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…
Category: poetry
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…
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 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,…
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 in a Thousand Tongues! International Mother Language Day
It is International Mother Tongue Day, today, the 21st of February. It’s an important day to celebrate because imperial monopolies of language (English, Spanish, Portuguese, French) have erased so many forms of communication and Indigenous and languages. Only this month, the Mexican government recognized 68 Indigenous languages as national languages alongside Spanish. This took over…
Poetry for the Peeps! Georgina Herrera, Cuba
This is a continuation of my previous blogs in which I present my translations of the AfroCuban poet Georgina Herrera. I find her an amazing poet whose economy of language and simple words belies the deep and complex essence of her feelings and poetry. She balances a righteous anger with a hope for wholeness, with…
Of Feral Cats and Cockroaches!
This week, I’ve been trying to get through the winter blues and the covid blahs by reading some humour. Over a hundred years ago, journalist and humorist Don Marquis created some of funniest free verse around. Wikipedia tells us: Marquis’s best-known creation was Archy, a fictional cockroach (developed as a character during 1916) who had been a free-verse poet…
Poetry for the Peeps! AfroCuban Poetry in Translation
The following three poems are by the contemporary Afro-Cuban poet and scriptwriter, Georgina Herrera, who has graciously given permission to share and translate her work . Author of numerous collections of poetry and radio and television scripts. I have done the English translations you see below. I’ve included a biography from Wikipedia, to give you…
Solstice 2020
Today marks the shortest daylight in our hemisphere, and the arrival of winter’s official season. But as of tomorrow, the days will lengthen again imperceptibly, and for those of us who need the light, like morning glories or sunflowers, hope will gradually be born anew. Indigenous and pagan peoples celebrated and celebrate the energies and…
Citizen Heart
there have beenso many armiesso many hungersfood, land, water,the naming and naming of ourselves,chanting out in slogansthe red, brown, black of usthe “not-you” of us. there have beenso many citizensso many subjectskidnappings, rapesbuyings and sellings at auction blocks.since then ships and trains hurtling, planes gleamingso many travellerstrading home for outsidershiptrading belonging for hopethere have been…
The Wind Speaks Winter: Haiku
Once again, I joined in https://ronovanwrites.com , Ronovanwrites’ Haiku challenge based on the two words, “grace” and “slip”. I enjoy the exercise for my rusty brain. And for me, so much more enjoyable than writing essays! The Haiku form has been around for centuries. It’s very sparseness makes it alluring. It’s like the very distilled…
Poetry for the Peeps! Of Spiders and Refugees
Autumn is a time when spiders look for warm places to spin their webs and lay their egg sacs. I’ve always been terrified of large and hairy spiders but outside among the plants they design the most beautiful webs which catch the dew or frost of colder times. While, I’m not a fan of spider…
Life, View, Haiku
I recently found a blog on haiku which also offers up writing challenges, by assigning words to construct a piece around. I hadn’t engaged in that sort of thing since high school. But I decided to try my hand at it. I learned that a) it’s harder than it seems and b) that it is…
Ear to the Ground 