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Morning Open Thread: “All Over Newspapers Have Stopped Appearing” [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-06-23
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“If the Party could thrust its hand
into the past and say of this or
that event, it never happened —
that, surely, was more terrifying
than mere torture and death?”
— George Orwell,
1984
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“Don’t wish me happiness. I don’t expect to
be happy all the time ... It’s gotten beyond that
somehow. Wish me courage and strength and
a sense of humor. I will need them all.”
— Anne Morrow Lindbergh,
Gift From the Sea
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Welcome to Morning Open Thread, a daily post
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So grab your cuppa, and join in.
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Thirteen poets born in June,
probing our past, our present
and the mysteries of our future.
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June 22
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1906 – Anne Morrow Lindbergh born and raised in Englewood, New Jersey; American writer; pilot; poet, and diarist. She graduated from Smith College in 1928, and married Charles Lindbergh in 1929. In 1930 she became the first woman awarded a U.S. glider pilot license. In the early 1930s, she was her husband’s radio operator and copilot on multiple exploratory flights and aerial surveys. But after the kidnapping and murder of their 20-month-old son, they moved to Europe in 1935. When they returned to the U.S., they supported the isolationist America First Committee, whose most prominent speakers tended to be pro-fascist. This greatly damaged Lindburgh’s image as an American hero. The Committee was dissolved on December 11, 1941, when Germany declared war on the U.S. after the attack on Pearl Harbor, and the Lindberghs expressed public support for the U.S. war effort. She moved away from politics and wrote poetry and nonfiction, which helped the Lindberghs regain some of their reputation. Her 1955 book Gift from the Sea became a top nonfiction best-seller in the U.S. that year. After suffering a series of strokes in the 1990s, Anne Morrow Lindbergh died at age 94 in February 2001.
Within the Wave
by Anne Morrow Lindbergh
Within the hollow wave there lies a world,
gleaming glass-perfect, rising to be hurled
into a thousand fragments on the sand,
driven by tide’s inexorable hand.
Now in the instant while disaster towers,
I glimpse the land more beautiful than ours,
another sky, more lapis-lazuli,
lit by unsetting suns, another sea
by no horizon bound, another shore,
glistening with shells I never saw before.
Smooth mirror of the present, poised between
the crest’s “becoming” and the foam’s “has-been” –
how luminous the landscape seen across
the crystal lens of an impending loss!
“Within the Wave” from The Unicorn and Other Poems, 1935-1955, © 1993 by Anne Morrow Lindbergh – Pantheon
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1949 – Alice Jones is an American poet, physician, psychoanalyst, and publisher (her birthplace was not disclosed). She practices Psychoanalysis in Berkeley and is a personal and supervising analyst at the San Francisco Center for Psychoanalysis and at the Psychoanalytic Institute of Northern California. She won the first Narrative Magazine Poetry Prize in 2009. Dr. Jones has published five poetry collections, including: Extreme Directions; Gorgeous Mourning; Plunge; and Vault.
In the Morning
by Alice Jones
Like at the pool, trying to haul
myself out, caught in that
transition between air
and water, floundering for a moment
on the concrete lip,
at the alarm,
I surface awkwardly remembering I dreamt
about Peter, I struggle
to wake, and still
hold on to the slippery creature.
In the last night’s phone call,
a stranger answered
in the hospital room, said Peter was
asleep so soundly
he couldn’t be roused.
I decide this is good, that he not
be awake to feel
the flicker of
himself begin to falter, as he starts
to part company with
the body. We used to
curl up together, like children, vying
to be held and he’d always
say—see you
in the morning, right before sinking off
into the solitary pool
of his first dream.
“In the Morning” from The Knot, © 1992 by Alice James – Alice James Books
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1951 – Rosario Murillo born in Managua; Nicaraguan poet, revolutionary, and politician. She was Secretary General of the Sandinista Cultural Workers and Director of Ventana Barricada Cultural, the cultural weekly newspaper of the FSLN. Her husband is Daniel Ortega, so she has been the First Lady of Nicaragua since 2007, Nicaragua’s Vice President (2017-2025), and Co-President of Nicaragua since February 2025.
When your eyes go to bed worn out
by Rosario Murillo
When your eyes go to bed worn out
with so much unending waiting
when the smile once more comes back to us
and vital still between us
by that time
over there beyond the old oak tree
in that street which my dreams keep watch over today
together we will remember
we will talk of the smell of weariness
we will retell each other the war.
