I used to lie on the floor for hours after
school with the phone cradled between
my shoulder and my ear, a plate of cold
rice to my left, my school books to my right.
Twirling the cord between my fingers
I spoke to friends who recognized the
language of our realm. Throats and lungs
swollen, we talked into the heart of the night,
toying with the idea of hair dye and suicide,
about the boys who didn’t love us,
who we loved too much, the pang
of the nights. Each sentence was
new territory, like a door someone was
rushing into, the glass shattering
with delirium, with knowledge and fear.
My Mother never complained about the phone bill,
what it cost for her daughter to disappear
behind a door, watching the cord
stretching its muscle away from her.
Perhaps she thought it was the only way
she could reach me, sending me away
to speak in the underworld.
As long as I was speaking
she could put my ear to the tenuous earth
and allow me to listen, to decipher.
And these were the elements of my Mother,
the earthed wire, the burning cable,
as if she flowed into the room with
me to somehow say, Stay where I can reach you,
the dim room, the dark earth. Speak of this
and when you feel removed from it
I will pull the cord and take you
back towards me.

Leanne O’Sullivan

-BCBG Designer Max Azria

Just like his plays.

Human nature will not flourish, any more than a potato,
if it be planted and replanted, for too long a series of generations, in the same worn-out soil.
My children have had other birthplaces, and, so far as their fortunes may be within my control,
shall strike their roots into unaccustomed earth.
 
-Nathaniel Hawthorne
“The Custom-House”"
 
Pointed out by a friend in the initial pages of

Jhumpa Lahiri’s  Unaccustomed Earth

“…Yeats’s opinion that we make art from the quarrel with ourselves, mere rhetoric from the quarrel with others.”

Andrew Motion on the Poet Philip Larkin

mike checked
my bags at the air
port in a random
routine check

i understand mike I do
you too were altered
that day and most days
most folks operate on
fear often hate this
is mic check your
job and I am
always random

-Rattapallax

(I wanna thank Yasmine for sharing her love for Suheir Hammad’s crisp words on her blog…I’m hooked! )

Language in this world is for keeping things safe in their places.

You must be brave, this kind of language says, and ordinary panic-struck human beings hear the imperative and perform extraordinary feats of tearless,uncomplaining stolidity.

Babel Tower

A.S. Byatt

i wanted to write

a poem

that rhymes

but revolution doesn’t lend

itself to be-bopping

then my neighbor

who thinks i hate

asked-do you ever write

tree poems- i like trees

so i thought

i’ll write a beautiful green tree poem

peeked from my window

to check the image

noticed the school yard was covered

with asphalt

no green-no trees grow

in manhattan

then, well, i thought the sky

i’ll do a big blue sky poem

but all the clouds have winged

low since no-Dick was elected

so i thought again

and it occurred to me

maybe i shouldn’t write

at all

but clean my gun

and check my kerosene supply

perhaps these are not poetic

times

at all

NIKKI GIOVANNI

Today Pakistan voted. I also voted.

These words, the bold, the italics, the capitals, can not communicate the sheer joy, liberation, empowerment that followed my depositing the ballots. I thought of the suffragist movement of elementary school textbooks and how those women must have felt when they won the right to vote, imagine, just the right itself!! I fulfilled what I believe was my duty,and that feels good, to put it plainly.

I also spoke with many, friends and family, Pakistanis who were in varying states of belief, disbelief, apathy, optimism and concern. To those who said that their chance to vote was robbed because the Voter Registration Form wasn’t presented to them, I wish them a social conscience and proactivity or they are sure to suffer in the long run. When information is everywhere, in the newspapers, on tv, and accessible via internet (yes where you go for Facebook) and you as an adult somehow do not gain from it, it is no one’s fault but your own. I don’t like this word ‘fault’ though, stinks of pessimism and finger-pointing, which is quite unproductive. Instead I’d use ‘accountable’, so if your voter’s registration was not up-to-date, you are accountable. Accountability, now thats a loaded word for a day as heavy with bloodshed and chaos as Election day has been so far, but it fits. Progress is only possible if one is willing to accept and be accountable for all that falls under one’s jurisdiction. Yes, there has been violence too horrid to recount, despicable acts of sabotage in and around polling stations, there is no denying those facts. Being accountable demands taking ownership of the causes; lack of proper security measures, or excruciating poverty that compells people to tamper the voting processs for rupees onethousand plus.