poetry

I heard the voice of myself / in the middle of war and death / wondering if I was a ghost.

Virgilio Dávila (1869-1943) was born in Toa Baja, Puerto Rico. Though he experimented with a Romantic style of verse, he is often mentioned as the primary representative of the Modernist movement in Puerto Rico. The influence of Rubén Darío, for example, can be clearly noted throughout his work. He devoted many of his poems to the indigenous beauty of his native island and unique syncretic culture therein. He was widely published by the time he died in Bayamón in 1943.

If Gaza hadn’t been killed, I’d be at my house, waiting to tell my friends how wide the Nile is, what it’s like inside an Egyptian movie theatre, and the best place in Cairo to order Koshari.

If Gaza hadn’t been killed, we’d be in a chalet, playing cards. Ouda would be losing, of course. He’d throw his cards, while Essa laughed at him. We’d awkwardly sing “bring me to life.”

If Gaza hadn’t been killed, I’d be walking with Bassem along Omar AL Mokhtar Street to Al Susi falafel shop. We’d eat two falafel sandwiches with hummus, each. Then to Abo Soad shop for hot Konafa.

If Gaza hadn’t been killed, I’d wake up early. cursing all the alarms in the world, going to work, drinking my morning coffee with the mates and wondering if I will ever not be late to work.

If Gaza hadn’t been killed, I’d sit with Bahaa at Al Baqa Cafe, where we’d repeat our daily jokes about the drones forever passing overhead, as Al Baha Al Abyad kissed the blushing sunset sky.

source: https://therumpus.net/2024/03/22/march-beyond-the-page/

Basman Aldirawi (also published under Basman Derawi) is a physiotherapist who graduated from Al-Azhar University in Gaza in 2010. Inspired by an interest in music, movies, and people with special needs, he has contributed dozens of stories to the online platform We Are Not Numbers, that gives a voice to the victims of Israeli aggression in Gaza; he has also published on many other online platforms. Basman contributed to the anthology Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, 2022 and the Arabic poetry anthology Gaza, the land of poetry, 2021. He is temporarily located in Egypt.

Amédée Brun (1868-1896) published his first poems when he was only seventeen, and later studied law in Paris. His poetry is usually categorized under the Romantic period, and, despite his short life, he managed to publish prolifically. His works include novels, poetry, and short stories inspired by his observations of quotidian Haitian life.

Photo courtesy of prothomalo “They are killing my people.” Mosab Abu Toha I will not be silent. When Sri Lankan soldiers murdered seventy thousand Tamil civilians in the Vanni during the last months of the last Eelam War ...

Nahuatl poet Tochihuitzin was born sometime near the end of the fourteenth century and died near the beginning of the fifteenth. He was a contemporary of Nezahualcócotl and, in fact, is said to have rescued Nezahualcócotl once as his enemies surrounded him with every intention to slay him. He differs slightly from many of the well-known Aztec poets in his chosen subjects, opting not to write as much about the glory and grief of war as about metaphysical questions.

Born in Ayllu Qaqachaca, Department of Oruro, Elvira Espejo Ayca is a painter, weaver, poet, musician, documentary filmmaker, and storyteller in the oral tradition. She is a graduate of the Academia Nacional de Bellas Artes in La Paz. She has had numerous exhibitions and, in January 2013, was named director of the National Museum of Ethnography and Folklore (MUSEF) in La Paz.

Read the winning entry, Lemon Blossoms by Lena Khalaf Tuffaha.

Jeannette L. Clariond is a poet, translator, and editor. Her published collections of poetry include Mujer dando la espalda (finalist for the Ramón López Velarde National Poetry Prize, 1992); Desierta memoria (winner of the Efraín Huerta National Poetry Prize, 1996); Todo antes de la noche (winner of the Gonzalo Rojas National Poetry Prize, 2001); Leve sangre, Marzo 10, NY (performed in Madrid using dance and music); 7 visiones (with Gonzalo Rojas); and the retrospective anthology Astillada claridad (UANL, 2014). She is also the author of the prose memoir Cuaderno de Chihuahua (Fondo de Cultura Económica). In 2003, Clariond founded the publishing house Vaso Roto Ediciones, which she has directed since then. She was awarded a Fundación Rockefeller-Conaculta grant in 2004 for her translation of Charles Wright’s Black Zodiac, a BANFF Translators Grant in 2004 for The School of Wallace Stevens: A Profile of North American Poetry (co-edited with critic Harold Bloom), and recognition from the Italian Institute for Culture in 2008 for her translations of the poet Alda Merini. For her poetry and her contributions to translation and culture, she was awarded the Juan de Mairena Prize by the University of Guadalajara in 2014.

