An
Imagined Letter
For
Comrade Xi Jinping
in
(9)
Poems
on Reading Liu Xia’s
‘Empty Chairs’
56 pages
"...And, as for Liu Xia’s Empty Chairs, (2015) finally maybe it is poetry that
reaches out to us to reach inside to that place where this future we imagine
already exists, as a seed, as a possibility, a future born out of a past that
leaves us with the ache of – with a longing for - something that could have –
but still did not – exist. " (7 april – 21, july, 2022)
On Reading Liu Xia's 'Empty Chairs'
美国之音海彦拍摄, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons
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ONLY IN ROJAVA
photographs
from kobanê
by
orsola casagrande
“We have work to do”. ‘Only in Rojava’, for the people of Rojava
Global Rights - 25 January 2019 -Text by Orsola Casagrande
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THESES
on [the Philosophy
of] HISTORY
 |
Theses on (the Philosophy of) History (poem) – downloadable E-Book
“The complete uncertainty about what the next day and even
the next hour will bring has dominated my existence for many weeks. I am condemned to read every newspaper (they
now come out on a single sheet of paper) like a summons that has been served on
me and to detect in every radio broadcast the voice of the messenger of bad
tidings.”
(Walter Benjamin, to Theodore W. Adorno, Lourdes, August 2, 1940, in Scholem & Adorno, The Correspondence of Walter Benjamin, University of Chicago Press, 1994, Page 638)
Download E-Book
On a Winter's Day
(at War)
On A Winter's Day (at War)
for the people (and refugees)
of Afrin Region,
the Democratic Federation of Northern Syria - Rojava (January, 2018)
**********
“Let Erdoğan come and look at the children he has killed. We will stay in our land till the last
drop of blood.”
Mustafa Hesen, Co-president of Afrin Canton
https://www.globalrights.info/2018/01/turkey-not-condemned-enough-for-rojava-invasion/
"Children of the world,
if Spain falls - I mean, it's just a thought-
...if mother
Spain falls - I mean, it's just a thoughtgo
out, children of the world, go look for her!...
(Spain, Take this Cup from Me)
Cesar Vallejo, October 1937
SOUTH DAKOTA
SUITE
South Dakota Suite
"In August 2000 I travelled to the American Mid-West to meet a friend and to
rest from years of banging my head against the wall of people and systems you
encounter working as a ‘social-activist’.
In the Mid-West, through the generosity of my host (and the two young men
living with her) I was fortunate to travel from Vermillion in Eastern South
Dakota to the Little Bighorn River in Montana and to do that through the 8th
largest of the American Indian Reservations of the country, Pine Ridge,
stopping at Wounded Knee Creek where between 150 and 300 Lakota Sioux
children, women and men were killed by the US 7th Cavalry on December
29th 1890..."
((From South Dakota Suite An Introduction
for Scooter Ratzsch-Carraher)
Benjamin's Grave
the Spanish border where he killed himself is such a potent reminder, not to mention the camps in Germany and Poland and what is happening with frightening velocity with the new state of emergency we are experiencing with the terror of the War against Terror..." Michael Taussig, 'Benjamin's Grave', (2006), Page 26
become a figment of the imagination.
In here, where the words are like Kalashnikovs!
or stun grenades, or tear gas
or just plain words, more words
now launched like a suicide bomber
at the door of our despair ..."
The Need for an Angel
"On the day exactly a week after the storm ripped through the country i set out to see if the Higgins' old cottage had survived... whereas
- “Days and months being travellers of eternity”... (Basho writes)... and likewise
- “many of the men of old who met their end upon the road”...
but... i, being a new man (yet recently old) set out then on the road in the wake of the storm after a sleepless night waiting on the rain to pass...
Not winter yet
still the morning embraces death
like a mother would cling to her child
in a shipwreck...
The road empty but for leaves and the
debris the storm had abandoned that no one had bothered to clear...
- “For those who pass their lives afloat on
boats, or face old age leading horses tight by the bridle, their journeying is
life, their journeying is home...” (Matsuo Basho again).
Behold!.. then, In the drunk-damp dark and among its restless shadows - the voice of an angel wakes in my head; O, yes, in among the other noises that daily threaten to break each day open with their deep and inner pain like a demented machine grinding its sexless way through the dark to lose itself, gratefully, into deep wet earth beneath...
The voice of an angel..."
-_The_Wounded_Angel_-_Haavoittunut_enkeli_(29568380521).jpg)
Hugo Simberg, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons
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1 comment:
Selected Poems by Liu Xia; Translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern; Introduction by Liao Yiwu; Foreword by Herta Müller
"Empty Chairs presents the poetry of Liu Xia for the first time freely in both English translation and in the Chinese original. Selected from thirty years of her work, and including some of her haunting photography, this book creates a portrait of a life lived under duress, a voice in danger of being silenced, and a spirit that is shaken but so far indomitable. Liu Xia's poems are potent, acute moments of inquiry that peel back to expose the fraught complexity of an interior world. They are felt and insightful, colored through with political constraints even as they seep beyond those constraints and toward love."
https://www.graywolfpress.org/books/empty-chairs
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