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@scatteredprayerbeads
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sandra cisneros
I Don’t Want to Live a Small Life
by Mary Oliver
I don’t want to live a small life. Open your eyes, open your hands. I have just come from the berry fields, the sun kissing me with its golden mouth all the way (open your hands) and the wind-winged clouds following along thinking perhaps I might feed them, but no I carry these heart-shapes only to you. Look how many small but so sweet and maybe the last gift I will bring to anyone in this world of hope and risk, so do Look at me. Open your life, open your hands.
Kissing God Goodbye, June Jordan // I don't want to live a small life, Mary Oliver
ID: pencil drawing of two long-haired people kissing, a sun bursting where their lips meet; one person's hand is holding the other person's head
snippet from June Jordan (in all caps): I am tasting myself / in the mouth of the sun
snippet from Mary Oliver: the sun / kissing me with its golden mouth all the way
Intifada Incantation: Poem #8 for b.b.L. by June Jordan
I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED GENOCIDE TO STOP I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED AFFIRMATIVE ACTION AND REACTION I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED MUSIC OUT THE WINDOWS I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED NOBODY THIRST AND NOBODY NOBODY COLD I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED I WANTED JUSTICE UNDER MY NOSE I SAID I LOVED YOU AND I WANTED BOUNDARIES TO DISAPPEAR
I WANTED NOBODY ROLL BACK THE TREES! I WANTED NOBODY TAKE AWAY DAYBREAK! I WANTED NOBODY FREEZE ALL THE PEOPLE ON THEIR KNEES!
I WANTED YOU I WANTED YOUR KISS ON THE SKIN OF MY SOUL AND NOW YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I STAND DESPITE THE TRILLION TREACHERIES OF SAND YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I HOLD THE LONGING OF THE WINTER IN MY HAND YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME AND I COMMIT TO FRICTION AND THE UNDERTAKING OF THE PEARL
YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME YOU SAY YOU LOVE ME
AND I HAVE BEGUN I BEGIN TO BELIEVE MAYBE MAYBE YOU DO
I AM TASTING MYSELF IN THE MOUTH OF THE SUN
“And so poetry is not a shopping list, a casual disquisition on the colors of the sky, a soporific daydream, or bumpersticker sloganeering. Poetry is a political action undertaken for the sake of information, the faith, the exorcism, and the lyrical invention, that telling the truth makes possible. Poetry means taking control of the language of your life. Good poems can interdict a suicide, rescue a love affair, and build a revolution in which speaking and listening to somebody becomes the first and last purpose to every social encounter." - JUNE JORDAN
it is indeed maundy thursday, so there is no better time to post this sonnet by gay wwi-poet wilfred owen. i love, love the contrast between the cold, dead crucifix and the warm live hand that is kissed directly (more analysis here)
Maundy Thursday
Between the brown hands of a server-lad The silver cross was offered to be kissed. The men came up, lugubrious, but not sad, And knelt reluctantly, half-prejudiced. (And kissing, kissed the emblem of a creed.) Then mourning women knelt; meek mouths they had, (And kissed the Body of the Christ indeed.) Young children came, with eager lips and glad. (These kissed a silver doll, immensely bright.) Then I, too, knelt before that acolyte. Above the crucifix I bent my head: The Christ was thin, and cold, and very dead: And yet I bowed, yea, kissed - my lips did cling. (I kissed the warm live hand that held the thing.)
Solitude by Franny Choi
In the Kitchen Where Mushrooms Were Washed
by Jane Hirshfield
In a kitchen where mushrooms were washed, the mushroom scent lingers.
As the sea must keep for a long time the scent of the whale.
As a person who’s once loved completely, a country once conquered, does not release that stunned knowledge.
They must want to be found, those strange-shaped, rising morels, clownish puffballs.
Lichens have served as a lamp-wick. Clean-burning coconuts, olives. Dried salmon, sheep fat, a carcass of petrel set blazing: light that is fume and abradement.
Unburnable mushrooms are other. They darken the air they come into.
Theirs the scent of having been traveled, been taken.
when i grow up i wanna be a dandelion
[ID: digital illustration dandelion plant. Yellow background, bold graphic design. Text reads "April. The weeds burst up from the gutter. Me too, I pray. Me too. And may God forget to mow the grass." /end ID]
[Image description:
Poem by L. Mantis titled "My coworker asks who's the man"
Susan, are you asking me who buys the flowers and who wears the dress? Or are you wondering who feels like they're allowed to be soft, and who thinks they have to hide their feelings? Or did you mean, who pays for the dates, and who pays to groom themself? Are you asking for permission? Are you asking me to remind you that flowers bloom in every direction, wherever they find sun?
