The Dollar Store Poem

1. AnthroApocology Safari suit clad fascist with microscope and coolies enters the Temple of Doom At his shoulder, Harrison, in those  Fordlike soundbytes Urging urging him on Amen Father Son and Holy Cow 2.  General Motors stares back at me From every shop-window his silver dollar and medals swinging to a marching oompah pah oompah…

The Weight/ Solo Quarantine

Waiting for the one who never comes or might come forever. The ground shattered beneath our feet, the sky splintered above us. Mitigating their barbarism or choosing our love? That is the weight of this wait . All the roads are empty, and do not only lead to Rome. Grief and fear sweep through China,…

COVID19 Kills Postmodernism!

The other day, a friend asked me if I had been writing. The truth of the matter is, being solitary sometimes makes me unable to concentrate. I think it’s ironic, that I have not watched Netflix once, since the start of official self isolation for elders and those with pre-existing conditions. Part of this has…

Xanaxocene

A poem about the coronavirus and our changing world

Stardust

in a distant eon, you and i were stars. tumble and spark, ether and eterntity, dust and light, while the world was being born. we were young. fierce and shining like a child’s eyes. in a distant eon, you and i were stars. rock and fire distance and delight. while the world flourished we joined…

March Mermaids

A visual series celebrating International Women’s Day!

World Social Justice Day

The United Nations has declared February 20th as World Social Justice day. In this era, social justice is like a carrot dangling before humanity while the vast majority of us are being beaten with sticks. So, social justice is an aspirational desire, a desire to remediate the wrongs of past times and current ways of…

I am the truth… as well as you…

This article is a brief and introductory summary of recent political developments in BJP India and some examples of resistance to the Hindu fascist agenda.

A Rapist in Your Way

Today’s piece pays homage– and it must– to the brave women of Chile and around the world who are standing up for their right to be free from sexual and gender-based violence. Currently, Mexico leads the world in murder of women and other forms of sexual violence. The United Nations, whose research wing may be…

Return to My Native Land (with apologies to Aime Cesaire)

I have been travelling and experiencing the world through the eyes of my childhood and the “now”. The city I return to is not the city of my childhood and teens, nor the city of my twenties and thirties, where the excitement of women’s liberation, the furious exchange of ideas, politics, and philosophies at the…

Chile: Forbidden to Forget…

I was first introduced to the world of Chileans in exile, in the late 1970s, as adults and children fleeing political repression, torture, kidnapping, political rape and murder, arrived in Canada. In fact, Chile had not been know for mass migration until the political banishment of left and progressive sectors under the Generals. Chile’s self-image, shaped…

Pachacutec

This is a seven part poem I have been working on since my work, studies, and travels have taken me to South America and Cuba. I have long been fascinated and moved by the strength of peoples who manage to hold on to their cosmologies in the face of terrible odds such as kidnapping, enslavement,…

We Lived Happily during the War

One tries to hang on to hope, in spite of the onslaught. Poetry, art, music, dance, theatre, and even sometimes film, can offer us someting in that direction, give us a glimpse of that blue star. This year has been filled with changes in our political landscapes, fear and trauma among many who have been…

Journey

nothing but the need for friendship reduced, quest now stripped of myth how difficult not to remember the colour of eyes how we ran to and from such passions there was a time i thought i must not know you but outside the rain howled your name could not forget, would not, how could i?…

2 O’Clock

a yellow butterfly flew past brushing bougainvillias with dreams of rain now the grass is solemn does not dance a shadow grows longer upon the limewashed wall somwhere near by, children ae singing to capture even half this beauty in the palm of the heart from A New Remembrance, 1993, Copyright Kaushalya Bannerji