poetry

In solitary life, I was a lost question;

In the encompassing darkness,

my answer was concealed.

You were a bright new star radiating light from the darkness of the unknown, revealed by fate.

The other stars rotated around you —once, twice — until it came to me, your unique radiance.

Then the bleak blackness broke And in the matching tremors of our two hands I found my missing answer.

Oh you! Oh you intimate, yet distant! Don’t you remember the coalescence Of your spirit in flames? Of my universe with yours? Of the two poets? Despite our great distance, Existence unites us – Existence!

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source: https://www.amust.com.au/2017/11/fadwa-tuqan-the-poet-of-palestine/

translated by Michael R Burch

biobibliographical note: Fadwa Tuqan became the Grand Dame of Palestinian letters, and was also known as ‘The Poet of Palestine.’ She is considered to be one of the very best contemporary Arab poets.

Sor Tadea de San Joaquín (1750-1827) was a Catholic nun and writer during the Chilean colonial period. She is regarded as the first woman poet of Chile.

Our city fled, And I saw my feet transform Into a river overflowing with blood, Into ships growing distant, expanding, And I saw my drowned shores seducing ... Our city fled, And refusal is a crushed pearl Whose powder anchors my ships, And refusal is a…

Márcia Wayna Kambeba is a member of the Omágua/Kambeba indigenous community in the Brazilian Amazon. She has a master’s degree in geography and is a writer, poet, composer, singer, storyteller, photographer, teacher, and lecturer. She is currently working on a project that combines literary and musical compositions to portray the resistance, culture, and identity of indigenous peoples. She lives in Castanhal, Pará in Brazil.

In 1960, the Syrian Lebanese poet Adonis published his prose poem manifesto and the Lebanese poet Unsi al-Hajj published his collection Lan (Won’t) with its seminal introduction theorising for the possibilities of poetry in prose. These are two theoretical cornerstones that launched the prose poem in Arabic. They are the first instances of using the Arabic term qaṣīdat al-nathr (prose poem) and by that announcing the entrance of the phrase into Arabic as a ‘simple abstraction.’

Adela Zamudio (1854-1928) was a highly intellectual Bolivian writer, feminist, and educator. She wrote verses from her adolescence under the nom de plume “Soledad” and lived her entire life in the city of Cochabamba, dedicated completely to education and literature. She was a formidable debater, using her talents often to defend the rights of women in the official debates of her time. According to her biography in the Antología de la Poesía Hispanoamericana (1965), in 1926 she was officially crowned for the government of her country. She is credited with beginning Bolivia's feminist movement and remains one of its most famous poets.

My mother is three years younger than Nakba. But she doesn’t believe in great powers. Twice a day she brings God down from his throne then reconciles with him through the mediation of the best recorded Quranic recitations. And she can’t bear meek women. She never once mentioned Nakba. Had Nakba been her neighbor, my mom would’ve shamelessly chided her: “I’m sick of the clothes on my back.” And had Nakba been her older sister, she would’ve courted her with a dish of khubaizeh, but if her sister whined too much, my mom would tell her: “Enough. You’re boring holes in my brain. Maybe we shouldn’t visit for a while?” And had Nakba been an old friend, my mom would tolerate her idiocy until she died, then imprison her in a young picture up on the wall of the departed, a kind of cleansing ritual before she’d sit to watch dubbed Turkish soap operas. And had Nakba been an elderly Jewish woman that my mom had to care for on Sabbath, my mom would teasingly tell her in cute Hebrew: “You hussy, you still got a feel for it, don’t you?” And had Nakba been younger than my mom, she’d spit in her face and say: “Rein in your kids, get’em inside, you drifter.”

—Haifa

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source: https://internationaleonline.org/ca/contributions/we-have-been-here-forever-palestinian-poets-write-back/ tr.: Fady Joudah

biobibliographical note: Hlewa is an award winning writer living in Haifa, and little known outside of Palestine. This is often the fate of Palestinian writers writing in Arabic and living within the 1948 borders of the settler state. Like my experience with my own family, the Arab literary scene has been historically cut off from Palestinians who never left the homeland. I first encountered this poem through the translation here by award winning Palestinian-American poet, translator, and medical doctor Fady Joudah. In addition to being a most sensitive Palestinian poet writing in English, Joudah is a committed curator and translator of Palestinian and Syrian poets, and his work has introduced me to many writers that I would consequently begin to read and to follow.

Two poems written during the major uprisings of Palestinian resistance against ongoing Israeli occupation in 2021.

