la mouette rose

stay gold

[okbesko]

Fable

You think of homecoming as it is often told: A soldier running home to the smell That bubbles from the iron pot,  To his mother who sits and stirs, Her white hair in a knot.  Having somewhere to go Satisfies you well enough.  It was never about someone. But you do know about warmth --  When she cried on the other end,  You cradled the phone on your shoulder And did not say a word.  After you hung up, you wept into a mirror With two hands on the glass.  Here, the Pacific is a muted glow.  In the Academy, they praise your work  For its fable of scars.  You hold the knife, you drink the sorrows.  You burn your hands making tea.  When something hurts,  you no longer feel rage.  You wipe up the mess.  Outside, dusk is the color of  Violet and ash.  There is a song in Korea that goes,  Beloved who abandons me Shall not walk ten li before her feet hurt.  People sing it when someone dies.  You picture the scene like this: It is summer in Nonsan,  Rain Beats about the treetops.  The persimmons of your childhood  Have turned to mush,  The river will not speak to you.  When you arrive, the village is empty.  Hayun Cho 

[okbesko]

We rip out so much of ourselves to be cured of things faster than we should that we go bankrupt by the age of thirty and have less to offer each time we start with someone new. But to feel nothing so as not to feel anything - what a waste! 

André Aciman, Call Me by Your Name

[okbesko]

Making America White Again

The choices made by white men, who are prepared to abandon their humanity out of fear of black men and women, suggest the true horror of lost status.

[okbesko]

"If you can only be tall because somebody is on their knees, then you have a serious problem. And my feeling is white people have a very, very serious problem, and they should start thinking about what they are going to do about it. Take me out of it." 

[okbesko]

Ada Limón: Why Poetry Helps

But what I do know, and what I am most intimately familiar with, is that poetry helps, that on days when I feel overwhelmingly bullied by the ongoing barrage of vitriol and pain in the world, there is a very real and significant joy that occurs when I return to, or discover, a really good poem. But explaining why it matters, or how it helps, is difficult. It's like trying to explain to someone why walking into a stand of trees helps, or why going to the water helps, or seeing that one kind burst of blue sky among the terrifying scrapers helps.

[okbesko]

the kind of love that i was interested in, that my characters long for intuitively, is the only kind of love that could liberate them from that horrible legacy of colonial violence. i am speaking about decolonial love...is it possible to love one's broken-by-the-coloniality-of-power self in another broken-by-the-colonality-of-power person?

junot díaz, boston globe

[okbesko]

Visit Original Link

그대 보내고 멀리 가을새와 작별하듯 그대 떠나보내고 돌아와 술잔앞에 앉으면 눈물 나누나 그대 보내고 아주 지는 별빛 바라볼 때 눈물 흘러 내리는 못다한 말들 그 아픈 사랑 지울 수 있을까 어느 하루비라도 추억처럼 흩날리는 거리에서 쓸쓸한 사람되어 고개 숙이면 그대 목소리 너무 아픈 사랑은 사랑이 아니였음을 너무 아픈 사랑은 사랑이 아니였음을 어느 하루 바람젖은 어깨 스치어 지나가고 내 지친 시간들이 창에 어리면 그대 미워져 너무 아픈 사랑은 사랑이 아니였음을 너무 아픈 사랑은 사랑이 아니였음을 이제 우리 다시는 사람으로 세상에 오지 말기 그립단 말들도 묻어버리기 못다한 사랑 너무 아픈 사랑은 사랑이 아니였음을

[okbesko]

The Forgotten Dialect of the Heart How astonishing it is that language can almost mean, and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say, God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according to which nation. French has no word for home, and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people in northern India is dying out because their ancient tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost vocabularies that might express some of what we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would finally explain why the couples on their tombs are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated, they seemed to be business records. But what if they are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light. O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper, as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind's labor. Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script is not language but a map. What we feel most has no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses, and birds. Jack Gilbert, from Great Fires, 1999

[okbesko]

[whoismims]

When others construct and model you favorably, it’s easy to let them keep at it, even if they start going off in ways that aren’t immediately comfortable or right. This is the challenge for Asians in America. How do you say no to what seems like a compliment? From the very start we don’t wish to be rude or inconsiderate. So we stay silent in our guises. We misapply what our parents taught us. I’m as guilty as anyone.

Chang-rae Lee, Native Speaker (via whoismims)

[okbesko]

hellebores in the garden

[okbesko]

[okbesko]

[okbesko]

The Chapel Hill Massacre Blues - The New Yorker

Getting blown away by a neighbor just because he’s pissed off at you for some ridiculous reason has become the equivalent of a natural disaster in our country, with our gun culture. It’s got nothing to do with the killer’s ideology, or with the victim’s identity. 

[okbesko]

“If race or gender (or any other important social force) are not part of your interpretive logic—if they’re not part of what you consider the real—then you’re leaving out most of what has made our world our world. This is a long way of saying that it’s not the books you teach, but how you teach them.” Junot Díaz

[okbesko]

despy spam e-mailz & kabob ads 

[okbesko]

We live a strange book, wherein we advance, line by line, without having the right to read the next page before the wind has turned it; but we possess the privilege of returning to a passage we have read before, and seeing it reappear before our eyes. And we do this especially when the wind has risen, and a leaf has trembled under our fingers.

Rilke