Islamophobia

ADOLESCENCE II(by Rita Dove)

Although it is night, I sit in the bathroom, waiting.
Sweat prickles behind my knees, the baby-breasts are alert.
Venetian blinds slice up the moon; the tiles quiver in pale strips.

Then they come, the three seal men with eyes as round
As dinner plates and eyelashes like sharpened tines.
They bring the scent of licorice. One sits in the wash bowl,

One on the bathtub edge; one leans against the door.
"Can you feel it yet?" they whisper.
I don't know what to say, again. They chuckle,

Patting their sleek bodies with their hands.
"Well, maybe next time." And they rise,
Glittering like pools of ink under moonlight,

And vanish. I clutch at the ragged holes
They leave behind, here at the edge of darkness.
Night rests like a ball of fur on my tongue.
© Rita Dove

Geoffrey Philp Wins Daily News Prize For Poetry

The Editorial Board of The Caribbean Writer has awarded Jamaica-born poet and short story writer, Geoffrey Philp, the Daily News Prize for his poem, “Erzulie’s Daughter.” A talented writer in many genres, Mr. Philp has also won the Canute Brodhurst Prize for his short story, “Uncle Obadiah and the Alien.” The prize winning poem is included in Philp’s upcoming collection of poems, Dub Wise, which will published in Spring 2010 by Peepal Tree Press.

“Erzulie’s Daughter” was one of those poems that came almost like a gift,” said Philp. “Once I imagined this girl-woman, who while her parents are forcing her to conform, she is figuring out her identity, I just knew she would have to emerge victorious because she is the archetypal daughter of one of the most compelling figures of Haitian/Caribbean mythology—an area in our literature that has been neglected for a long time”
[continue there...]

False Tooth(by Julius Chingono)

A false tooth
got lost
during a tongue dance
that was misty
and full of froth.
It was found holding
on to a rotting gum.

A false tooth
also smiles
when real teeth smile
do they have any feelings?

Are you aware
all those people died
to make certain
you lost the election?
[source...]

Interview with Mr Chingono

The Second Coming

And if when I got to the market
you wasn't there on your straw mat
of straw that shines when light parses it
and dances with the good wind
(the same we use on rondavel roofs and
Qiloane hats), if you wasn't there
selling tomatoes to the people, statue of ebony,
if there was nobody bargaining at a spice-table
a little from where I stood, arms shaping bag sizes:
small medium big, in sharp movement, or,
as price ministers say at forums: not enough at all,
while you on your rug sat, or not,
eating monokotšoai from a pocket,
tracing roads in your mind in hopes of a lighter load
(for the day would later go, the mountain willing you
to climb its faint light home). If dawn hadn't broken
would you still love me? If morning wasn't dying,
the sun not half-cast on its journey to the sea,
would night still blindfold us?
Will we have our second coming, homecoming
promised by God who lived in our bones
and loved our hearts of stone?

The Day Jesus Christ Came to Mount Airy

Ben Okri discusses writing

__________

• A poem by Ben Okri
• Wikipedia on Ben Okri
  

The October Garden

If you were zinnia, still bright
in the October garden and I the last
orange cosmos. If you were catmint blue
draping yourself over the cinder block wall
and I the weed coming up through gravel.
If you were the bamboo pole, listing
under the weight of late green tomatoes
that will never ripen now, and I
the frayed string that binds them. If
you were heavy purple grapes dangling
over the canted railing and I the feasting
thrush. If you were summer's echo
in yellow coreopsis and I the tall sedum,
autumn-flushed. If you were the sun
breaking slant over that little grove of aspens
across the street, if you were hummingbird's
quick wing, if you were winter coming on
or the studious worm and I the turned
earth, the patch of moss beneath an oak,
the oak's sharp-edged leaf ready to crackle
underfoot, the white-throated sparrow's
familiar three descending notes in a minor
key, oh, if only I were sometimes
you and you were me.

Molly Fisk
Michigan Quarterly Review
Fall 2008

Copyright ©2008 by The University of Michigan
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

Happy birthday, Chinua!

The novelist Chinua Achebe, a fine stylish and an astute social critic, is one of the best-known African writers in the West and his novels are often assigned in university courses.

Nigerian novelist and poet, whose works explore the impact of European culture on African society. Achebe's unsentimental, often ironic books vividly convey the traditions and speech of the Ibo people. Born in Ogidi, Nigeria, Achebe was educated at the University College of Ibadan (now the University of Ibadan).

He subsequently taught at various universities in Nigeria and the United States. Achebe wrote his first novel, Things Fall Apart (1958), partly in response to what he saw as inaccurate characterizations of Africa and Africans by British authors. The book describes the effects on Ibo society of the arrival of European colonizers and missionaries in the late 1800s.

