original post

Learning to Pray All Over (m.kahf)

One of these days, I’ll add
A spiritual dimension to my life
One of these days I’ll learn to pray
Here’s how it will start: Alone
In a great jelly of time and space,
I will wallow in formlessness

At first. Never having tasted time
Outside the running from task to task,
I will drink my fill. Summer shade
And Popsicles beyond counting!
Nude I will go, everywhere out-
rageous and inappropriate, reveling

Slowly I will begin to want
A rhythm to shape and space my days.
I will wake a little earlier. Eat
A little less. A little less will do,
Because I will still be so still inside.
As still as the first daybreak.

Soon, like the second half of an eclipse,
The dark will shift. I’ll come to know
That all this time I had been living
On a quarter of the light the real sun has.
That thing that trains and forces souls
to pray will move aside. I’ll fall down,

as if blind, with my unused eyes. Groping
I will discover the knobs and knots
In the wall of my own soul. Opening
the door, I will emerge to fields
Of sorrows and wildflowers, I will find
Rock, stream, tree, wind, road

These, these will become my daily prayers.

[mohja khaf]

Jailed Artist, Mehraneh Atashi (no info)

Case of Acclaimed Photographer is One of Hundreds Who Have “Disappeared” Into the Prison System

URL to article
(1 February 2010) Internationally recognized photographer Mehraneh Atashi, along with her husband Madjid Ghaffari, were arrested on 12 January 2010 in their home in Tehran and detained, apparently in solitary confinement in ward 209 of Evin prison, but authorities have released no information about charges against them, the International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran reported today. Atashi and her husband have had no access to a lawyer. They have been allowed no visit by their family and only one brief telephone call they used to inform relatives they had been arrested.

“The arrest and detention of Mehraneh Atashi and her husband are, unfortunately, typical of hundreds of other arrests where Iranian citizens have been snatched by authorities and held without information or explanation, which are tactics of a terror state” said Aaron Rhodes, a spokesperson for the Campaign.

Mehraneh Atashi (30) is a prominent and internationally acclaimed photo artist whose work has appeared in major exhibitions around the world. She has worked for numerous newspapers, magazines, and TV programs. However, in the past few years, she discontinued her job as a photojournalist and concentrated on her artistic photography.

As reported by the Campaign previously, a standing, blanket arrest warrant is being used by Iranian security agents to massively detain Iranian citizens in the absence of evidence of criminal activity and analysis of specific cases by independent judicial authorities.

“Mehraneth Atashi and all who have been arbitrarily arrested are being denied their basic right to liberty, as protected by Article 9 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, to which Iran is a state party,” Rhodes said.

The United Nations General Assembly passed a Resolution in December 2009, which called for engagement by the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detentions with regard to detained persons in the Islamic Republic.

The Campaign calls for the immediate release of Mehraneth Atashi, her husband Madjid Ghaffari, and of all who are being detained arbitrarily.

from International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran: http://www.iranhumanrights.org
URL to article: http://www.iranhumanrights.org/2010/02/mehraneh-atashi/

fantasy and conversation (a. lorde)

Speckled frogs leap from my mouth
to drown in the coffee
between our wisdoms
and decisions

I could smile
and turn these frogs in to pearls
speak of love, our making
our giving.
And if the spell works
shall I break down
or build what is broken
into a new house
shook with confusion

Shall I strike
before our magic
turns colour?

[audre lorde]

when i or else (j.jordan)

when i or else when you
and i or we
deliberate chose if you if
we then near or where
unless i stand as loser
of that losing possibility
that something that i have
or always want more than much
more at
least to have as less and
yes directed by desire

[june jordan]

our global youth.

you’re not done. and neither are we

tehran’s blood sunday

please visit the original site: http://tehranlive.org/2009/12/27/war-in-tehran-streets-on-ashura-day/

ballad (s.sanchez)

forgive me if i laugh
you are so sure of love
you are so young
and i too old to learn of love.

the rain exploding
in the air is love
the grass excreting her
green wax is love
and stones remembering
past steps is love,
but you. you are too young
for love
and i too old.

once. what does it matter
when or who, i knew
of love.
i fixed my body
under his and went
to sleep in love
all trace of me
was wiped away

forgive me if i smile
young heiress of a naked dream
you are so young
and i too old to learn of love.

[sonia sanchez]

the forgotten dialect of the heart (j.gilbert)

How astonishing it is that language can almost mean,
and frightening that it does not quite. Love, we say,
God, we say, Rome and Michiko, we write, and the words
get it all wrong. We say bread and it means according
to which nation. French has no word for home,
and we have no word for strict pleasure. A people
in northern India is dying out because their ancient
tongue has no words for endearment. I dream of lost
vocabularies that might express some of what
we no longer can. Maybe the Etruscan texts would
finally explain why the couples on their tombs
are smiling. And maybe not. When the thousands
of mysterious Sumerian tablets were translated,
they seemed to be business records. But what if they
are poems or psalms? My joy is the same as twelve
Ethiopian goats standing silent in the morning light.
O Lord, thou art slabs of salt and ingots of copper,
as grand as ripe barley lithe under the wind’s labor.
Her breasts are six white oxen loaded with bolts
of long-fibered Egyptian cotton. My love is a hundred
pitchers of honey. Shiploads of thuya are what
my body wants to say to your body. Giraffes are this
desire in the dark. Perhaps the spiral Minoan script
is not language but a map. What we feel most has
no name but amber, archers, cinnamon, horses and birds.

[Jack Gilbert]

bosnia bosnia (j.jordan)

Too bad
there is no oil
between her legs

that 4-year-old Muslim girl and
her 5-year-old sister
and the 16- year-old babysitter
and the 20-year -old mother of that 4-year-old/that
Muslim child gang raped
from dawn to dark to time become damnation

Too bad
there is no oil
between her legs

Too bad there is no oil
between Sbrenica and Sarajevo
and in-between the standing of a life
and genocide

Too bad
ther is no oil

Too bad
there in no oil
between her legs

the woman in Somalia
who weighs 45 pounds and
who has buried village elders and
who has buried village children

who weighed even less
than she weighs after so many days
of hunger gaping open
to the flies

Too bad
there is no oil
in South Central L.A.
and in between the beaten men and beatup woman
and in between the African and the Asian throwaways
and in between the Spanish and the English speaking
homeless
and in between the dealers and the drugged
and in between the people and criminal police
too bad
there is no oil

Too bad
there is no oil
between her legs
that four-year-old Muslim girl

Too bad
there is no oil
between her legs

[june jordan]