Monday, August 17, 2015

"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.'

Friday, May 15, 2015

Alain Bousquet



Je ne suis pas un poete d'eau douce 

"I am no milk-and-water poet"


Tuesday, April 14, 2015

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."

Saturday, March 21, 2015

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.
 

Thursday, February 26, 2015


Constantinople, 1522 and Krakow, 1573


Thursday, December 11, 2014

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.



Tuesday, October 21, 2014




paper crane,

i will write peace on your wings

and you will fly all over the world