"you can't make homes out of human beings"

watermusic ii

"Ethiopia Across the Red Sea & Indian Ocean" - Prof. Pankhurst

http://www.ethiopianreview.com/index/389

"At least one Ethiopian zebra was also taken to India... The creature seemed so strange that some people thought that it had been colored by hand, but the monarch rejected this view, stating that it was in fact 'the painter of fate,' who had 'left it on the page of the world.'

breton et bombarde

Alain Bousquet

Je ne suis pas un poete d'eau douce 

"I am no milk-and-water poet"

no need: excerpt

the poem of the poet is to say all this

and thousands and thousands of other things.

no need to understand.

-Alain Bosquet

Lay Ch'an Practitioner, P'ang Yün (d. 808)

"Mysterious power and
marvelous function:
carrying water and
gathering kindling."

kindness : naomi shihab nye

Kindness Before you know what kindness really is you must lose things, feel the future dissolve in a moment like salt in a weakened broth. What you held in your hand, what you counted and carefully saved, all this must go so you know how desolate the landscape can be between the regions of kindness. How you ride and ride thinking the bus will never stop, the passengers eating maize and chicken will stare out the window forever. Before you learn the tender gravity of kindness, you must travel where the Indian in a white poncho lies dead by the side of the road. You must see how this could be you, how he too was someone who journeyed through the night with plans and the simple breath that kept him alive. Before you know kindness as the deepest thing inside, you must know sorrow as the other deepest thing.  You must wake up with sorrow. You must speak to it till your voice catches the thread of all sorrows and you see the size of the cloth. Then it is only kindness that makes sense anymore, only kindness that ties your shoes and sends you out into the day to mail letters and      purchase bread, only kindness that raises its head from the crowd of the world to say it is I you have been looking for, and then goes with you every where like a shadow or a friend.

Constantinople, 1522 and Krakow, 1573

love

gerard manley hopkins : pied beauty

GLORY be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;	5
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:	10
Praise him.

tsegaye gebre-medhin : ethiopia's poet laureate

You are still worshipping my temple of the sun, we are one. So, when he comes here, I will tell him to look for his heritage, for the heritage of the ancestors, for our mythology, to walk in the footprints of his ancestors. This land is a museum of man's ancient history. They look at us, they watch us, the Europeans, the Americans, the other nations, with this tremendous fascination. They are awestruck by the unique practices of our church, of our Islam, of our ancient pre-Judaic worship.

So I'll tell my European friend, my American friend, not to steal the Ark of the Covenant, which the slaves stole and say they received from a cloud. They didn't receive it from the cloud, they took it. And Solomon returned it, he didn't give it to me, he returned it. 

This is the source, his source, this is his heritage, our heritage. He must come and walk in the footprints of the human ancestors. The American has gone to the moon and found dust, he's going farther away to look for other planets, very good. But know thyself first. That is what I would tell my American friend.

obama :: the decree

The Colbert Report
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paper crane,

i will write peace on your wings

and you will fly all over the world

walk on by, dionne warwick

welcome to bombay

throwback

~ bonnie & clyde ~

der grüner see

~forugh farrakhzad~

• I Shall Salute the Sun Once Again
I shall salute the sun once again to the stream that flowed within me, to the clouds that were my tallest thoughts, to the painful growth of aspens in the garden who endured the seasons of drought with me, to the flock of crows who as a gift brought the fields nocturnal scent to me, to my mother who lived in a mirror and revealed the figure of my old age, and to the earth, whose burning womb I’ve filled with green seeds in my lust for repetition I shall salute once again.

• The Forbidden Walls
Now forbidding walls frontier walls rise again in the quiet night like plants sentries posted on my love’s estate I can sense it I know when it’s time to pray Now  all the stars are making love Come back with me Come back with me to the start of creation to the fragrant core of a fertilized egg to the moment I was born from you Come back with me You’ve left me incomplete Now the doves on the tips of my breasts take wing Now kisses cocooned in my lips stir like butterflies thinking of flight Now my body’s an altar ready for the rites of love. Let me conceive by the moon in the sanctuary of the night Let me be filled by small raindrops by infant hearts by the weight of children not yet born Perhaps my love could be the womb of another Jesus.

• Green Delusion
I wept all day to my mirror Spring had given my window away to the green delusion of trees how cramped I was in my cocoon alone my crown of paper mildewed and polluting the air of that sunless realm I couldn’t anymore, I couldn’t Street sounds, bird song tennis balls bounding away flurry of children fleeing balloons bobbing, climbing like soap bubbles to the tips of their branches of string and through ancient clefts in my fortress of silence whose walls securely hemmed me in the wind called my heart by its name panting as though sunk in love’s deepest, darkest moment.