broken pushed over into the shallow water. It was all a pleasant business. My word yes a most pleasant business. 

 “On The Quai At Smyrna” published In Our Time, a collection of Ernest Hemingway’s earliest stories. Published originally in 1925 by Charles Scribner’s Son. Hemingway, born in Illinois 1899 went on to become a reporter for the Kansas City Star then ambulance driver in World War I where he was badly wounded. He settled in Paris and during correspondents with Toronto Star, dove into his writing career. Covering such topics as Spanish Civil War and World War II eventually lead Hemingway to the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was inducted into the literary canons and is widely considered one of the greatest writers of our modern era.

Excerpt from William Shakespeare's Hamlet:

Oph: There's rosemary, that's for rememberance. Pray you, love remember. And there is pansies, that's for thoughts.

Laer. A document in madness: thoughts and remembrance fitted. 

Oph: There's fennel for you, and columbines. There's rue for you, and here's some for me. We may call it herb of grace o' Sundays. O, you must wear your rue with a difference. There's a daisy. I would give you some violets, but they withered all when my father died. They say a made a good end - 

Laer: Though and affliction, passion, hell itself, She turns to favour and to prettiness.

"He and She" by William Bulter Yeats

As the moon sidles up

Must she sidle up,

As trips the scared moon

Away must she trip:

‘His light had struck me blind

Dared I stop.’

She sings as the moon sings:

‘I am I, I am I;

The greater grows my light

The further that I fly.’

All creation shivers

With that sweet cry.

Written in 1934 by William Butler Yeats, and published in Selected Poems and Two Plays of William Butler Yeats, New York, First Collier Books Edition. Originally punished in Supernatural Songs. 

Excerpt from William Butler Yeats play, Purgatory written in 1939: 

Boy. What's right and wrong?

        My Grand-dad got the girl and the money.

Old Man. Looked at hin and married him, 

And he squandered everything she had. 

She never knew the worst, because

She died in giving birth to me, 

But now she knows it all, being dead. 

Great people lived and died in this house;

Magistrates, colonels, members of Parliament, 

Captains and Governors, and long ago

Men that had fought at Aughrim and the Boyne. 

Some that had gone on Government work

To London or to India came home to die, 

Or came from London every spring

To look at the may-blossom in the park.

They had loved the trees that he cut down

To pay what he had lost at cards

Or spent on horses, drink and women;

Had loved the house had loved all

The intricate passages of the house

But he killed the house; to kill a house

Where great men grew up, married, died, 

I here declare a capital offense.