“A place is not only a geographical area; it’s also a state of mind. And trees are not just trees; they are the ribs of childhood.”
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“Those who boast of being cultured and civilized are most often the killers.”
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“Is it a fact that ‘no community in the world has developed at the same rate as the Arab community in Israel’? To fall in line with this attempt to reduce the whole issue to a question of development benefits the Israeli authorities, not only because they are the ones who—in possession of he tools of forgery—conduct the census and engineer the figures, but also because this way of framing the issue implies the admission that conquest for the sake of ‘civilizing’ the conquered is the law of interaction between conquerors and conquered peoples. According to this logic, an occupier can gain political, human, and cultural legitimacy because he has been gracious enough to allow occupied peoples to live and breathe. The natural development of people stopped before the arrival of the conqueror. An Arab writer in Israel satirized the practice of the Israeli authorities in ascribing to their actions and good intentions the human development that takes place in the natural course of events: ‘When Israel was established my daughter was one year old. Now she is twenty. Did she then grow u and reach maturity as a result of Israeli efforts?’ This satirical comment brilliantly records the Israeli way of keeping track of human progress. What was the work like before Israel was established, and what is it like now? Before the establishment of Israel, human beings did not land on the moon, and after it was establish they landed on the moon three times!”
Friday Notebook 09.30.11
STORM SEASON
Veils of rain trailed by low clouds
snagged on the shadowed peaks,
as if the body poured its anger
into the panicky atmosphere:
dense drops striking granite;
cold white flashes under the skin.
***
somewhere
a red ant hill with red
ants eating a baby
somewhere two
blood diamond miners
slash each other open
with knives fashioned
out of folded dollar bills
somewhere in the tinted
windows of a limo heaps
of rubble flow
and a pair of eyes
scan the current for a clue
somewhere a soup kettle
stirred with a corpse’s
middle finger
somewhere in the desert
of my shadow this scorpion
poem wanders
flaunting its dread
question mark
***
A DARLING OF THE AVANT-GARDE
His poetry walks with a cane, the knob of it carved in the exact shape of Wittgenstein’s left nut.
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From Journal of an Ordinary Grief, by Mahmoud Darwish:
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The so-called Tea Party: a gang that hates human beings—not their being, but their humanity.
I used to write this kind of poem all the time—not often successfully (whatever that means). Then "something happened," as they say; it was as if I lost touch with the telluric level of the psyche. There's poetry everywhere, of course, but I enjoy writing "somewhere" poems most of all.
Joseph,<br /><br />the "somewhere" series seem to take the simply 'imagal' into the realm of sensation. Subject-matter (whether insect cannibalism, vacancy of limo riches or diamond mine savagery)turns into a "flesh" of the world to which we can't remain indifferent.<br /><br />As William Michaelian would say, I have more feelings than words for verses like these.