Outside ideas of right doing and wrong doing there is a field
I’ll meet you there.
That old same place, mid-state, with sunshine 300 or so days a year.
Where we can break bread again,
take our tomatoes and our cheese,
our chicken wet with curry and make a meal.
Let us saw through those bones to the mealy marrow,
and you tell me how Khomeni kicked you out,
how Carter’s men spit on you for your predictions,
as if you were a knowing Ocyrhoe, foretelling a fall
new faces, black shawls
semi-automatic weapons.
Tell me how you woke in Kubla Khan after 15 hours,
two transfers, a train ride, then the plane.
Tell me then how your hand acted from divine guidance
minutes curling in the twirl of your ear
letters and odes devotedly written in the closet of your family home.
How, after you arrived, found new art,
wrote of Varo’s Birds while blindfolded,
cried when they destroyed de Koonings’ Woman.
Tell me how long we can idle this car in the cold,
whether we can make it in this new desert of yours,
so far away from Dasht-e Kavir, Neigenan, the true center of your bearings.
Finally tell how you let go of ‘God willing’, Ma-daar, or
Reza’s skinny wrists as he ran away from you when you got off the plane.
And tell me there is more than one field
where both the wounds of light and truth
can dry and heal—where the great blinking eye of aloneness closes,
and you are my father again.
*Poetry assignment that required: a childhood memory, the name of two politicians, a starting quote from a non-modern poet (in this case Jalāl ad-Dīn Muḥammad Balkhī, otherwise known as Rumi), two works of art significant to me, and some reference to a story from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Whew!
(Source: natashavc)
![magdolenelives:
Thou shalt not mess with a woman’s reproductive rights.” — Fallopians 4:28[Courtesy Arizona Women Unite Rally April 28th, 2012]](http://25.media.tumblr.com/tumblr_m3dyfzz4sd1qbjc2ao1_500.jpg)
Thou shalt not mess with a woman’s reproductive rights.” — Fallopians 4:28
[Courtesy Arizona Women Unite Rally April 28th, 2012]
(via fuckyeahfeminists)
“The gods recline. Old Baucis, with her skirts
tucked up—and hands that shook a bit—sets out
the table; one of it three legs was short—
but then the piece of broken pottery
she jams beneath the shorter leg adjusts
the slant—at last it’s level. And with green
mint leaves, old Baucis wipes the table clean.
She offers dappled olives—green-and-black—
the berries frank Minerva cherishes;
wild cherries, pickled fruits of autumn, kept
in lees of wine; endive and radishes;
and curdled cheese; and—taken from warm ashes—
some very delicately roasted eggs.
And all of this is served on earthen dishes.
That same rich ware is matched by the embossed
wine bowl they have set out with beechwood cups
whose cracks and holes were patched with yellow wax.
And soon the steaming ham and cabbage come
from off the hearth; and wine of no great age
again is served, then set aside: the space
is needed for the final course—dried dates
and nuts and figs and plums and purple grapes
straight from the vine, and fragrant apples heaped
in ample baskets; and the centerpiece—
a comb of honey that is pale and clear.
And to all these are added liveliness,
good cheer, kind faces—willing, generous.
His eyes seized upon the sudden beatitude of her face illuminated by exaltation. It was as if in the dilated wrinkles, in the quivering nose, in the agitated eyelids (and even in the streaks of penciled brows, in the narrow forehead and the tiny ears) all the emblems of life were reunited, emblems of a splendid and definitive existence which afterward was dispersed in the tiny blue veins, in the aureoles of her breasts, in the groove of her buttocks, even in the nails painted with an already cracked and fading red.