“When your eyes go to bed worn out,” translated by Janet Brof, appeared in Bomb, issue #9, in April 1984
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June 23
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1888 – Anna Akhmatova born as Anna Andreyevna Gorenko near Odessa, Ukraine, but grew up in Tsarskoye Selo (now Pushkin) near St. Petersburg. One of the most acclaimed and significant Russian poets of the 20th century, she remained in the USSR even after her work was condemned and censored by Stalinist authorities. She wrote in secret about the horrors of living under Stalin. Requiem, her interconnected poems about Stalin’s Great Purge, is considered her masterwork. Her first husband was executed by the Soviet secret police, and her son spent many years in a Gulag. Requiem, written and rewritten between 1935 and 1961, was published in Germany in 1963. In 1987, Requiem was finally published in Russia, 21 years after her death at age 76.
Requiem from
by Anna Akhmatova
No foreign sky protected me,
no stranger's wing shielded my face.
I stand as witness to the common lot,
survivor of that time, that place.
Instead of a Preface
In the terrible years of the Yezhov terror I spent seventeen months waiting in line outside the prison in Leningrad. One day somebody in the crowd identified me. Standing behind me was a woman, with lips blue from the cold, who had, of course, never heard me called by name before. Now she started out of the torpor common to us all and asked me in a whisper (everyone whispered there):
"Can you describe this?"
And I said: "I can."
Then something like a smile passed fleetingly over what had once been her face.
Dedication
Such grief might make the mountains stoop,
reverse the waters where they flow,
but cannot burst these ponderous bolts
that block us from the prison cells
crowded with mortal woe. . . .
For some the wind can freshly blow,
for some the sunlight fade at ease,
but we, made partners in our dread,
hear but the grating of the keys,
and heavy-booted soldiers' tread.
As if for early mass, we rose
and each day walked the wilderness,
trudging through silent street and square,
to congregate, less live than dead.
The sun declined, the Neva blurred,
and hope sang always from afar.
Whose sentence is decreed? . . . That moan,
that sudden spurt of woman's tears,
shows one distinguished from the rest,
as if they'd knocked her to the ground
and wrenched the heart out of her breast,
then let her go, reeling, alone.
Where are they now, my nameless friends
from those two years I spent in hell?
What specters mock them now, amid
the fury of Siberian snows,
or in the blighted circle of the moon?
To them I cry, Hail and Farewell!
– translation by Stanley Kunitz & Max Hayward
“Requiem” from The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova – Zephyr Press, 2020 edition
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1931 – Colette Inez born Brussels, Belgium; American poet and academic, child of a French woman scholar and a French-American priest, she spent 8 years in a Belgian orphanage before being sent to the U.S. as an “orphan” at the start of WWII. Her adolescence was spent in the foster care of an alcoholic and abusive family in Long Island, New York. She went on from there to graduate from Hunter College in New York City. Her first poetry collection, The Woman Who Loved Worms, was published in 1972. Several of her poems have been set to music by composer David Del Tredici. She taught at several American universities and colleges, including State University of New York, Hunter College, The New School, and Columbia University, where she became a lecturer in the Undergraduate Writing Program (1983-2018). Inez was also a summer writer-in-residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She died at age 86 in January 2018. Among her ten published collections are: Alive and Taking Names; Family Life; Getting Underway; Clemency; and For Reasons of Music. The American Academy of Poets now awards an annual Colette Inez Poetry Prize in her honor.
Poem 094: Slumnight
by Colette Inez
TV gunning down
the hours
serves as sheriff
in a room
where one yawn
triggers off another,
sends time scuffling
into night.
Wars slugged out
on vacant lots
sign an armistice
with sleep.
Turned to a wall,
the children dream
and the moon pulls up
in a squad car.
“Poem 094: Slumlight” from The Woman Who Loved Worms, © 1972, 1991 by Coletee Inez – Carnegie Mellon University Press
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1933 – Robert Sward born to a Jewish family in Chicago, Illinois; American-Canadian poet, novelist, academic, newspaper editor, and food reviewer. He graduated from high school at age 17, and joined the Navy. Sward served during the Korean War aboard a Landing Ship Tank, and became keeper of its library of 1200 paperbacks – the LST took a month to get from Pusan, Korea to San Diego, giving him plenty of time to read. He also began writing poetry, but his first book, Uncle Dog & Other Poems, wasn’t published until 1962. Two more books followed – Kissing the Dancer and Thousand-Year-Old Fiancee. A Fulbright Scholar and Guggenheim Fellow, he taught at Cornell University (1964-1965). In 1966, he was hit by a speeding car the day before he was to start a reading series, and temporarily lost his memory. After working for the Canadian Broadcasting Company and becoming a Canadian citizen, he returned to the U.S. in December 1985. He taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and several universities, including the University of California, Santa Cruz. He published over 20 books, including two novels. Sward died at age 88 in February 2022.