/end description]
We have what we always have had, and more.
We know how to mourn to pray to persist to find resistance in the smallest of spaces to find each other and make homes, alone and together to lay down in the middle of the road and keen with grief and rage and block traffic to crip innovate to do some shit that no one says is possible to do something wild and unexpected under the radar
to keep going.
- Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
The Psych Survivors Know by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha
for the people in the ICE concentration camps
Whisper to each other in the corners Evade capture Run Find a corner There is always one Even if it’s only in your brain You are still human no matter how much they treat you otherwise Maybe you become partially other than human because of what you endure
This does not make you less There is also dignity in feral We have been here before We inhabit these lands We are with you Bathrooms are your friends Even if it’s just five minutes Even if it’s no door I wish we didn’t have to keep whispering enduring Play dead be invisible
disassociate Suck cock for a phone Organize in ways they never know how to see bank on their incompetence their petty squabbles over jurisdiction them distracted by porn on a screen Find each other again Disappear into the sky Memory Dream as long as you need to We have the tech for it
There will be an after Survive for it.
From "Still Dreaming Wild Disability Justice Dreams at the End of the World" in Disability Visibility, 2020
from The Memory Palace, by Nate DiMeo
There was this woman poet in 4th century China called Su Hui (蘇蕙), a child genius who had reportedly mastered Chinese characters by age 3.
At 21 years old, heartbroken by her husband who left her for another woman, she decided to encode her feelings in a structure so intricate, so beautiful, so intellectually staggering that it still baffles scholars to this day.
Came to be known as the Xuanji Tu (璇璣圖) - the "Star Gauge" or "Map of the Armillary Sphere" - it's a 29 by 29 grid of 841 characters that can produce over 4,000 different poems.
Read it forward. Read it backward. Read it horizontally, vertically, diagonally. Read it spiraling outward from the center. Read it in circles around the outer edge. Each path through the grid produces a different poem - all of them coherent, all of them beautiful, all of them rhyming, all of them expressing variations on the same themes of longing, betrayal, regret, and undying love.
The outer ring of 112 characters forms a single circular poem - believed to be both the first and longest of its kind ever written. The interior grid produces 2,848 different four-line poems of seven characters each. In addition, there are hundreds of other smaller and longer poems, depending on the reading method.
At the center a single character she left implied but unwritten: 心 (xin) - "heart." Later copyists would add it explicitly, but in Su Hui's original the meaning was even more beautiful: 4,000 poems, all orbiting the space where her heart used to be.
Take for instance the outer red grid of the Star Gauge. Starting from the top right corner and reading down, you get this seven-character quatrain:
仁智懷德聖虞唐,
貞志篤終誓穹蒼,
欽所感想妄淫荒,
心憂增慕懷慘傷。
In pinyin, it is:
Rén zhì huái dé shèng yú táng,
zhēnzhì dǔ zhōng shì qióng cāng,
qīn suǒ gǎnxiǎng wàng yín huāng,
xīn yōu zēng mù huái cǎn shāng.
Notice how it rhymes? táng / cāng / huāng / shāng
The rough translation in English is: "The benevolent and wise cherish virtue, like the sage-kings Yao and Shun, With steadfast will I swear to the heavens above, What I revere and feel - how could it be wanton or dissolute? My heart's sorrow grows, longing brings only grief."
Now read it from the bottom to the top and you get this entirely different seven-character quatrain:
傷慘懷慕增憂心,
荒淫妄想感所欽,
蒼穹誓終篤志貞,
唐虞聖德懷智仁。
The pinyin:
Shāng cǎn huái mù zēng yōu xīn,
huāngyín wàngxiǎng gǎn suǒ qīn,
cāngqióng shì zhōng dǔzhì zhēn,
táng yúshèngdé huái zhì rén.
It rhymes too: xīn and qīn, zhēn and rén
And the meaning is just as beautiful and coherent: "Grief and sorrow, longing fills my worried heart, Wanton and dissolute fantasies - is that what you revere? I swear to the heavens my constancy is true, May we embody the sage-kings' virtue, wisdom, and benevolence."
That's just 2 poems out of the over 4,000 you can construct from the Xuanji Tu!
