the two-faced sinister and saintly woman

[inhernature]

Dilruba Ahmed — Phase One | The On Being Project

A poem about the difficulty — and necessity — of self-forgiveness.

Phase One

Written by Dilruba Ahmed

Read by Pádraig Ó Tuama

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For leaving the fridge open last night, I forgive you. For conjuring white curtains instead of living your life.

For the seedlings that wilt, now, in tiny pots, I forgive you. For saying no first but yes as an afterthought.

I forgive you for hideous visions after childbirth, brought on by loss of sleep. And when the baby woke repeatedly, for your silent rebuke

in the dark, “What’s your beef?” I forgive your letting vines overtake the garden. For fearing your own propensity to love.

For losing, again, your bag en route from San Francisco; for the equally heedless drive back on the caffeine-fueled return.

I forgive you for leaving windows open in rain and soaking library books again. For putting forth

only revisions of yourself, with punctuation worked over, instead of the disordered truth, I forgive you. For singing mostly

when the shower drowns your voice. For so admiring the drummer you failed to hear the drum. In forgotten tin cans,

may forgiveness gather. Pooling in gutters. Gushing from pipes. A great steady rain of olives from branches, relieved

of cruelty and petty meanness. With it, a flurry of wings, thirteen gray pigeons. Ointment reserved for healers and prophets. I forgive you.

I forgive you. For feeling awkward and nervous without reason. For bearing Keats’s empty vessel with such calm you worried

you had, perhaps, no moral center at all. For treating your mother with contempt when she deserved compassion. I forgive you. I forgive

you. I forgive you. For growing a capacity for love that is great but matched only, perhaps, by your loneliness. For being unable

to forgive yourself first so you could then forgive others and at last find a way to become the love that you want in this world.

“Phase One” from Bring Now the Angels by Dilruba Ahmed, © 2020. Aired by permission of University of Pittsburgh Press.

[peelsofpoetry]

I Did Think, Let’s Go About This Slowly by Mary Oliver

I did think, let’s go about this slowly. This is important. This should take some really deep thought. We should take small thoughtful steps.

But, bless us, we didn’t.

[70sscifiart]

Luigi Castiglioni

[platitudeurn]

If we were not so single-minded

about keeping our lives moving,

and for once could do nothing,

perhaps a huge silence

might interrupt this sadness

of never understanding ourselves

Pablo Neruda

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

unencumberedbylogic:

“It is not her interest in me that I miss–But those moments in which we seemed to share some perception, Some feeling, some indefinable experience In which we were both unaware of ourselves.”

—T.S. Eliot, from The Cocktail Party (Mariner Books, 1964)

[discreetwithabellyring-deactiva]

https://thenewinquiry.com/blog/social-media-is-not-self-expression/

[danslecieltoutvabien]

[lifeinpoetry]

Some kisses are not without cruelty. Some things burn more quickly in the ocean. Even now, as we stroll through the empty                  city at dusk, as you lean in,

and I sand your face between my palms, my other self is in the mountains                  watching you, where the distance is safe and the tides are calm.

— Sally Wen Mao, from “Song, with Caution Tape,” Mad Honey Symposium

[lifeinpoetry]

If I could do girlhood again, I’d ask

to be scarier. Less whimpering—more pyromaniac

urges, more flirting with kerosene.

— Sally Wen Mao, from “Drop-kick Aria,” Mad Honey Symposium

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

‘The human soul is infinitely Richer than it is aware of. Its being is so broad and deep That it can never wholly Develop and comprehend Itself in the consciousness. Man is a mystery to Himself, a riddle which will Never be solved in consciousness, For, should he ever attain to The internal intuition Of his whole being he would Be swallowed up and consumed In himself.’ So Leibniz says.

Kenneth Rexroth, from section 1 of “The Dragon and the Unicorn,” The Complete Poems of Kenneth Rexroth, eds. Sam Hamill & Bradford Morrow (Copper Canyon Press, 2004)

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

red leaves and the way humans attach emotion to one little patch of ground and continually go back there in the autumn of our lives to deal with some of the questions that have troubled us […] for which there are really no answers except at this tranquil season of falling leaves watching them a kind of jubilation sometimes mistaken for sadness

Al Purdy, from “Red Leaves,” The More Easily Kept Illusions: The Poetry of Al Purdy, intro. Robert Budde (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2006)

[memoryslandscape-deactivated202]

My habit […] is to peel an orange as I walk—bits of peel in my pockets— pants that smell of Florida—and sometimes approach a car at an intersection— tap on the window—interrupt the driver’s rapture of watching for the green light of release—I’m sworn at by most—flipped-off—or ignored with the same passion I’m ignored by God— but she rolled down her window when I made the motion of a crank with my hand—took the half I offered— the sweetness of a warmer sky— and ate the slices in front of me—with me— as I my equal measure devoured—then left our common life together—the only moment of our eternal bond—the link that will play out as a long string between us, no matter what pleasure is advanced by other days—we looked at each other and ate bits of a world making the most of the sun—of the light that is blowing away into nothingness— the moment so small, so precise, it was easy to love everything we knew of each other—I had a gift and she had a desire to accept that gift—we were whole— we were cured—had advanced the cause of being ever so slightly along the path it wanders with us, little bits of dust caught in its hair.

Bob Hicok, “Sweet,” New England Review (vol. 37, no. 1, 2016)

[books-n-quotes]

Our current mental-hygiene philosophy stresses the idea that people ought to be happy, that unhappiness is a symptom of maladjustment. Such a value system might be responsible for the fact that the burden of unavoidable unhappiness is increased by unhappiness about being unhappy.

Viktor E. Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (via books-n-quotes)

[ceremonialized]

“I am interested in building a society where creativity is a mass condition and not a gift reserved to the happy few, even if half of them are women. Our story at present is that of thousands of women who are agonizing over the book, the painting or the music they can never finish, or cannot even begin, because they have neither the time nor money. We must also broaden our conception of what it means to be creative. At its best, one of the most creative activities is being involved in a struggle with other people, breaking out of our isolation, seeing our relations with others change, discovering new dimensions in our lives.”

— Silvia Federici, “Putting Feminism Back on its Feet”  (via oaluz)

[onetwofeb]

poetry isn’t revolution but a way of knowing why it must come

Dreamwood by Adrienne Rich

In the old, scratched, cheap wood of the typing stand there is a landscape, veined, which only a child can see or the child’s older self, a poet, a woman dreaming when she should be typing the last report of the day. If this were a map, she thinks, a map laid down to memorize because she might be walking it, it shows ridge upon ridge fading into hazed desert here and there a sign of aquifers and one possible watering-hole. If this were a map it would be the map of the last age of her life, not a map of choices but a map of variations on the one great choice. It would be the map by which she could see the end of touristic choices, of distances blued and purpled by romance, by which she would recognize that poetry isn’t revolution but a way of knowing why it must come. If this cheap, mass-produced wooden stand from the Brooklyn Union Gas Co., mass-produced yet durable, being here now, is what it is yet a dream-map so obdurate, so plain, she thinks, the material and the dream can join and that is the poem and that is the late report.

[perkwunos]

The economic system founded on isolation is a circular production of isolation. The technology is based on isolation, and the technical process isolates in turn. From the automobile to television, all the goods selected by the spectacular system are also its weapons for a constant reinforcement of the conditions of isolation of “lonely crowds.” The spectacle constantly rediscovers its own assumptions more concretely.

Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

[amare-habeo]

Lothar Fischer (German, 1933 – 2004)

Female Leaf Torso III (Weiblicher Flügeltorso III), 1977

Plaster