Report from the Front
by Robert Sward
All over newspapers have stopped appearing,
and combatants everywhere are returning home.
No one knows what is happening.
The generals are on the phone with the President,
a former feature writer for the New York Times.
No one knows even who has died, or how,
or who won last night, anything.
Those in attendence on them may,
for all we know, still be there.
A few speak compulsively, telling too much,
having sat asleep in easy chairs.
All over newspapers have stopped appearing.
Words once more, more than ever,
have begun to matter. And people are writing
poetry. Opposing regiments, declares a friend,
are refusing evacuation, are engaged instead
in sonnet sequences; though they understand, he says,
the futility of iambics in the modern world.
That they are concerned with the history and meaning
of prosody. That they persist in their exercises
with great humility and reverence.
“Report from the Front” from The Collected Poems of Robert Sward 1957- 2004 – Black Moss Press, 2004 edition
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June 24
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1842 – Ambrose Bierce born in a log cabin at Horse Cave Creek in Meigs County, Ohio; American short story writer, journalist, poet, and Civil War Union Army veteran. Best known for his lexicon The Devil’s Dictionary and his short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” widely regarded as one of the greatest short stories ever written. Bierce left home at age 15 to become a printer’s devil (apprentice) at The Northern Indianan, an abolitionist newspaper. He enlisted in the 9th Indiana Infantry during the American Civil War. He was in the Battle of Rich Mountain, where he rescued a wounded comrade while under fire. He also fought at the Battle of Shiloh, which inspired several short stories, and a memoir, “What I Saw of Shiloh.” In April 1863, he became a staff officer, but in June 1864, at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, he was wounded, and a traumatic brain injury kept him on furlough for months before returning to action. He was discharged from the army in January 1865. In 1866, he joined an inspection tour of military outposts across the U.S. He resigned when they arrived in San Francisco, and remained in the city for many years. He gained fame as a contributor to The Argonaut, the Overland Monthly, The Californian, and The Wasp, where he was also an editor. He was also a crime reporter for The San Francisco News Letter. Bierce lived in England (1872-1875), then returned to San Francisco, and wrote a column for the San Francisco Examiner. In 1896, he went to Washington DC to expose a plot to quietly pass a bill in Congress that would excuse the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads from repaying $130 million in low-interest government loans made to them to build the transcontinental railroad. Collis Huntington, the main mover behind the plot, confronted Bierce on the Capitol steps and told him to name his price for keeping quiet. Bierce’s answer was published in newspapers across the country: “My price is one hundred thirty million dollars. If, when you are ready to pay, I happen to be out of town, you may hand it over to my friend, the Treasurer of the United States.” In October 1913, Bierce, age 71, went to Ciudad Juárez, to become an observer with Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army. He witnessed the Battle of Tierra Blanca. Bierce’s last known communication, a letter to a friend dated December 26, 1913, said “As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.” He then vanished without a trace, one of the most famous unsolved disappearances in American history.
Egotist
by Ambrose Bierce
Megaceph, chosen to serve the State
In the halls of legislative debate,
One day with his credentials came
To the capitol's door and announced his name.
The doorkeeper looked, with a comical twist
Of the face, at the eminent egotist,
And said: "Go away, for we settle here
All manner of questions, knotty and queer,
And we cannot have, when the speaker demands
To know how every member stands,
A man who to all things under the sky
Assents by eternally voting 'I.'"
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1916 – John Ciardi born in Boston, Massachusetts; American poet, translator, etymologist, editor, and columnist. He was the director of the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in the 1960s, poetry editor for Saturday Review, and recorded commentaries on word histories for National Public Radio. His many poetry collections include Homeward to America; Live Another Day; The Reason for the Pelican (one of several books of verse for children); Echoes: Poems Left Behind; and Stations of the Air. He died of a heart attack at age 69 in 1986.
