Thursday, November 15, 2012

All but for one leaf



"If she[…] had known how much her first half-inch beginning to let go would take - and how long her noticing and renouncing owning and her turning her habits, and beginning the slimmest self-mastery whose end was nowhere in sight - would she have begun?”
Annie Dillard, The Maytrees



A rock
dozes in the sun
A young sky
blinks
And rain traverses
a rutted face
Carrying away
grit, dust, dreams
The rock gives up
these parts of itself
without protest
(You could say
that the rock
has lost its integrity)


A person in a life time 
amasses 
reams of wrongs
Undeniably suffered
grievances
So many uncountable
Swelling
Unutterable
Things
Slop over the
deckled edge


My mind today
is bare as the trees are
Bare
beneath a tufted sky
All but for one leaf
dangling
crimson
translucent




Written for One Single Impression, "struggle"

Wednesday, November 7, 2012

Tonight we celebrate



Tonight we celebrate
A beginning.
No time for complacency.

Written for Real Toads, Mama Zen's challenge

Wednesday, October 3, 2012

on purpose

I walk counter clock wise
on purpose
backfilling the grooves.

Thursday, September 20, 2012

Ululation


** "I swear it to you on my common woman's head, the common woman is as common as a common loaf of bread--and will rise."  Judy Grahn from The Common Woman

Ululation


At Real Toads,  Kenia introduces us to the landai form and invites us to “write a bunch” of them.



Kenia's Wednesday Challenge

image credit: Drew Harron via Compfight

Only five out of 100 women in Afghanistan graduate from high school; most are married by the age of 16.  For many, poetry allows them to express themselves. It's the only voice they have, but women writing poetry is seen as shameful and could result in a beating or even death, reason why they have to rely on pen names.

Women write and recite landai, two-line folk poems that can often be humorous, sexy, raging, tragic and  also deal with love, grief,  war, exile and Afghan independence. The success of the poetry form is attributed to it being easy to memorize, which is really important in a culture where women are poorly schooled and forbidden to write or read.
The word landai means “short, poisonous snake” in Pashto. The poems are collective — no single person writes a landai; a woman repeats one, shares one. It is hers and not hers.


“Landai belong to women,” Safia Siddiqi, a renowned Pashtun poet and former Afghan parliamentarian, said. In Afghanistan, poetry is the women’s movement from the inside."
.
Please go to this New York Times article to learn more about lanai, the eloquent poetry of resistance of the Afghan women:


Ululation 
*for Zarmina

Cut out my tongue,  my voice
becomes a slender insect’s song.
Now the night is ripe with music
Is there anyone who can still sleep?



In the hills my sisters are waking.
the sky swells to contain their grief.




A storm gathers, women open their throats
a cloud passes in front of the sun.


Under this burqa, I am invisible.  Nobody sees
the brown leg of sorrow or the contour of my wings. 



My secret wish.  Simply this.  That my daughters
find these shards of my heart and can make no sense of them!


Written for  Imaginary Gardens with Real Toads , “landai”.

* Rahila was the name used by a young poet, Zarmina, who committed suicide two years ago. Zarmina was reading her love poems over the phone when her sister-in-law caught her. “How many lovers do you have?” she teased. Zarmina’s family assumed there was a boy on the other end of the line. As a punishment, her brothers beat her and ripped up her notebooks, Amail said. Two weeks later, Zarmina set herself on fire. 


**  "The Common Woman" by Judy Grahn - A classic of the second wave feminist movement, published in the form of a pamphlet.  I bought my copy at Old Wives Tales bookstore in San Francisco and it was passed from friend to friend.