“ You won’t allow me to go to school.
I won’t become a doctor.
Remember this:
One day you will be sick. ”
Poem written by a 15 year old Afghan girl
This poem was recorded in a NYT magazine article about female underground poetry groups in Afghanistan. An amazing article about the ways in which women are using a traditional two line poetry form to express their resistance to male oppression, their feelings about love (considered blasphemous), and their doubts about religion.
(via 1612th)
(Source: katyuno)
The mortar stirred beneath his fingertips, fragments tumbling over his skin. He could feel the slow thoughts of crushed stone deep inside the bricks, memories of rivers and mines and the baking heat of the furnace in which they had been reshaped. In the empty alleyway his footsteps were quiet, his soles brushing the cobbles, but his breathing was loud and pushed the still air in eddies over the walls. As he walked he traced the mortar lines with his fingers, lost in the crystalline awareness that spread through his veins and did not speak but did not need to speak, that projected still and solid into his being so that it became a struggle to remember how it was that he was able to lift his feet, how his lungs could possibly contract and expand.
They are police, soldiers, teachers, journalists, scientists. They are fashion models and film stars. They are landladies, housekeepers, cooks. They are exotic dancers and sex workers. They are animal rights, social, labor activists. They are gender rebels. They are community…
(Source: i-ambic)
I’ve given you my dreams, but they amounted to nothing and I sought new ones to bring back to you. In times of peace our farmers work warily in the fields, their scythes never far from reach even in the sowing season; there’s war in our blood, put there by our murderous neighbours. On the darkest nights, when the moon’s newborn and weak, you’ll see the Lights above the mountain passes, veils of iridescence that form valleys in other worlds. The cock crows – morning is here, and I must be gone. Leave a space in your dwelling-place for my bed and my books and I’ll be back, a shadow under your door. He has grown tall, your little boy, and handsome, skilled, cold as the moors under the deathless snow. When we last spoke, he said that he would be the end of me. Did he speak truth, little sister?
In blood we’re born, by blood we’ll live and in blood we’ll die – call that what you will, but aren’t we born to it? My mind is with the lightning and my heart beats a rhythm beneath the bloody earth. This is my place, and the Hunt is called. What need have we to remember the dead? We forget and forgive, and return their bodies to the earth and all else to their loved ones. This day stands still, and the eagle cries to the clear blue high above. I stand in the waves, and they pool about my shins and tell me what has happened on the Great Way, show me the shards of ships and the broken bodies.
Your boy’s come home, little sister.
We are butterfly collectors, to whom stories flutter sometimes to land in our caged hands, shifting in stop-motion as we gaze at them and, motionless, try to record how they move and look, what noise they make and their particular scent, and the feeling of them. They become restless in moments, so that we have the choice to pin them down and watch them slowly still, or to release them, and watch them faithlessly spiral away from us. They leave only coloured dust on our fingertips, and we use it to try to recreate the reality of wings brushing our skin.
The best of us have minds like butterfly houses.
“ We are all a little weird and life’s a little weird, and when we find someone whose weirdness is compatible with ours, we join up with them and fall in mutual weirdness and call it love. ”
Robert Fulghum
If you must burn, for grief or rage
Then burn, but let me burn beside you.
Let me rise and flare and fall,
Swayed by the swirling air that sways you;
Let me dance with you this once,
And let the reactions of my flesh be yours
So that merged, we’ll flare like dying stars
And end universes with our ending.
We’ll light the world, and when we burn no more –
Are char and dust – let our ashes mingle,
Feather-light and indistinguishable and still.
Let us never be scattered.
I don’t know if anyone will ever read this, or even if it can be read. If I close my eyes and allow my hand to trace the motions of my thoughts, the shapes that it forms on the parchment seem regular and might perhaps be correct. Even if I fool myself, drawing meaningless scrawls, the action associated with writing is a comfort. Perhaps one day it will be read, when all of this has passed and our senses are restored. I would like to hope that I will know the reader, but after fifty cycles of the seasons hope is a difficult thing to summon. I am an old man and I will die before this is over, if it is ever over.
So, stranger, I greet you, if you exist, and hope that my thoughts and hands do not wander too much in the process of this piece. If they do, I apologise - my memory has become a candle flame guttering in the gales of Time, and even the best of writers will struggle to edit what they cannot read.
I apologise also for the Library, which grows outside my window through the shouts of men and the groans of wood and stone and orders that I should not have given. You know who I am now, and I beg you not to burn this flimsy work of prose because of its unfortunate chance of authorship. Please continue to read, stranger. I wish to explain my actions. The Library was a terrible mistake - a series of terrible mistakes - and I have been a fool, whose lead others have followed when they should have been led better. You have no reason nor right to acquit me, but I beg you to listen to my defence.
