[Video: original video version of Talking Heads’ “Once in a Lifetime.” This isn’t the first time I’ve accompanied a Friday post with this song, but come on — it’s been over twelve years. And with a post title like today’s, how could I not have been reminded of these lyrics?]
From whiskey river:
Desperate Note from Byron’s Palace in Lerici
In the blue wind the leaves begin to think they are birds.
This is when you lean your body against its sorrows.
The truth is always there with its hidden reefs.
Your touch still hovers over the shore. Each wave is
a mirror that washes in a past we wanted hidden.
Now our voices are roosting in the branches.
Everything is echo, or shadow. Your shadow
walking on the other side of the street, your shadow
sitting in a passing car, your last words casting
the shadow that has replaced my own. Where have
we been that has brought us here? The past burrows
into me like an insect. The tree frogs, after tonight’s
rain, fill the woods. They throw their voices
so predators can’t find them. The old truths are
falling from the branches. The old dreams wash up
on the shores of our souls. Sometimes I think
the soul is a shadow even gravity can’t touch,
and love is what passes in the mirror as we look away.
(Richard Jackson [source — apparently originally here, though])
…and:
Ancient maps of the world — when the world was flat — inform us, concerning that void where America was waiting to be discovered, HERE BE DRAGONS. Dragons may not have been here then, but they are certainly here now, breathing fire, belching smoke; or, to be less literary and biblical about it, attempting to intimidate the mores, morals, and morality of this particular and peculiar time and place. Nor, since this country is the issue of the entire globe and is also the most powerful nation currently to be found on it, are we speaking only of this time and place. And it can be said that the monumental struggles being waged in our time and not only in this place resemble, in awesome ways, the ancient struggle between those who insisted that the world was flat and those who apprehended that it was round.
(James Baldwin [source, originally here])
Not from whiskey river:
Drycleaners
At the drycleaners I stand in line, my feet
shuffling weight from side to side,
impatience all over me while the woman,
light brown, with her Creole story drones on.
In New Orleans none would notice.
She’s exotic in Baltimore, a dawn bird
everything hears. Even the clerk
leans into her tale, clucking softly. When
people behind me cough, she won’t be
rushed. She’s got her whole story to go.
Soon there’s a man she never married,
her mother opposed, far away still, and he
went into a bar, wrong place, wrong color,
wrong words, maybe, a good man.
He’ll never come away of there, not comin’
home, geraniums on the back porch,
and not replace the bad tire her Honda has,
who could always be telling her what time
does in the kitchen if she stand half
naked letting his dog go on out. So
let me pay you for him, give you money
because you is nice and I remember,
her nearly singing voice sighs. The sleeved
pants, two shirts hang on the brass ring, all
finished, unclaimed, the stiffened
stains gone away. The perfectly starched
cloth a redemption so beautiful
it might be the linen of royalty, but small
for a man two of us will think of as
sleep scuffs house walls like tide under a boat.
How nice they are, these women doing
the little one person can for another
which is, in the end, a wash
of memorable words that leave you standing.
(Dave Smith [source])
…and:
Say Grace
In my country our shamans were women
and our gods multiple until white people brought
an ecstasy of rosaries and our cities today
glow with crosses like graveyards. As a child
in Sunday school I was told I’d go to hell
if I didn’t believe in God. Our teacher was a woman
whose daughters wanted to be nuns and I asked
What about babies and what about Buddha, and she said
They’re in hell too and so I memorized prayers
and recited them in front of women
I did not believe in. Deliver us from evil.
O sweet Virgin Mary, amen. O sweet. O sweet.
In this country, which calls itself Christian,
what is sweeter than hearing Have mercy
on us. From those who serve different gods. O
clement, O loving, O God, O God, amidst ruins,
amidst waters, fleeing, fleeing. Deliver us from evil.
O sweet, O sweet. In this country,
point at the moon, at the stars, point at the way the lake lies,
with a hand full of feathers,
and they will look at the feathers. And kill you for it.
If a word for religion they don’t believe in is magic
so be it, let us have magic. Let us have
our own mothers and scarves, our spirits,
our shamans and our sacred books. Let us keep
our stars to ourselves and we shall pray
to no one. Let us eat
what makes us holy.
(Emily Jungmin Yoon [source])
…and:
Gitanjali 35
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
(Rabindranath Tagore [source])
Leave a Reply