oh tiger, oh bone-breaker, oh tree on fire!

poetry problem was getting out of hand. my main is @nulfaga

[givemearmstopraywith]

rest in power assata shakur

[beguines]

Patrycja Humienik, "The Last Anchoress", We Contain Landscapes

[sourhearts]

[maryolive]

The Days by Jon Anderson

[sivavakkiyar]

two Kannada original poems in translation by AK Ramanujan

[nulfaga]

No, my real fear is not of materialism. If it were true, we—or what we mistake for ‘we’—could get out, get from under the harrow. An overdose of sleeping pills would do it. I am more afraid that we are really rats in a trap. Or, worse still, rats in a laboratory. Someone said, I believe, ‘God always geometrizes.’ Supposing the truth were ‘God always vivisects’?

—from C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed

[apoemaday]

Elegy

by Leonard Cohen

Do not look for him In brittle mountain streams: They are too cold for any god; And do not examine the angry rivers For shreds of his soft body Or turn the shore stones for his blood; But in the warm salt ocean He is descending through cliffs Of slow green water And the hovering coloured fish Kiss his snow-bruised body And build their secret nests In his fluttering winding-sheet.

[ghuroub]

“Look,” Beauford [Delaney] said one day as they walked along Broadway. They had stopped at a crosswalk and he was pointing down at a gutter. “What do you see?”

Baldwin saw nothing but a dirty puddle of water.

“Look again,” Beauford said.

Baldwin looked more closely this time and noticed a reflection of buildings moving like mercury in the gutter’s black water, distorted and radiant. It was a life-changing lesson in light and perception.

“The reality of his seeing,” he later recollected, “caused me to begin to see.”

Now he saw everything anew through Beauford’s eyes. Was a brown leaf really brown? No, not exactly. For he found that if he took the time to stare at it carefully enough, it actually contained many colors. “And though black had been described to me as the absence of light,” he later wrote, “it became very clear to me that if this were true, we would never have been able to see the colour; black; the light is trapped in it and struggles upward, rather like the grass pushing up through the cement. It was humbling to be forced to realize that light fell down from heaven, on everything, on everybody, and that the light was always changing.” Baldwin was learning to see the world around him as an artist sees it—alive with color and shades of difference and detail and unexpected beauty.

—from Baldwin: A Love Story by Nicholas Boggs

[ghuroub]

by Langston Hughes

[ghuroub]

by Langston Hughes

[ghuroub]

Oscar Wilde's Salome / Langston Hughes

[ghuroub]

by Langston Hughes

[nobrashfestivity]

Happy birthday Richard Brautigan

[nulfaga]

Every once in a while someone might be made uneasy by the color of my skin, or an expression on my face, or I might say something to make him uneasy, or I might, arbitrarily (there was no reason to suppose that they wanted me), claim kinship with the Arabs. Then, I was told, with a generous smile, that I was different: le noir Americain est très évolué, voyons! But the Arabs were not like me, they were not 'civilized' like me. It was something of a shock to hear myself described as civilized, but the accolade thirsted for so long had, alas, been delivered too late, and I was fascinated by one of several inconsistencies. I have never heard a Frenchman describe the United States as civilized, not even those Frenchmen who like the States. Of course, I think the truth is that the French do not consider that the world contains any nation as civilized as France. But, leaving that aside, if so crude a nation as the United States could produce so gloriously civilized a creature as myself, how was it that the French, armed with centuries of civilized grace, had been unable to civilize the Arab? I thought that this was a very cunning question, but I was wrong, because the answer was so simple: the Arabs did not wish to be civilized. Oh, it was not possible for an American to understand these people as the French did; after all, they had got on well together for nearly one hundred and thirty years. But they had, the Arabs, their customs, their dialects, languages, tribes, regions, another religion, or, perhaps, many religions—and the French were not raciste, like the Americans, they did not believe in destroying indigenous cultures. And then, too, the Arab was always hiding something; you couldn’t guess what he was thinking and couldn’t trust what he was saying. And they had a different attitude toward women, they were very brutal with them, in a word they were rapists, and they stole, and they carried knives. But the French had endured this for more than a hundred years and were willing to endure it for a hundred years more, in spite of the fact that Algeria was a great drain on the national pocketbook and the fact that any Algerian—due to the fact that Algeria was French, was, in fact, a French départment, and was damn well going to stay that way—was free to come to Paris at any time and jeopardize the economy and prowl the streets and prey on French women. In short, the record of French generosity was so exemplary that it was impossible to believe that the children could seriously be bent on revolution. Impossible for a Frenchman, perhaps, but not for me. I had watched the police, one sunny afternoon, beat an old, one-armed Arab peanut vendor senseless in the streets, and I had watched the unconcerned faces of the French on the café terraces, and the congested faces of the Arabs. Yes, I could believe it: and here it came.

—James Baldwin, from No Name in the Street

[nulfaga]

"I starved in Paris for a while, but I learned something: for one thing, I fell in love. Or, more accurately, I realized, and accepted for the first time that love was not merely a general, human possibility, nor merely the disaster it had so often, by then, been for me—according to me—nor was it something that happened to other people, like death, nor was it merely a mortal danger: it was among my possibilities, for here it was, breathing and belching beside me, and it was the key to life. Not merely the key to my life, but to life itself. [...] In any case, the world changes then, and it changes forever. Because you love one human being, you see everyone else very differently than you saw them before—perhaps I only mean to say that you begin to see—and you are both stronger and more vulnerable, both free and bound. Free, paradoxically, because, now, you have a home—your lover’s arms. And bound: to that mystery, precisely, a bondage which liberates you into something of the glory and suffering of the world."

—James Baldwin, from No Name in the Street

[nulfaga]

Epigraphs from Baldwin's No Name in the Street

[havingapoemwithyou]

Flight by Christian Wiman