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In raptures over Chapman’s Homer, Keats forgets

who discovered the Pacific—not stout Cortez

with eagle eyes but Balboa upon a peak in Darien.

Where he withdrew his handkerchief and saw

the death warrant drop of arterial blood,

a fate too deep for tears. Years, I was afraid

someone would refer to you in past tense,

and I’d sink like an animal past the dream

of evolution clean into disrepair. You lived—

this wasn’t that sort of tragedy. More like

a fairground after rain where heavy tents

had gauged large crevices. Franz said the silences

need to be loved, perhaps more than the words

that describe them in time. The dog cries

because it sets the human world in motion,

and I rise to stop the wailing, accusative at times.

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Excerpted from If You Love That Lady: Poems . Copyright (c) 2026 by Maya C. Popa. Used with permission of the publisher, W. W. Norton & Company, Inc. All rights reserved.

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It has been a celebratory week for Final Fantasy fans as the beloved RPG's tenth installment marks the 25th anniversary of its original Japanese release. Developed by Square (then known internationally as SquareSoft), the 10th main entry in the Final Fantasy series launched for PlayStation 2 in Japan on July 19, 2001, before arriving in North America on December 18 of the same year. Entering development in 1999, this particular Final Fantasy game was a landmark release for the franchise , introducing full voice acting, dynamic facial animations, and fully realized 3D character and environment rendering.