I Wouldn't
by John Ciardi
There's a mouse house
In the hall wall
With a small door
By the hall floor
Where the fat cat
Sits all day,
Sits that way
All day
Every day
Just to say
"Come out and play"
To the nice mice
In the mouse house
In the hall wall
With the small door
By the hall floor.
And do they
Come out and play
When the fat cat
Asks them to?
Well, would you?
“I Wouldn’t” from The Collected Poems of John Ciardi – by John Ciardi –University of Arkansas Press, 1997 edition
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June 25
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1903 – George Orwell born as Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, British India; English novelist, essayist, journalist, poet, and critic. His father was a Sub-Deputy Opium Agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, overseeing the production and storage of opium for sale to China. His mother brought the children back to England when Eric was a year old. His father returned in 1912. The family, unable to pay the full fees for his schooling, sent him on scholarship to St. Cyprian’s, a boys’ school he hated. He was a King’s Scholar at Eton College (1917-1921), then went Burma to join the India Imperial Police. After police training school in Mandalay, he was appointed as an assistant district superintendent, posted to a frontier outpost, then to a port city near Rangoon. The Burmese were hostile toward the British, but Blair was also alienated from his fellow countrymen because he was interested in Burmese culture, became fluent in Burmese, and spent more time reading than socializing. In 1926, he contracted dengue fever, and returned to England. His novel Burmese Days, and his essay “Shooting an Elephant” came out of his experiences. He lived in London until 1928, then moved to Paris. Back in England in 1929, he wrote reviews and essays, and did private tutoring. By 1932, he was teaching at a boys’ school, but finally found a publisher and chose the pen name of George Orwell. His Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933 to favorable reviews. In 1936, he became a corporal with a contingent of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification in the Spanish Civil War, but became disillusioned with communism. In 1937, wounded in the throat, he was declared medically unfit for service. Back in England, he spent time in a sanatorium. Due to his health, he was rejected for military service during WWII, but joined the British Home Guard, then worked for the BBC on cultural broadcasts to India until 1943, when he began work on Animal Farm, published in 1945. In 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. His lung problems worsened, and he went to a sanatorium. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, he was sent to University College Hospital in London. In January 1950, an artery burst in his lungs, and he died at age 46.
The Pagan
by George Orwell
So here are you, and here am I,
Where we may thank our gods to be;
Above the earth, beneath the sky,
Naked souls alive and free.
The autumn wind goes rustling by
And stirs the stubble at our feet;
Out of the west it whispering blows,
Stops to caress and onward goes,
Bringing its earthy odours sweet.
See with what pride the setting sun
Kinglike in gold and purple dies,
And like a robe of rainbow spun
Tinges the earth with shades divine.
That mystic light is in your eyes
And ever in your heart will shine.
“The Pagan” from George Orwell: the Complete Poetry, edited by Peter Davison, was published in 2015 by Finlay Publishers
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June 26
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1936 – Nancy Willard born in Ann Arbor, Michigan; prolific American novelist, poet, and children’s book author and illustrator. She won the 1982 Newberry Medal for A Visit to William Blake’s Inn. Willard’s many poetry collections include: Skin of Grace; Swimming Lessons; and The Sea at Truro. She died of coronary and pulmonary arrest at age 80 in February 2017.
The Migration of Bicycles
by Nancy Willard
I have seen them flash among cars or lean
so low into the curved wrist of the road
to brake would kill them, yet a whole pack
will stand for hours in the rain
yoked to each other, chained to the rack
till the shops close. I have seen
them balanced on one foot like a clam,
the front wheel turned, at ease. It waits
like a severed centaur, for lover or thief
to give it a running push, shift gears, and ride
off with the Great Bear and the full moon
hooping the earth, winding the spring tide.
"The Migration of Bicycles" from In the Salt Marsh © 2004 by Nancy Willard – Alfred A. Knopf
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June 27
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1872 – Paul Lawrence Dunbar born in Dayton, Ohio, born in Dayton, Ohio, to parents who were slaves before the Civil War; author and poet, one of the first African-American poets who gained national attention and acclaim. He was helped by Orville Wright and the owner of United Brethren Publishing to get his first poetry collection Oak and Ivy published in 1893, and two other Dayton Residents, lawyer Charles Thatcher and psychiatrist Henry Tobey, teamed to publish his second book, Majors and Minors. Thatcher and Tobey also helped him meet an agent, and book public readings. Lyrics of Lowly Life sold well enough for Dunbar to go to England, where he found a British publisher for this book. In 1897, he became a clerk at the Library of Congress. He wrote Folks From Dixie, a short story collection, while working there. But he began to have lung problems which led to tuberculosis, and he left that position in 1898. He continued to write, but died of tuberculosis at age 33. His poetry collections include Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow and Lyrics of the Hearthside.
