Ear to the Ground

Poetry for the Peeps! From the Land’s Heart

Land Back Rivers flowingScreens overflowingwith deathA keyboard of rubbleTechnology’s offeringRetina-burned imagesSeared into our conscience Violence reveredDialogue destroyedLives snapped into piecesDeath’s drones and sirensThe soundtrack of these days This is the world we witnessAs we bow and breakBeneath the onslaughtBut return we doOver and over and over againTo the olive grove’s heart.

Poetry for the Peeps! Citizen Heart

Today is my father’s birthday. Since he was a poet, translator, lover of, and professor of comparative literatures, it is fitting that he should be born in World Poetry Month. The poems and visual arts today are a tribute to him (Manabendra Bandyopadhyay, 1938-2020)). The poems below would have engaged him and certainly been part…

Poetry for the Peeps! Affirm Life!

The poems and art pieces chosen here reflect on themes of injustice, oppression and deprivation, and specifically starvation as a weapon of capitalist social organization and war The poems speak to a reality that has been ongoing in places where man-made famine and war have deprived people of their most basic necessities and rights ,including…

World Poetry Day!

March 21st is a day which celebrates both the power of poetry and calls for the elimination of racism globally. Today’s post shares the words and pictures of poets and artists speaking to the need for justice and for poetry. As the great Salvadoran poet Roque Dalton said, “poetry, like bread, is for everyone.” Even…

Poetry for the Peeps! Humanity or Nothing

Today is a day when poetry and art speak for themselves. I think it is the 160th day of genocide, nearly 6 months since October 7th and we’ve seen things go from bad to worse with regard to the human rights of Palestinian peoples. Israel, U.S and the European powers who have big investments of…

Poetry for the Peeps! Gloria Fuertes

Gloria Fuertes, Spain, 1917- 1998 (English Translations, Kaushalya Bannerji, 2023) Gloria Fuertes, says Wikipedia, was a Spanish poet, author of children’s literature, and regular participant in children’s television shows. She was part of the post-war literary movement of postismo, and a member of the Generation of ’50. Her work focused on gender equality, pacifism, and environmentalism. HAGO VERSOS, SENORES! Hago versos señores, hago…

Art and Poetry Speaking to Our Hearts!

We are in the 129th day of genocide and ethnic cleansing carried out by the Israeli state with military, economic and moral backing by the U.S. , Germany, U.K. and Canada to name a few. Nicaragua has joined South Africa in a plea for ceasefire through the ICJ. People around the world continue to walk…

Nothing More Hopeful Than Solidarity! Poetry for the Peeps

Today I continue my journey of sharing the words of artists and writers speaking out against genocide. For no matter how the ICJ stops short in calling for a permanent ceasefire to hostilities on Gaza, we around the world know the truth of the matter. I share today the beautiful words and vision of Canada’s…

Poetry for the Peeps! Witnessing Genocide

Today’s blog continues to look at the atrocities being committed in Gaza and to join the world plea for a ceasefire now. There is no end to this inhumanity of pulverizing a people in real time and with the massive citizen and press presence on social media platforms, allowing us if we choose, to follow the absolute tragedy…

Off with the Old Year! In with the New!

As we say goodbye to 2023, I feel compelled to say that witnessing genocide in real time has overshadowed so much and become one with the grief of the world.Since the management of the covid pandemic when blind obedience and global leadership let us down royally, to the current situation in which 2 countries hold…

Poetry for the Peeps! Sharing Spirit, Sharing Solidarity

Today’s post shares the amazing resilience of the Palestinian people and their supporters around the world. . Although I sometimes find myself turning away from the incessant slaughter by the Israeli and U.S. governments I remember that it is a privilege to do so and I turn back to the brave young journalists who bring…

Poetry for the Peeps! A Year to Remember

2023 has turned out to be a year to remember for all the wrong reasons. It has exposed the heartlessness at the centre of settler colonialism and empire. The inhumanity of the world’s leaders, the logic of capitalism and the global push to fascism are all so clearly spelled out for us. And the mainstream media has…

Poetry for the Peeps! Poems For Humanity

This week, before the celebration of the birth of Christ in Beit Layem in a week’s time, Israeli leaders and their U.S. handlers continue their vicious bombardment and genocide of Gaza and its people. It is with a heavy heart that we witness no mercy. From occupation to apartheid to genocide, settler colonialism seems to follow the…

International day of solidarity with the People of Palestine!