Achebe's subsequent novels No Longer at Ease (1960), Arrow of God (1964), A Man of the People (1966), and Anthills of the Savannah (1987) are set in Africa and describe the struggles of the African people to free themselves from European political influences. During Nigeria's tumultuous political period of the late 1960s and early 1970s, Achebe became politically active. Most of his literary works of this time address Nigeria's internal conflict (see Nigeria, Federal Republic of: Civil War). These books include the volumes of poetry Beware, Soul Brother (1971) and Christmas in Biafra (1973), the short-story collection Girls at War (1972), and the children's book How the Leopard Got His Claws (1972).
[More...]

Tongues of Clout (for Geoffrey Philp)

These images deep sleep
has given to the poets. Images
the mouth turns round and
spits out, clean as pits sucked off,
the raw tongue finding the texture
awright. Poets are always talkin'
about heaven, the pain of
the four seasons, countless
lucky stars at night, winking;

some poets write right into hell
though none find the way back:
what happens when a child
loses its soul, caught
in earth's dry hunger,
a soul painted in such a way
you could not tell
where the child ended and

the tree with its blossom began:
two handfuls of a clear possibility;
some with prickles, others
with bunches of a red berry
hungry as jewels for Sheba's earlobes
(but all with cheeky freckles).
Mounds of buried treasure
grow like Quthing molehills
in a clearing, and remove

the world from the face of itself.
As you listen, hear now how language
in words can be home-bound,
crossing a page. Even as night
lifts its mercury, and we keep
coughing our lungs out,
the poet through the rift speaks
in faceless tongues of clout.

Amiri Baraka on Barack Obama

"The Right hates [Obama] because he proved that this is no longer "White America." It is a multinational nation."
~Amiri Baraka

[source...]

untitled

New Year, 2009 (by Gillian Clarke)

A poem by the National Poet of Wales to honour the Inauguration of Barack Obama as the 44th President of the United States of America on 20th January 2009

Venus in the arc of the young moon
is a boat the arms of a bay,
the sky clear to infinity
but for the trailing gossamer
of a transatlantic plane.

The old year and the old era dead,
pushed burning out to sea
bearing the bones of heroes, tyrants,
ideologues, thieves and deceivers
in a smoke of burning money.

The dream is over. Glaciers will melt.
Seas will rise to swallow golden islands.
Somewhere a volcano may whelm a city,
earth shake its skin like an old horse,
a hurricane topple a town to rubble.

Yet tonight, under the cold beauty
of the moon and Venus, something like hope begins,
as if times can turn, the world change course,
as if truth can speak, good men come to power,
and words have meaning again.

Maybe black-hearted boys in love with death
won’t blow themselves and us to smithereens.
Maybe guns will fall silent, the powerful
cease slaughtering the weak, the rich
will not gorge as the poor starve.


Hope spoke the word ‘Yes’, the word ‘we’, the word ’can’,
and a thousand British teenagers at Poetry Live
rose to their feet in a single yell of joy –
black, white, Christian, Muslim, Jew,
faithful and faithless. We are all in this together.
Ie. gallwn ni.²

-----
²Yes, we can in Welsh.

The discipline of the rhyme

...to think about line breaks in a fresh way, and by working toward end rhymes, we must modify some of the habits we all naturally fall into. The discipline of the rhyme makes us speak in new ways.
[source...]

How so very true!

High Horses

Way up there, so high and well fed
they seem to be gods
or at least ridden by gods,
the high horses walk—so well bred

little disturbs them. Sedately,
they show off their steps,
canter right, canter left ... perhaps
a brief trot, the perfect lifting of one knee

after another, and then
that exquisite gallop, that arrogance
of the totally convinced,
that disdain.... Then down

off the high horses
come their riders at last,
little men of the past,
clad in bright silken colors.

Dick Allen
Present Vanishing
Sarabande Books

Copyright ©2008 by Dick Allen
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

For Khotsofalang and Motlatsi

In the eyes of my people are the absent
whose lives the red donga drags
in rivulets toward Bethulie and the coast.
My own eye sweeps the ground
(for existing while the sun is dead).

Music pounds my drums and sex musk fills
the corners of my brains, prancing
little dancers from villages around;
but I never leave my room. Not even after
neighbours have left theirs to ponder life.

