Posts Tagged ‘faith’
Hope, (A Lament From The Trail Of The Refugee)
Posted in depression, dreams, empowerment, freedom, gaza, grief, Homs, hope, inequality, israel, justice, life, loss, MENA, Mohammed, nakba, palestine, personal growth, poetry, refugee camp, refugees, regret, writing, tagged apartheid, asylum, despair, exile, faith, famine, fraternity, friends, gaza, Gaza Strip, home, hope, hopelessness, hunger, illegal settlements, kibbutz, love poetry, Nakba, pain, palestine, peace, poems, poetry, refugees, sadness, sorrow, Syria, the earth, violence, Writing on April 29, 2017| Leave a Comment »
And The Gods Told Our Fathers
Posted in death, Fascisim, grief, growth, hope, justice, life, loss, love, poetry, politics, politics, regret, war, writing, tagged faith, Family, life, Literature, poetry, politics, religion, violence on February 2, 2017| Leave a Comment »
And the Gods told our fathers
Give us your sons
And we will trade their smiles for death.
Send us their coats of many colours
And we will change those colours to red,
Give us their sandals
And we will exchange them for boots with which
To tread upon the lives of nameless mothers.
Give us their shirts and
We will smother the children in them.
And they will hate us for it.
We will lie to them,
We will never set them free.
We will take the lives of your sons
In wars over greed and lust.
Our altars of sacrifice will bleed once more
With glorious blood.
The spilled blood of your sons
The sons of the poor, the sons of the illiterate,
The sons without hope, and the foolishly brave.
And we will teach you deception,
We will teach you loss
We will teach you sorrow and
We will desert you when you grieve
And you will thank us for it.
Towards Lhasa
Posted in crimes against humanity, death, depression, empowerment, end hunger, equality, free tibet, grief, hope, inequality, justice, life, personal growth, poetry, politics, politics, self immolation, tibet, torture, travel, truth, writing, Zen, tagged china, dalia lama, faith, free tibet, freedom, history, learning, Lhasa, Lhasa River, life, poems, poetry, politics, religion, self immolation, tibet, travel, violence, Word on January 11, 2017| Leave a Comment »
Towards Lhasa
We discussed the smell
Of the monk who set himself on fire,
Shaking our heads in half-disbelief
As our tour guides made dinner.
We camped early along the banks of
The Lhasa River,
The terrain rough-hewed and ragged.
The sunset, intense orange and purple, matching
The orange flames of our campfire matching
Those that ate his flesh.
In Liuwuxiang we waited as our gear dried.
We inquired, with barely a concern,
As to precisely where he burned,
How much further to the spot in Ngawa and
Was the spot worshiped like a shrine?
To forgotten freedom? Was there
A plaque to commemorate?
No one talked to us about the Why.
Half- hearted questions met with steel eyes.
Such questions are better not asked
Such words carry too much weight
Baggage packed with an official taboo
Burning the tongue before utterance.
We discussed the smell of a monk on fire.
His ashes washed away long ago
But the smoke still presents a challenge
The stench of burning flesh
A common pain that may never leave.
Poets note: Most of the self immolation that has occurred in Tibet have been in the Ngawa region, not in Lhasa. Access to Ngawa is forbidden by the Chinese government for most from the west, and internet access has been severely restricted. I chose to use Lhasa in this poem to reinforce these restrictions.
For more information, go to this website; https://www.freetibet.org/about/self-immolation-protests
The Hijab On The Subway
Posted in civil war, crimes against humanity, death, depression, empowerment, equality, grief, hope, inequality, Islam, justice, life, loss, love, personal growth, poetry, politics, politics, racisim, refugees, relationships, Syria, war, women, womens' rights, writing, tagged faith, life, Literature, poems, poetry, politics, religion, violence, Women on January 11, 2017| Leave a Comment »
The hardest part of a poem is always
The start.
The saddest part of a journey is often
The journey itself.
A woman in a hijab waits in the subway
The whoosh of air as a train passes by,
Rustling the edge of her scarf on her soft face.
Posters on the windows of the train mere colors as they pass
Blues and greens and lots of yellow and white, and red
Red, the color she left behind,
Not red like a sunset, but Red.
Red like the lights of an ambulance,
Red like the cheeks of a wailing child.
Red like the blood-streets and sidewalks. Red.
The lights of another passing train flicker by.
Her hijab offers no protection, no barrier is formed between the soft fabric and
Faces lit and then hidden
Eyes shine momentarily and then retreat to dark.
Eyes she’s afraid to meet.
Faces she has learned not to look back at.
The color of her skin disallows contact.
The happiest part of a journey is quite often the arrival.