Today is the international day for solidarity with the Palestinian people, These are a people who have experienced expulsion and ethnic cleansing for 75 years now. They have been living in what even former U.S. president Jimmy Carter called an “apartheid state”. Diasporic Palestinians are in many countries across the globe and provide cheaper labour…

Poetry for the Peeps! Against Devastation

Once again I find myself still reeling from not only the onslaught of terror that is being perpetrated in the name of Israeli expansionism, but also the apathetic and two-faced world in which we dwell. The disconnect between the kleptocrats who rule us (disguised thinly as bourgeois democrats) and those of us who appear to…

Poetry for the Peeps!

We are seeing the rise of the new era of capitalism in its decadence, that is, decline. The thrashing tail and head are swinging all of us on this globe from side to side, twisting reality, employing doublespeak, and criminalizing compassion. In the midst of this slaughter of civilians and children, with over 12000 dead…

Poetry for the Peeps!

I have been overwhelmed with learning, feeling, raging, and mourning about the state of the world. Stuck in the freeze mode of powerlessness, we watch the absolute destruction of a people; reminiscent of the words of the advisors to the infamous fascist house painter, of the final solution. Psychopaths run nations, corporations, militaries ,and institutions…

Poetry for the Peeps! Palestine in Poetry

Watching the invisibilizing collusion of mass media and the Israeli state vis a vis the media blockade on Gaza shows us not only the weaponizing of the internet but of everything necessary for the maintenance of life. Add to that, the genocidal bombing under the cover of absent eyes. Peoples around the globe have called…

Poetry for the Peeps! Poets of Palestine and Elsewhere

I am speechless at what I have been witnessing. The haves and have-nots are no longer about accumulation of capita alone but, as in the times of slavery and conquest, about having humanity and being seen as human. In the face of such violence and dispossession, this poetry cries with her voice to be heard…

Poetry for the Peeps! Mahmoud Darwish

I’ve been aghast at the news of what is amounting to ethnic cleansing in Gaza and the repetition of the Catastrophe of 1948. I am saddened and enraged by the absence of a real international outcry. We truly live in a inhumane world. Some antidote to the despair I have been feeling is found in…

Poetry for the Peeps! Suheir Hammad

Palestine/USA I will notdance to your wardrum. I willnot lend my soul normy bones to your wardrum. I willnot dance to yourbeating. I know that beat.It is lifeless. I knowintimately that skinyou are hitting. Itwas alive oncehunted stolenstretched. I willnot dance to your drummedup war. I will not popspin beak for you. Iwill not hate…

Poetry for the Peeps! Silvio Rodriguez on Chile

This September 11 2023 marks 50 years since the terrible coup in Chile, replacing democratically elected progressive President Salvador Allende with CIA and ITT backed dictator General Pinochet. Assassinating Allende and torturing and killing hundreds and hundreds of other local activists, artists and social organizers, the new military government brought in the first Neo-liberal experiment…

Poetry for the Peeps! More Dalton!

Some more Roque Dalton for us to enjoy. I have shared his work in a previous post with a small biography from Wikipedia. His poetry was very important for Latin American writing and for revolutionary cultural producers from all over the world. His time was cut short by an assassination by his ex-comrades and El…

Poetry for the Peeps! Roque Dalton

It’s a hot September day. Unseasonably so. Weather extremes are being felt more and more frequently, affecting millions and millions around the globe. Stewardship of the land and waters that sustain us has fallen by the wayside. Hunger is a global disgrace. And even poets– not economists or think- tanks, were able to pin-point the…

Poetry for the Peeps! Cesar Vallejo

Cesar Vallejo lived between 1892-1938. He was born in Peru but died in France, not on a Thursday as in this poem presaging his own end, but on a Good Friday, I believe. His grandfathers in the Andes where he was born were both Spanish priests, and his grandmothers, Indigenous women. This early experience of…

Into the Throat of Summer

I took the name of this blog post from Jenny Xie’s (USA) “Chinatown Diptych”, one of her travel poems set in a summer in New York’s Chinatown. And allthough set in summer, many of these poems are melancholy, rather than frothy Hallmark tidings. I decided to share some poems of a rather random selection of…

Let’s at least, leave Flowers! Let’s at least, leave, Songs!

