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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Poetry for the Peeps! Mahmoud Darwish

Earth Presses Against Us Earth is pressing against us, trapping us in the final passage.To pass through, we pull off our limbs.Earth is squeezing us. If only we were its wheat, we might die and yet live.If only it were our mother so that she might temper us with mercy.If only we were pictures of…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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Nonsense Verse for this Metaverse!

I’ve been under the weather and tried reading some silly stuff to cheer myself up! Here I share Lewis Carroll’s poem, one of so many worthy of both nonsense and great sense! Little Birds is from Sylvie and Bruno, a rather peculiar and rambling story, but dotted with some good poems! Enjoy… Little Birds are…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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