Juana Inés de Asbaje y Ramírez de Santillana (1648-1695), or as she is better known, Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, was a self-educated poet, philosopher, and composer during the colonial period in Mexico—then called the territory of New Spain. She was fluent in Latin and Nahuatl in addition to her native Spanish. She is considered one of the most important and influential writers of the period, not merely within the Mexican or Hispanic American traditions, but in the entire Spanish-speaking world. She was forced to join a nunnery in her late teens by her own confessor and later lifelong antagonist the Bishop of Puebla. In a letter years later she would recall this, writing, “If you had known I was to write verses you would not have placed me in the convent but arranged my marriage.” The cloistered life afforded her time, access to books, and a cell of her own, and thus it became her most prolific period. The poetry she composed there would make her famous in the world well beyond the convent walls, and allow her to reel the world back into those walls, receiving many visitors and admirers and earning the protection and patronage of the viceroys of De Mancera, the archbishop viceroy Payo Enríquez de Rivera, and the marquises de la Laguna de Camero Viejo. Her work has long been honored by the Mexican government, and her life and works have inspired numerous authors, composers, and filmmakers. Carlos Fuentes once called her "the first great Latin American poet." She died at age 43 of an unknown plague while caring for a sister of her religious order, shortly after writing the now-famous letter to Sor Filotea de la Cruz, the pen name for the Bishop of Puebla.

we chew off fresh sugarcane and tell overblown stories

The poem featured here was written by an unknown Guaraní poet from the Maká people, an indigenous group native to Paraguay. This type of verse is considered part of the Guaraní tradition of religious songs.

I’m a whisper caught in the city’s breath / An echo trapped in the screams of death.

As Donald Ritchie once said: “The passage of time is a matter we commonly regret. … One of the ways of holding on to passing time is to transcribe it.” https://www.japantimes.co.jp/community/2024/11/18/our-lives/japan-writers-conference-fukushima/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=mastodon #community #ourlives #literature #poetry #translation

#Irish #HealthcareWorkers held a #protest against the Israeli atrocities against civilians in #Gaza.

#Transcription of the #poem read in video:

I'm not from Palestine, but here I stand, my eyes telling a thousand stories about a land,
A land of hope, a land of courage
A land where one child is braver than a million men
I am not from Palestine and the world is blind, they won't open their eyes or even take a stand.

Can they hear the children's cries?
Or the bombs that are raining from the skies?

I know they do, but all they do is justify their crimes
I'm not from Palestine, but I bleed because every Palestinian's wound is mine
I'm not from Palestine but I understand that what goes around comes around and that one day the sun will shine and my hands will touch the sand Of a free land called Palestine
I'm not from Palestine, but here I stand, my eyes telling a thousand stories about a land,
A land of hope.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=yQ8vFSKd1EM

From @PressTV on Telegram.

#Ireland
#IrishSolidarity
#Humanitarians
#FreePalestine
#Poem
#IsraelIsATerroristState
#IsraelWarCrimes
#RacistIsrael
#IsraelRogueState
#ArmsEmbargoOnIsrael
#USAFundsGenocide
#BoycottIsrael
#BDSMovement
#BoycottIsraeliApartheid
#StopGenocide
#ApartheidIsrael
#SanctionIsrael
#ZionismIsACult
#HumanityInAction
#Poetry

Manuel Gonzáles Prada (1844-1918) was an influential figure in Peruvian culture and politics during his lifetime. His essays were known for being full of irony and humor, and his innovative poetry has been described as a precursor to Modernism. In addition to his writing and political careers, Prada spent several years working as the Director of the National Library of Peru.

the world is not as bad as our neighbors made it to be that day— we’ve seen worse days— and how beautiful they were, these days living strife: how we loved everything about not having to go to school:

I won’t describe the past for you, I tell you I got held at borders, I tell you I am used to it, and what? What is this record you play over and over: don’t get used to it, you shouldn’t it’s sad—I bow in recognition:

and after the long journey from border to border, wanting only piece after piece of these walls around me to start breaking, what does not getting used to it do for me?

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source: https://themarkaz.org/poet-ahmad-almallah/

Ahmad Almallah is a poet from Palestine. His first book of poems Bitter English is now available in the Phoenix Poets Series from the University of Chicago Press. His new book Border Wisdom is now available from Winter Editions. He received the Edith Goldberg Paulson Memorial Prize for Creative Writing, and his set of poems “Recourse,” won the Blanche Colton Williams Fellowship. Some of his poems and other writing appeared in Jacket2, Track//Four, All Roads will lead You Home, Apiary, Supplement, SAND, Michigan Quarterly Review, Making Mirrors: Righting/Writing by Refugees, Cordite Poetry Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Great River Review, Kenyon Review, Poetry and American Poetry Review. Some of his work in Arabic has appeared in Al-Arabi Al-Jadid and Al-Quds Al-Arabi. His English works have been translated into Arabic, Russian and Telugu. He is currently Artist in Residence in Creative Writing at the University of Pennsylvania.