It’s been more than a year since I have been away from this blog and writing, generally. Words seem rusty and disused, and the world outside has twisted and contorted itself in ever more lexicons of cruelty.Humanity has been turned into soundbytes and fleeting visual catastrophes that seem to lead to no impact with regards…

Learning to See: The Art of Oswaldo Guayasamin

I’ve been inspired lately by the paintings of Oswaldo Guayasamin. Although he is well-respected in Latin America, I rarely see the type of eulogizing that over him that is so common with Frida Kahlo, whose identity as a mature and political artist has been submerged in a depoliticized portraitist school of thought that is…

Children’s Books and my Father: A Remembrance

Culture and memory share a root, like branches of the same plant. That root is us, human beings, in our most creative and unself-conscious renditions. Once again, after the whirlwind of systemic violence and structural upheaval engineered through the COVID19 pandemic response, the time has come to honour the memory of those we love who…

Now That I am a God…

On April 28th, one of Cuba’s outstanding women poets, among many, Fina Garcia Marruz, celebrated her 99th birthday. This writer was part of the cultural and literary circle of the Origenes magazine in the pre-revolutionary period and remained committed to the spirit and ideals of Jose Marti, making her home in Cuba after the 1959…

National Poetry Month with Chabuca Granda!

María Isabel Granda Larco (3 September 1920 – 8 March 1983), known as Chabuca Granda, was a Peruvian singer and composer. She was a trailblazer as a woman lyricist and composer, drawing on Peruvian Criollo music, as well as Afro-Peruvian rhythms, which were much devalued in high society of Lima at the time. It was…

Questions of War

Kaushalya Bannerji March 2022 getting us ready?for a flag that is a lielike all flags? getting us ready?for a war that is a lielike all wars? getting us ready?to lovethe executioner more than ourslves? getting us ready?to watch agape and twisted,inside knowing there issome other way Questiones de Guerra, Kaushalya Bannerji, marzo 2022 preparándonos? por…

World Poetry Day! Songs in Bleak Times

Speak out!, Faiz Ahmad Faiz, (1911-1984) Pakistantranslated byMustansir Dalvi Speak out!Your words are free.Speak up!Your tongue is still your own.Your body remains yoursramrod, erect.Speak out!Your life is still your own. Look!How in your smithy’s forgeflames soar;iron glows red.How the lockshave opened yawsand every chain,unlinked, now spreads. The short time left to youis enough. Speak up,before…

Rich Man’s War, Poor Man’s Blood: Poetry Against War

I didn’t think that yet another outbreak of war would be the only response in a world reeling from the impact of pre-existing wars and the covid19 pandemic. But here we are, in a bizarre lexicon of words and media where everything seems stripped of meaning and context, like a tsunami of global anomie. And because…

All of Us or None! A Belated Return to the Virtual World

It’s been ages since I have posted on the blog. Pandemic fatigue and the onset of winter and lock-downs have exacerbated SADness and made writing a difficult chore. While I have been doing some drawing, I haven’t mustered up the focus to write. This blog, pays homage to the work of two poets, February birthday…

The Close and Holy Darkness! Winter Solstice and the Song of Poetry: A Moment with Dylan Thomas

Every few years around this time, I read or see or hear a version of Dylan Thomas’ A Child’s Christmas in Wales. Such a beautiful prose poem where the words sing like the wind and the sea herself. This year, I drew to a reading of the piece, as I found the very LP record…

To the Land of the Maroons! Commemorating Georgina Herrera

Dear all, it is with a heavy heart that I am letting you know Georgina Herrera has passed on yesterday. She was an inspiring and much beloved poet whose glittering sparseness was a counterpoint to the Spanish classical flowery formalism of older Cuban writers. Her personal story centers Afro-Cubanhood as the location, from where, and…