At the very center of the grid, the 8 red characters wrapped around the central heart, she "signed" her poem with a hidden message:
詩圖璇玑,始平蘇氏。 "The poem-picture of the Armillary Sphere, by Su of Shiping."
Or reversed:
蘇氏詩圖,璇玑始平。 "Su's poem-picture - the Armillary Sphere begins in peace."
Many scholars, and even emperors, throughout Chinese history have been completely obsessed by Su Hui's puzzle.
For instance, in the Ming dynasty, a scholar named Kang Wanmin (康萬民) devoted his entire life to the poems (kangshiw.com/contents/461/2…), ending up documenting twelve different reading methods - forward, backward, diagonal, radiating, corner-to-corner, spiraling - and extracting 4,206 poems. His book on the subject ("Reading Methods for the Xuanji Tu Poems", 璇璣圖詩讀法) runs to hundreds of pages.
Empress Wu Zetian herself, the legendary woman emperor of the Tang dynasty, wrote a preface to the Xuanji Tu around 692 CE (baike.baidu.com/item/%E7%BB%87…).
Incredibly, there's even far more complexity to the Xuanji Tu than just the poems:
- The name 璇玑 (Xuanji) - Armillary Sphere - is astronomical in meaning and the way the poems can be read mirrors the way celestial bodies orbit around a fixed center. It's a model of the heavens.
- Her original work, with the characters woven on silk brocade, was in five colors (red, black, blue/green, purple, and yellow) which correspond to the Five Elements (五行) - the foundational Chinese philosophical system that explains how the universe operates. So it's also a model of the entire cosmic order according to ancient Chinese philosophy.
- It's also of course deeply mathematical with this 29 x 29 perfect square grid, with sub-squares, lines and rectangles, and a structure which allows for symmetrical reading patterns in all directions
- Last but not least, the content of the poems themselves contain multiple registers. On top of expressing her personal grief and longing for her husband, it's also filled with accusations against the concubine (Zhao Yangtai) he left her for, reflections on politics (with many references to sage-kings) and philosophical reflections.
So the Star Gauge is simultaneously:
- A love letter (expressing personal longing)
- A legal brief (arguing her case against her rival)
- A cosmological model (structured like the heavens)
- A Five Element diagram (encoding the fundamental structure of the world according to ancient Chinese philosophy)
- A mathematical construction with perfect symmetry and precision
And yet, for all this complexity, we should not forget this was all ultimately in service of the simplest human message imaginable: a 21-year-old woman asking the love of her life "come back to me".
Her husband did, eventually. According to what empress Wu Zetian herself wrote in her preface to the Xuanji Tu, when he received Su's brocade he was so "moved by its supreme beauty" that he sent away his concubine and returned to his wife. As the story goes, they lived together until old age.
The heart at the center was filled after all.
[ID: The two pictures from the original tweet, of the poem on an old scroll with a painting of (presumably) Su Hui, and a separate scan of the poem which uses brighter colors to section off the blocks of the poem and make it easier to read. /End ID]
proximity
original image: four panel comic titled "Proximity" by @JNYMFG (op). Each is numbered in the corner, counting from 3 down to 0.
Panel #3 is yellow-toned, with an over-the-shoulder shot of a cheerful man reading the newspaper headline MORE WAR and thinking: "How awful... but I have my own problems!" Panel #2 is orange-toned, showing a distraught woman reading the same headline, and thinking: "But my husband has family there!" Panel #1 is red-toned, showing a pensive man reading the same headline, and thinking: "If I'd stayed, maybe I could have saved them." Panel #0 is entirely blacked out.
reblog image: photo of poem titled The Diameter of the Bomb. Poem reads:
The diameter of the bomb was thirty centimeters and the diameter of its effective range - about seven meters. And in it four dead and eleven wounded. And around them in a greater circle of pain and time are scattered two hospitals and one cemetery. But the young woman who was buried where she came from over a hundred kilometers away enlarges the circle greatly. And the lone man who weeps over her death in a far corner of a distant country includes the whole world in the circle. And I won't speak at all about the crying of orphans that reaches to the seat of God and from there onward, making the circle without end and without God.
Yehuda Amichai (translated from the Hebrew by Yehuda Amichai & Ted Hughes) /end ID
the worst part about grief is that it feels like the world should be horrendously earth shatteringly changed, and to an extent it IS but its also the same. to everyone else it's just another tuesday. the world moves on. you have to go grocery shopping.
Painting by Pieter Bruegel the Elder
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by William Carlos Williams
musée des beaux arts, w.h. auden