Francisco Gavidia (1863-1955) was a well-respected public figure in El Salvador known for his work as a writer, politician, lawyer, historian, educator, and journalist. His wide-ranging body of work includes everything from poetry and plays to music, pedagogy, and literary translation. In 1964, the Salvadoran government created a medal for intellectual merit named after Gavidia, to be awarded each year to a Central American writer or journalist who has made significant cultural contributions.

I didn’t believe I would ever learn to die

I wasn’t around when death was for free

But I was there when my maternal grandfather paid the price of cotton labourers’ sweat that made his Ottoman suit

The price of bare miles to the women of Bosnia

The price of their tears on the chests of their men before the war

The price of God’s banners

The price of the emperor’s frivolousness and long-term sickness

Balkan blood dripped on my school shirt

The teachers found vows of vengeance in my backpack, and so fabricated chapters of history

I wasn’t around when death happened by chance, on the road

But I was there when my paternal grandfather paid the price of a signature at the bottom of a page, the price of surrendering his village at the bottom of the mountain, of taking the occupier’s hands off of it, the rebel’s taking his hands off of his waist. With the move of a pen, my grandfather’s ink numbed the slope. With the folding of a paper, the mountain folded history, with a handshake, he took the valley’s hand from the tank’s muzzle.

The almond trees died in the cardiac operation rooms, the wedding horses shrouded their eyes with henna and killed themselves.

No one cleansed my ethnicity. But the mountain’s spinal cord broke. And so broke my chance to ever ascend it together, to look at Christ’s footsteps on the lake and copy them.

I’m not the miracle

I didn’t walk on water and I didn’t heal myself of your love’s ailments

But it was my heart’s water which I learned to turn into asphalt whenever I remembered you

I learned to flee the lava that dripped from the mountains of your fear

And I didn’t learn death

I wasn’t there when death was a once and for all lesson

Where the memory of the rocket betrayed it and so forgot the way

The bullet that never meant to cease being a pen

The massacre that passed by the main road and fired peace

When I was walking in the back road

Picking yellow daisies and watching wars drawn in cartoons

I didn’t believe I would ever learn to die

Until Beirut’s war drowned my mother’s lullaby in the well

The scent of invasions emanates from the cooking oven

The commando’s voice enters Um Kulthoum’s cassette

The skulls that paved the city road, they leave the poster hanging beside the bed and lull me, tapping my soft head like a long latmiya. So I stop crying, or they stop crying in it.

My heart grows in the well like a pomegranate tree, each time a branch is broken I climb another on my way to you. All of me breaks, so I become a nest. The birds look in the water and see the laughing face of a Bosnian, I look in it and see your face.

I am the child of tubes crossbred in a medical lab

I smelled the scent of dead horses in my father’s sperm

And I retreated

I was born in the seventh month

After I was beaten by Bosnians in my mother’s womb

And I retreated

I didn’t believe I would ever learn to die

Until the Hebron massacre was committed on the cake of my ninth birthday. I lit the candles on the carpets of Abraham’s house. They melted there alone and no one sang upon them. The birthday gifts fall into the well, the gifts fall, vows of vengeance, in my backpack

The vows would’ve dug my grave had they any hands

The almond trees would’ve stepped on it had they a spinal cord

The mountains would’ve praised it had they any poems

The Bosnian’s tears would’ve creviced its stones had they any beaks or claws

And I would’ve come out

To learn the first lesson

That the smashed skull in the poster is my skull

And that the blood on my shirt

Is my blood

---

source: https://www.lyrikline.org/de/uebersetzungen/details/4355/12874 biobibliographical note: https://www.lyrikline.org/en/authors/asmaa-azaizeh

Time to add some poetry to your feed! Here's a little something by @[email protected], the Banksy of the poetry world, about monetizing your followers.

#BrianBilston #Poetry #Humor #Humour #Monetization #SocialMedia #Monet

Chimalpahin, or Domingo Francisco de San Antón Muñón Chimalpahin Quauhtlehuanitzin (1579-1660), was born in Chalco, in what is now central Mexico. He is best known for writing the history of Mexico in both Nahuatl and Spanish. The better known of his surviving works is Relaciones, or Anales, which includes testimonies from indigenous people and descriptions of the events before and after the colony was established. He died in Mexico City.

