Category: art

Your love
Should never be offered to the mouth of a
Stranger,
Only to someone
Who has the valor and daring
To cut pieces of their soul off with a knife
Then weave them into a blanket
To protect you.

Hafiz

THE MOMENT
by Margaret Atwood

The moment when, after many years
of hard work and a long voyage
you stand in the centre of your room,
house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,
knowing at last how you got there,
and say, I own this,

is the same moment when the trees unloose
their soft arms from around you,
the birds take back their language,
the cliffs fissure and collapse,
the air moves back from you like a wave
and you can’t breathe.

No, they whisper. You own nothing.
You were a visitor, time after time
climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.
We never belonged to you.
You never found us.
It was always the other way round.

la la la human steps – dance like u’ve never seen before: Exaucé / Salt is a multimedia performance employing live music, film, video and dramatic lighting and decor to convey the emotional and dramatic dimensions of the choreography. The multidimensionality of Édouard Lock’s imagination draws the spectator into a performance world where sweat and muscle interact with the ephemeral.

“This precisely drawn piece, with its total concentration on pointe dance, sustains a remarkable tension. Shorter dance sequences build a chain of movement that evolves to a poetic river, aided by live music for cello, piano and electric guitar (courtesy of David Lang and Kevin Shields). Projected on the back wall of the stage, images by Lock himself lend this otherwise abstract piece a touch of warmth.”

love this…

A MOMENT

i stand still, gently, silently
in measured quietude,
proportioned gratitude,
concentrated sharply on diffusion –
transport to another state,
another aspect, another day.

a voluptuous breeze slings by:
touching, caressing, inviting,
blending in lazy sunny ways
with little insistence on etiquette –
even-keeled and pleasant,
careless of its fluid seduction.

light enters into the cave,
a stranger in the cloud forest –
sliced, transmuted by giant fronds,
disembodied, unrepentant –
it tricks the eye, sheds bulky heat
to slyly mix with ribboned leaves.

i close my eyes and breath, deeply,
the rich verdant aroma of the forest,
the balmy breeze, the stunted heat,
the coqui’s song, shimmery and sweet,
i feel profoundly present, yet ethereal,
unbound by time-space coordinates

no mental maps, obsessive turns,
no skipping to predestined stops,
no clogged mind or arteries –
brain flushed of uneven thoughts;
clean, clean, clean and sparse
transfixed by a nascent star –

a concept, a prophesy,
caught in a fishing net, redeemed
from the spiral arms of galaxies,
the sheer folds of dusty dreams,
instinct a vestigial muscle no more
preens the feisty notion, attentively.

ah, i can breathe again,
yes i can truly breathe:
each gulp of air, squeeze of the lung,
each rise and fall, crest and trough,
timed to sweet perfection –
life is mysterious, magnificent.

connectedness, that weathered word;
brainwave to beating heart to ligament,
wind to tree, root to leaf, rich scented soil
to restless deeds and grounded feet –
absolved, absorbed and softly grieved,
maternal womb to earthy tomb.

connectedness, as sweet as cake,
muddies the water of time’s parade
the stagnant mix of past and present
holds court with future’s regal arc –
time dwells in synchronous bent,
a mobius strip of dawn and dusk.

if silence is the medium of poesie
then let me be fully soundless today
let me stand still in muted humility,
and partake of this soulful solitude
let me be one with the forest’s gravity,
i close my eyes to capture a moment.

one of my favorite writers – learned to write english from his short stories.

The motorcycle increased his status, gave him weight, so that people began calling him Uncle and asking his opinion on world affairs, about which he knew absolutely nothing. He could now range farther, doing much wider business. Best of all, now he could spend every night with his wife, who early in the marriage had begged to live not in Nawab’s quarters in the village but with her family in Firoza, near the only girls’ school in the area. Read complete short story here.

The waiting drove me mad… you’re finally here and I’m a mess
I take your entrance back… can’t let you roam inside my head
I don’t want to take what you can give…
I would rather starve than eat your bread…

Poems are not simply emotions – they are experiences. For the sake of a single poem, you must see many cities, many people and things and know the gestures which small flowers make when they open in the morning. You must be able to think back to streets in unknown neighborhoods, to unexpected encounters, and to partings you have long seen coming, to days of childhood whose mystery is still unexplained, to childhood illnesses, to mornings by the sea, to the sea itself, to nights of travel, and it is still not enough.