In Summer
by Paul Laurence Dunbar
Oh, summer has clothed the earth
In a cloak from the loom of the sun!
And a mantle, too, of the skies’ soft blue,
And a belt where the rivers run.
And now for the kiss of the wind,
And the touch of the air’s soft hands,
With the rest from strife and the heat of life,
With the freedom of lakes and lands.
I envy the farmer’s boy
Who sings as he follows the plow;
While the shining green of the young blades lean
To the breezes that cool his brow.
He sings to the dewy morn,
No thought of another’s ear;
But the song he sings is a chant for kings
And the whole wide world to hear.
He sings of the joys of life,
Of the pleasures of work and rest,
From an o’erfull heart, without aim or art;
‘T is a song of the merriest.
O ye who toil in the town,
And ye who moil in the mart,
Hear the artless song, and your faith made strong
Shall renew your joy of heart.
Oh, poor were the worth of the world
If never a song were heard,—
If the sting of grief had no relief,
And never a heart were stirred.
So, long as the streams run down,
And as long as the robins trill,
Let us taunt old Care with a merry air,
And sing in the face of ill.
“In Summer” from The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (republished in 2018 by Adansonia Press)
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1936 – Lucille Clifton born in Depew in northern New York state; prolific American author, poet and educator, Poet Laureate of Maryland (1979-1985); her work celebrates her African-American heritage and chronicles her experiences as a woman. She won the 1984 Coretta Scott King Award for Everett Anderson’s Good-bye; the 2000 National Book Award for Poetry for Blessing the Boats; the 2007 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement; and the 2010 Frost Medal for lifetime achievement. She died of cancer at age 73 in February 2010. Her poetry collections include Two-Headed Woman; Next; Quilting; The Book of Light; Mercy; and Voices.
5/23/67
by Lucille Clifton
R.I.P.
The house that is on fire
pieces all across the sky
make the moon look like
a yellow man in a vei
watching the troubled people
running and crying
Oh who gone remember
now like it was,
Langston gone.
“5/23/67” from The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton, © 1987 by Lucille Clifton – BOA Editions, Ltd.
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June 28
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1887 – Floyd Dell born in Barry, Illinois; American novelist, playwright, poet, journalist, essayist, critic, radical liberal, and feminist; editor of The Masses (1914-1917). In 1917, after the Espionage Act passed, the USPS notified the magazine it was banned from the mails for its outspoken opposition to U.S. involvement in WWI. The Masses challenged the ban and won, but lost on appeal, after the government officially labeled the magazine “treasonable material” in August 1917, issuing charges against its staff for “unlawfully and willfully… obstruct[ing] the recruiting and enlistment of the United States” military. After three days deliberation, the jury was unable to come to a unanimous decision, because one juror was a socialist. Not only did the other eleven jurors demand the prosecutor levy charges against the lone juror, they attempted to drag him out into the street and lynch him. The Judge, given the uproar, declared a mistrial. A second trial also resulted in a deadlocked jury. While no one was convicted, the magazine folded. Floyd Dell wrote Women as World Builders; Intellectual Vagabonage; Upton Sinclair: A Study in Social Protest; Love in the Machine Age; and Homecoming: An Autobiography. After Homecoming was published in 1933, he stopped writing. In 1935, he became a WPA administrator. Though he resumed writing after WWII, he only published a few articles after his retirement from public service in 1947. Floyd Dell died in July 1969, just a few days before what would have been his 83rd birthday.
Apologia
by Floyd Dell
I think I have no soul,
Having instead two hands, sensitive and curious,
And ten subtle and inquisitive fingers
Which reach out continually into the world,
Touching and handling all things.
The fascination of objects!-
The marvelous shapes!
Contours of faces and of dispositions,
Hearts that are tender or rough to the touch,
The smooth soft fabrics in which lives go clothed –
Hope and pity and passion:
All these as I touch them delight and enchant me,
And I think I could go on touching them forever.
But the impulse comes into the nerves of my fingers,
Into the muscles of my hands,
To give back this beauty in some shape
Confessional of joy.
And so I make these toys.
“Apologia” appeared in Poetry magazine’s May 1915 issue
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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[END]
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