From the River to the Sea every street, every house, every room, every window, every balcony, every wall, every stone, every sorrow, every word, every letter, every whisper, every touch, every glan…

Seed Seed, so tightly wound, a tiny world waiting for rain, rays, and welcoming ground to uncage your dream unfurl your flag create this intention of brown and bright green. Stem and leaves growing...

Maria Farazdel is a native of the Dominican Republic who has lived and worked in New York since the age of 17. She received her BA from Hunter College, MA in Education from Fordham University, and PhD in School District Administration from Long Island University. Formally an Assistant Principal, she has taught English as a Second Language and Bilingual Education. She is a member of Dominican Poets USA and the literary group Camila Enriquez Ureña. She is the author of the books My Little Paradise, Amongst Voices and Spaces, and Laberinto de la Espera.

Poem by an unknown author. According to Abraham Arias-Larreta in Literaturas Aborigenes de America (1976), “The Mayan Uinal was a period of 20 days, each of them with a different name. The Mayan year, or Haab, was composed of 18 Uinales and a final period of 5 days, the Xma Kaba Kin, nameless days.”

I am drawing an image of me that remains embedded in an undissolved dream of mine.

You may take my hands and lock them in your chains You may also blindfold me.

You bereaved me from the light and I marched You robbed me of the bread and I ate. You plundered the land from me and I ploughed.

I am the son of the land and for that I find goodness in this earth anywhere I happen to be: The ants of this land feed me The branches of this land foster me The eagles of this land will shield my open revolt

Yes You may take my hands And lock them in your chains You may also blindfold me But here I will stand tall And here I shall remain until the very end.

(April, 1970)

source: palestineinsight.net From: El Azmar, Fouzi. POEMS FROM AN ISRAELI PRISON. Intro. By Israel Shahak. New York: KNOW Books, 1973.

An owl winks in the shadows
A lizard lifts on tiptoe, breathing hard
Young male sparrow stretches up his neck,
                   big head, watching—

The grasses are working in the sun. Turn it green.
Turn it sweet. That we may eat.
Grow our meat.

Brazil says “sovereign use of Natural Resources”
Thirty thousand kinds of unknown plants.
The living actual people of the jungle
        sold and tortured—
And a robot in a suit who peddles a delusion called “Brazil”
        can speak for them?

        The whales turn and glisten, plunge
                and sound and rise again,
        Hanging over subtly darkening deeps
        Flowing like breathing planets
              in the sparkling whorls of
                     living light—

And Japan quibbles for words on
        what kinds of whales they can kill?
A once-great Buddhist nation
        dribbles methyl mercury
        like gonorrhea
                      in the sea.

Pere David's Deer, the Elaphure,
Lived in the tule marshes of the Yellow River
Two thousand years ago—and lost its home to rice—
The forests of Lo-yang were logged and all the silt &
Sand flowed down, and gone, by 1200 AD—
Wild Geese hatched out in Siberia
        head south over basins of the Yang, the Huang,
        what we call “China”
On flyways they have used a million years.
Ah China, where are the tigers, the wild boars,
                   the monkeys,
                      like the snows of yesteryear
Gone in a mist, a flash, and the dry hard ground
Is parking space for fifty thousand trucks.
IS man most precious of all things?
—then let us love him, and his brothers, all those
Fading living beings—

North America, Turtle Island, taken by invaders
        who wage war around the world.
May ants, may abalone, otters, wolves and elk
Rise! and pull away their giving
        from the robot nations.

