To a Young Poet Zaina Alsous I don’t usually write because I’m too busy being afraid of it. Not of writing but the it. It’s more like breaking open a fruit. Not to taste but to see what bleeds out. Here is a country. Here is a person in that country who has no papers but…
I offer some lines and phrases from the story-poem Stardust by Hisham Bustani. Tired of turning the dials of history. I LOOK AT THEM: they are motionless and shackled, sap sucked dry, faces covered with imbecilic smiles. Who are these people… (First answer) Physical systems change…from highly ordered to more disordered. Entropy The entropy…
A gray but mild February day, almost like a Southern winter day. Climate warming amounts to season after season of decreased snowfall, of fewer days of single-digit bitter cold… More heat means exponential acceleration, intensity, a supercharged process,… Opinions become irrelevant. A slow breaking of what we thought to be normal… I read two…
An inauspicious day from the get-go by Hisham Bustani translated from the Arabic by Alice Guthrie Some damn thing made her mom start talking to her about her fiancé yet again. “He’s just not cast from the same clay we are,” she said, “and I don’t think he’s really got it in…
THE SECOND COMING Turning, turning in the widening gyre The falcon cannot hear the falconerThings fall apart; the centre cannot hold; Turning and turning in the widening gyreMere anarchy is loosed upon the world,The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere The ceremony of innocence is drowned; The best lack all convictions, while the worst Are full…
As intended, I made a fire at nightfall on the winter solstice. The family left the warmth of the house to see the fire that by itself cut the frost of the night. I made the fire as a memorial of sorts for those who might have been with us, my parents, the grandmother…
The mind begins to sweat soon enough when reading Nietzsche. He offers a style of thinking, and angle of view of world and of self which is uncomfortable, at first. Reading such philosophy is comparable to training in order to run a marathon. One does not just run 26.1 miles on a whim. One…
Thought reels upon recall of yesterdays extended quotation. Nietzsche describes Moira, a concept of the ancient Greeks. Moira is an inchoate dimension of a-rationality, impenetrable, formless dark, which disrupts our “world”, the one which we’ve purposefully constructed, a life-world of reason. We call such events accidents. Such as when a vehicle slams into another…
I felt comfort to see the horizon alight with the dawn. Upon entering the seating area at Starbucks, I felt the red of the Christmas-holiday promotion posters behind the beverage prep. counter. Paper cups with the colorful holiday graphic were stacked ready for use. Thus, I am reminded that life has a relentless heartbeat…
Disastrous are disasters. Paradise is such a lonely place that we are doomed, anyway. But at the meeting point of its rivers the horizon is always enlarged, the imagination unleashed. *** Love creates sand-storms and loosens reality’s building blocks. Its feverish energy takes us into the heart of mountains. Sometimes, a frozen moon illuminates…
