Showing posts with label peace. Show all posts
Showing posts with label peace. Show all posts

Thursday, July 23, 2020

"Travel Tickets," by Samih al-Qasim

Terrific poem by the Lebanese Arab-language poet, Samih al-Qasim. Poem is translated by A.Z. Foreman from his great poetry in translation site.

link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5_guYEYMbkg

Friday, April 3, 2020

A Common Form of Alienation

I'm a common stock in search
of a future. A laugh looking
for a joke. A surrender seeking
a peace offering. A seduced
yearning for seduction. I'm a
blank in search of a blank.
A past that's lost its present.
I'm a solution without its
problem, and that's a problem.


hans ostrom 2020

Friday, November 11, 2011

Lime Cove

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*
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Lime Cove


Charlotte sings a lullaby
to her bedroom, making sure
it's slow asleep before she
quicks herself away. Charlotte
and the night are in a kind
of clanky love. She says
to her doorbell, "Please come
in," and washes from it all
those oily index-finger prints.

Solicitations, she thinks, take up
so much of our lives. Asking,
answering. "God," she asks,
"help me to find a place in pause,
a site, a situation, for it seems
I am defeated by the business
of each day."  Charlotte knows

she hasn't earned or isn't due
a special treatment. She also
knows she isn't out of line
in asking for some cease of
time, a cove carved out of
lime, where a pod of echoes
soaks itself in brine.


Copyright 2011 Hans Ostrom