Season of Verses

I haven’t been on the blog for quite a while. 2021 is proving to be a year of elusive concentration, spiralling exhaustion, sadness, and intense physical pain. I have re-acquainted myself with some drawing, although I have been reading about the state of the world and am often disturbed by what I see our little…

Late September Commemoration

I’m late this year in commemorating the anniversary of September 11, 1973. This infamous date came into being as the day that the military dictatorship of General Agusto Pinochet overthrew the democratically elected government of socialist President Salvador Allende Gossens in Santiago, Chile. Much has been written and recorded from that time and in terms…

Who’s Your Troubadour? Fifty Years of Chico Buarque

More than fifty years ago, a young singer songwriter burst on to the exciting and boundary breaking music scene in Brazil, a country grappling with the legacy of cruelty, colonization, migration, and above all, enslavement. Burgeoning movements for racial and regional equality, along with student and feminist movements, workers, and small peasantry, found themselves clamouring for…

The Real People

I see the chaos being fomented in Cuba, Mexico, Peru, Chile, Colombia… All places where I have had the fortune to travel and the misfortune to read the news of those countries forever after… They are locked in my heart like the humble pleasures of nostalgia for friends in my country of origin. Yet health…

Our Eyes See the Blood on the Red of Your Flag

I’ve slowed down on my blog due to health and other very important circumstances. But I have not stopped… I have been, like so many of us in Canada, overwhelmed by the physical forensic evidence of a genocide so recent that it is actually on-going. Kamloops Residential School, Cowessess First Nation Marieval Residential School, and…

Intersecting Pride and Resistance

Happy Pride Month! It’s been strange to be as fragmented as the LGBT community has been even before covid19. But lack of face to face contact has in particular been hard for LGBT people, especially young people who may be living with homo/transphobic or disapproving family members. So it’s a month to honour our many…

Our Uncomfortable Dread: From George Floyd to Henry Dumas

It’s been 6 weeks since I have been on the blog. I have been watching the state of the world with eyes that want to look away, but can’t. It seems we are on a collision course with hopelessness and destruction, vaccine or no vaccine. Human rights are being violated and lives taken with impunity,…

A Groundhog Spring! Haiku

This spring, the second of the covid19 pandemic, is another lockdown. I remember my fear and isolation during the first one, the first stay at home order I had ever experienced. I am grateful that I am able to be out in sun, sitting on my balcony and enjoying the calls of the birds. The…

Poetry for the Peeps! Georgina Herrera

I’ve been a bit slow on the translation front. I’ve been working on a selection of poems from Cuba’s Georgina Herrera. This writer really captivated my interest when I was studying in Cuba for my doctoral research. Her slim paperback volumes were on display at UNEAC in the Vedado and my favourite poetry bookstore in…

Poetry for the Peeps! Adam Zagajewski

I’ve been away from the blog for nearly a month this time. I’ve been grappling with flares of chronic health issues and also been feeling somewhat disheartened by the announcement of a surge of covid-19 patients where I live, the increasing shuttering of small businesses, the business as usual approach of capitalist warlords, the rise…

Poetry for the Peeps! A Litany of Refusals to Become Ghostly!

We had the honour of supporting the students in response to their encampment for disclosure and divestment from Israel at Universities across the U.S, Canada, and internationally. This blog is dedicated to the young people who show us that conscience and compassion are still bringing hope to those who wish for justice against settler colonialism…

To Wake Up Human!

Antonio Gramsci would have aptly described our times, smug and blood-thirsty as the “time of monsters”. Unbelievably, it’s been 173 days of military onslaught that has brought calamity and massacres to the Gaza Strip. The suffering seems endless. Having seen the testimonies of so many children and youth, the murders, the detritus of bombardment, it’s…

Return to the Same Moon

We enter the new year full of desires for a new and different world, a truly human world that honours our interconnectedness and “right relations” as Indigenous teachings put it. In this world, genocide would not exist because the power and powerlessness engendered by relations of exploitation, oppression, empire-building would not be the filters through which all…