I just keep wondering why the world is
walled in words, why when I close my eyes
to pray, hieroglyphs merge in the dark
with what I say, drive meaning home.
With the eyes of a thousand years to which

the head bows in allegiance, I stare at the ground
we'd get together on after sunset, after
following a shadow home, to sit on stumps
for a game of morabaraba, till food called us, and
we had fought back the world's loneliness

with sticks and stones of words, and kept
to ourselves mostly, waking up to live
and living up to wait for another day:
the eyes of my people are futured with
plans, like the blueprint to our new house.

Quote: "Komunyakaa"

Word for word,
we beat the love
out of each other.
~Yusef Komunyakaa

[from Once the Dream Begins...]

Winter Trees Cough Like Old Men

Winter trees cough like old men
about death's white nightmares
while the rain talks in Latin.
They cough about the sobbing tragic
ash, they bind valises for leaving,
they darken—and in the chill
of frost from the sun, the lungs
bristle to see coffins hidden
in the dry capes of kings.

Eugenio Montejo
translated from the Spanish by Kirk Nesset
The Paris Review
Fall 2008

Copyright © 2008 by The Paris Review Foundation, Inc.
All rights reserved.
Reproduced by Poetry Daily with permission.

The Banjo Lesson (1893)

Maseru Man

I'll be your life when spring arrives.
I'll want to touch your black face again, see
your arms hoist work onto the belt like a behemoth
tossing things out of this world.

Our thoughts will meet in the middle, melt.
And we shall go to Kingsway where men smell
of soap and honey, and mothers sell fruit,

a spring in our heel and love on our mind, now that
centuries have lashed us with their tongue, the moon
a cool, waste of sand, street-lamps hanging
like heads in shame at the mention of your name
(I, too, have wondered why the moon, after studying
the world for so long, is not yet tear-shaped).

You are the spark that fired us from the coals of Grootvlei
into this season. You are glisten. Month after month
on our way to work we hear words of mouths,
we lunch on benches where the sun has banned our games,
sip warm Sparletta, laugh at worn jokes.

Your panga splits yam like a head, spills
swastikas of broken butterflies no sleep can remove,
nor cold from the land of night,
nor words that bane our thoughts.

Whether or not anyone reckons we're good, our mountain
centres, the commitment, a myriad feelings in it unsaid.

If there's a god looking it's awfully quiet. If anyone cares.
I watch you throw like a fleeing slave your rucksack
onto the train and dive. We meet in the middle.

'Shopping While Black'

URL: http://abcnews.go.com/video/playerIndex?id=7165444

Happy birthday, Dizzy!

The trumpet pioneer of bop, Dizzy was one of a small group of people who defined an entire generation of music. That style featured his furious playing, alternating between infectiously simple and complex high speed phrases.

He began studying the playing of Roy Eldridge. In 1937 he moved to New York and became a session player. In 1940 he met Charlie Parker in Kansas City. They developed bebop playing in after-hours jam sessions with Kenny Clarke, Thelonious Monk and Max Roach.

His first bebop recording was in 1944 with Coleman Hawkins. A year later he recorded with Parker. Some of his famous compositions include 'Salt Peanuts', 'Woody 'N You' and 'Shaw Nuff'. [source]

Gillespie described be-bop as music with a different accent, " ... on the up beat. Instead of OO-bah, it's oo-BAH. Different chords too." [source]

They're not particular about whether you're playing a flatted fifth or a ruptured 129th as long as they can dance to it. [source]

John Birks "Dizzy" Gillespie was born on 21 October 1917. Happy birthday to him.

Philp reading from "Who's Your Daddy?"

Happy birthday, Peter.

Peter Tosh (October 19, 1944 – September 11, 1987) was the guitarist in the original Wailing Wailers, a pioneer reggae musician, and a trailblazer for the Rastafari movement. Born Winston Hubert McIntosh, Peter grew up in the Kingston, Jamaica slum of Trenchtown.

His short-fuse temper and unveiled sarcasm usually kept him in trouble, earning him the nickname Stepping Razor after a song written by Joe Higgs, an early mentor. He began to sing and learn guitar at a young age, inspired by the American stations he could pick up on his radio.

After an illustrious career with the Wailers and as a solo musician, his life was cut short when he was brutally murdered at his home. Though robbery was officially said to be the motivation behind Tosh's death, many believe that there were ulterior motives to the killing, citing that nothing was taken from the house.
[source]

Quote: Emile Griffith

"I like men and women both. But I don't like that word: homosexual, gay or faggot. I don't know what I am. I love men and women the same, but if you ask me which is better ... I like women. I keep thinking how strange it is ... I kill a man and most people understand and forgive me. However, I love a man, and to so many people this is an unforgivable sin; this makes me an evil person. So, even though I never went to jail, I have been in prison almost all my life."
~Emile Alphonse Griffith