I shall plough

everywhere

and move on

Out of your soul’s press

and your body’s distillery

I shall be drunk on your last breath

In the palms of your hands

I shall place all of me

All time will pass

Me and you

everywhere

we shall be

• -

And while we are aware of our profound sadness

we force our bodies to pass through infinite tunnels

where the world is preoccupied with perfecting its plans

to eliminate our children

Q: You are an Arab artist?

A: Me? God forbid! I am a criminal, thank God. God was merciful and kind to me.

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The mornings green, yellow

and honey hued

In the time of the apricots

The smell of burning sugar

Children playing in the dust

while my mother makes coffee

and milk and tea

My mother

In the time of the apricots

Always my mother

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source: https://www.shaeirat-project.com/by-the-time-of-the-apricots Kotob Khan ed., Cairo, 2019 – translation Youssef Rakha

In the Time of the Apricots is a tour de force. A cycle of poems, it embraces the entire life experience of a woman poet who happens to be Palestinian. We can find, without being able to disentangle them, daily life and politics, desires, childhood memories, motherhood. The insistent memory of the mother is like the refrain of this long and finely chiselled song.

The variety of poetic forms is brought into play and their meticulous arrangement into an ode to life recited in an almost natural voice by this duet of splendid readers, each in her language, is a drama in stereo where anger, sensuality, reportage, elegy, fantasies, the infinite tenderness of mothers, heady melancholy of this season of apricots and the smell of Turkish coffee all mix.

biobibliographical note:

Carol Sansour is a poet from Palestine whose first book, في المشمش, In the Time of the Apricots, appeared in a trilingual edition in 2019 in Cairo by Kottob Khan ed. The French translation has been published in Geneva by Héros Limite ed. in May 2022, coupled with her second collection, Jamila.

She co-manages the Shaeirat Project and is the director of the Athens Palestine Film Festival. Her work is translated into French, English, Italian, Spanish and German.

Carmen Peña Visbal, born in Barranquilla, Colombia, is a poet, journalist, lawyer, and expert in strategic communications. Visbal has studied human resources at the Industrial University of Santander; law at the Free University of Colombia; human rights at the ESAP (Escuela Superior de Administracion Publica); security and national defense at the War College of Colombia (Escuela Superior de Guerra); criminal law and forensic sciences at the Catholic University of Colombia; senior management at Nueva Granada Military University; and political management and governance at the University of the Rosary. She has held numerous leadership positions in journalism, government, and consulting. Visbal’s collections of poetry include Dite (1994), Las vestiduras de mi alma (1998), Mi voz no te alcanza (2008), and Todo silencio es esencial (unpublished). She has also been included in several anthologies such as Poseia Colombiana del siglo XX escrita por mujeres, Vol. 2 and Siete Poetas: Dreams of a country at peace without mines.

When you walk under the rain, take off your shoes and walk barefoot. Let your feet feel the water on the ground, let them soak a little. Let your feet sink into the mud, feel its softness and play with it using your toes.

But whatever you do, do not look up at the sky. That gray sky with its black clouds. You will see death hovering above you, smiling a terrifying smile. You will see deadly smoke in the air. You will see the souls of children gazing at you with pity. You will see the rain turning red, mixed with blood.

You will not like the sight of the sky, so don’t look at it. Look at the ground, at the puddle of water. You will see your reflection in it. Look closely and remember who you are. This is you, and this is the land where you grew up.

This puddle, debris will fall on it at any moment and might hit or kill you. Run away from it and stop at another puddle. Look at your reflection again. Remember who you are, then run again.

And when the rain stops and the puddles dry up, look up at the sky. Have you understood what has happened to you? Have you finally realized what is going on around you? Have you grasped that you are forgotten, perhaps even dead to those people? Those who stripped you of your identity and took away your safe refuge. Those who killed your family and broke your spirit. The time has come.

You will go and fight so that the sky returns to its blue, the clouds to white, and the rain to clear!

You will fight so that the sun rises, plants grow, and you breathe oxygen instead of gunpowder.

And either you return victorious, or you do not return at all.

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source: https://wearenotnumbers.org/when-it-rains-blood/

Reem Sleem is a student in the Department of English Language, Literature, and Translation at Al-Azhar University. She is ambitious, loves learning languages, ​​and has a passion for reading personal development books and novels of all types.

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.

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