Solidarity. The People.
Standing Tree People!
Flying Bird People!
Swimming Sea People!
Four-legged, two-legged people!

How can the head-heavy power-hungry politic scientist
Government     two-world     Capitalist-Imperialist
Third-world     Communist      paper-shuffling male
             non-farmer     jet-set     bureaucrats
Speak for the green of the leaf? Speak for the soil?

(Ah Margaret Mead . . . do you sometimes dream of Samoa?)

The robots argue how to parcel out our Mother Earth
To last a little longer
                    like vultures flapping
Belching, gurgling,
                    near a dying doe.
“In yonder field a slain knight lies—
We'll fly to him and eat his eyes
                    with a down
         derry derry derry down down.”

             An Owl winks in the shadow
             A lizard lifts on tiptoe
                         breathing hard
             The whales turn and glisten
                         plunge and
             Sound, and rise again
             Flowing like breathing planets

             In the sparkling whorls

             Of living light.

                      Stockholm: Summer Solstice 40072

https://poets.org/poem/mother-earth-her-whales

A poet and professor at the Universidade Federal da Bahia, Lívia Natália is the author of five poetry collections: Água Negra (2011), Correntezas e Outros Estudos Marinhos (2015), Água Negra e Outras Águas (2016), Sobejos Do Mar (2017), and Dia Bonito pra Chover (2017). In 2016, her poem “Quadrilha,” which describes the grief of a woman whose lover was killed by the Polícia Militar, was censored throughout the state of Bahia. All copies of the poem—which had been displayed publicly on billboards as part of the Poetry in the Streets project in Ilhéus—were ordered to be destroyed.

Three poems from Naser Rabah, written in Maghaazi Camp, Gaza. Our New Neighbor 1. If we were to plant bullets What would the earth sprout, I...

I WAS in three languages
and I died in all three of them.

So how come you still speak?

María Adela Bonavita (1900–1934) was born in San José, Uruguay and died before her 34th birthday. She published just one collection of poetry in her lifetime, The Conscience of the Suffering Song. One more collection was published after her death. She was plagued by “a nervous illness.” At four years of age, she began attending the odd class in the cultural center “mostly for entertainment,” wrote her brother in the introduction to her second poetry collection, which she'd dictated to him from her deathbed. She worked as a teacher for most of her adult life, setting up a small school in her home where she was beloved by her students. She was also known to create portraits of family members in her spare time, though she’d never received any education on the subject.

This film is one of three shorts I made during a week in Beirut in May 2011. The films were commissioned by Reel Festivals and Creative Scotland and the remit was make a series of short films "inspired by" the festival of poets that Reel Festivals was running in Lebanon. It was an amazing week, it's not every day that you get to meet poets from Lebanon, Palestine, Syria and Scotland. It was a real honour to make a film with Mazen Maarouf, he's an extraordinary man, who is a real artistic collaborator and embraced the filmmaking with true panache. It would be great to go back and make a longer film about his life together.

Regnor Charles Bernard (1915-1981) was a Haitian-born poet, essayist, literary critic, and journalist who taught both in the Congo and in Canada. He published three books of poetry in his lifetime: Le Souvenir (1940), Pêche d’étoiles (1943), and Négre (1945).

Heba Abu Nada, a brilliant Palestinian poet and novelist, was killed by an Israeli airstrike on her home in Khan Younes, Gaza, on October 20, 2023. To honor her memory and the thousands of other Palestinians martyred by the Zionist state as part of their genocidal assault on Gaza, we are co-publishing Huda Fakhreddine’s translation of her poem “Not Just Passing” alongside ArabLit.

The translation featured here uses the same version of the poem used by Alfred M. Tozzer (1877-1954), and draws upon his notes and annotations. A highly respected and influential anthropologist, archaeologist, linguist, and educator who specialized in Mesoamerican studies, Tozzer served as the president of the American Anthropological Society and was a member of the National Academy of Sciences. In 1974, Harvard renamed its Peabody Museum Library the Tozzer Library.

These are the titles of 120 films from Palestinian cinema archives, strung together in an experiment to see if it is possible to know from their names alone what stories Palestinians want to tell. The links for these films are available separately.