#carolyn forché
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The heart is the toughest part of the body.
Tenderness is in the hands.
Carolyn Forché
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Earth Presses against Us.
Book: Unfortunately, It Was Paradise
Mahmoud Darwish, (trans. Carolyn Forché)
#literature#quotes#spilled ink#poetry#mahmoud darwish#carolyn forché#palestinian literature#free palestine#*mine: quotations
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Mahmoud Darwish (محمود درويش), I Belong There [from 'Fewer Roses' (1986)], in Unfortunately, It Was Paradise. Selected Poems, Translated and Edited by Munir Akash and Carolyn Forché (with Sinan Antoon and Amira El-Zein), University of California Press, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, and London, 2003, p. 7
#graphic design#poetry#book#mahmoud darwish#munir akash#carolyn forché#sinan antoon#amira el zein#university of california press#2000s
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The heart is the toughest part of the body.
Tenderness is in the hands.
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For the Stranger
Each time the train slows, a man
with our faces in the gold buttons
of his coat passes through the cars
muttering the name of a city. Each time
we lose people. Each time I find you
again between the cars, holding out
a scrap of bread for me, something
hot to drink, until there are
no more cities and you pull me
toward you, sliding your hands
into my coat, telling me
your name over and over, hurrying
your mouth into mine.
We have, each of us, nothing.
We will give it to each other.
— Carolyn Forché, closing lines to “For the Stranger,” The Country Between Us (Harper & Row, 1981) (via Vale of Soul Making)
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This blog witnesses all women and girls. Remember that when you see pain, you are responsible for it. You become responsible for the stories you carry.
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The Dreamers Pass from One Sky to Another—Mahmoud Darwish, Trans. Carolyn Forché
... And we left our childhood to the butterfly
when we left a few drops of olive oil on the stair
but we forgot to greet the mint everywhere
and we forgot to secretly greet our tomorrow.
The ink of midday was white
were it not for the butterfly's book fluttering around us.
Butterfly! sister of yourself, be what you desire
before my longing, and after.
But let me be a brother to your wing, that my madness might remain fevered.
Butterfly, born of yourself,
don't let others decide my fate. Don't abandon me.
From one sky to another the dreamers pass-
the butterfly's attendants carry mirrors of water.
We could be what we should be.
From one sky to another the dreamers pass.
The butterfly spins her garment on a needle of light, to decorate her comedy.
The butterfly is born of herself and dances in the flame of her tragedy.
Half phoenix, what touched her touched us:
an obscure similarity between light and fire-and between two paths.
No. Our love is neither foolishness nor wisdom.
And thus, from one sky to another the dreamers pass and pass and
pass forever.
The butterfly is water longing to fly. It filters
from the sweat of young girls and grows into a cloud of memory.
The butterfly is what the poem doesn't say.
Her very lightness breaks words, as dreams break dreamers.
Let it be so! Let our tomorrow be present with us.
Let our yesterday be present with us.
Let today be present in the feast of this day
set for the butterfly's celebration,
and let the dreamers pass from one sky to another.
From one sky to another the dreamers pass.
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exile by Carolyn Forché
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#france daigle#christina sharpe#terry tempest williams#alicia garza#sakine cansız#mariame kaba#susan sontag#lisa wells#lorraine o’grady#paul valéry#alexis pauline gumbs#carolyn forché#ann snitow#nicholas ridout#leanne betasamosake simpson#mckenzie wark#lynne tillman#fernando pessoa#quotes#quotations
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I am the woman whose photograph
you will not recognize, whose face
emptied your eyes, whose eyes
were brief, like the smallest
of cities we slipped through.
from ‘Departure’ in The Country Between Us by Carolyn Forché
#Carolyn Forché#the country between us#poetry of witness#political poetry#quotes#resistance#poetry#ourselves or nothing
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I Talk Too Much.
Book: Unfortunately, It Was Paradise
Mahmoud Darwish, (trans. Carolyn Forché)
#literature#quotes#spilled ink#poetry#mahmoud darwish#carolyn forché#palestinian literature#free palestine#*mine: quotations
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"Each time I find you
again between the cars, holding out
a scrap of bread for me, something
hot to drink, until there are
no more cities and you pull me
toward you, sliding your hands
into my coat, telling me
your name over and over, hurrying
your mouth into mine.
We have, each of us, nothing.
We will give it to each other."
Carolyn Forché, from For the Stranger
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The Garden Shukkei-en
By Carolyn Forché
By way of a vanished bridge we cross this river
as a cloud of lifted snow would ascend a mountain.
She has always been afraid to come here.
It is the river she most
remembers, the living
and the dead both crying for help.
A world that allowed neither tears nor lamentation.
The matsu trees brush her hair as she passes
beneath them, as do the shining strands of barbed wire.
Where this lake is, there was a lake,
where these black pine grow, there grew black pine.
Where there is no teahouse I see a wooden teahouse
and the corpses of those who slept in it.
On the opposite bank of the Ota, a weeping willow
etches its memory of their faces into the water.
Where light touches the face, the character for heart is written.
She strokes a burnt trunk wrapped in straw:
I was weak and my skin hung from my fingertips like cloth
Do you think for a moment we were human beings to them?
She comes to the stone angel holding paper cranes.
Not an angel, but a woman where she once had been,
who walks through the garden Shukkei-en
calling the carp to the surface by clapping her hands.
Do Americans think of us?
So she began as we squatted over the toilets:
If you want, I'll tell you, but nothing I say will be enough.
We tried to dress our burns with vegetable oil.
Her hair is the white froth of rice rising up kettlesides, her mind also.
In the postwar years she thought deeply about how to live.
The common greeting dozo-yiroshku is please take care of me.
All hibakusha still alive were children then.
A cemetery seen from the air is a child's city.
I don't like this particular red flower because
it reminds me of a woman's brain crushed under a roof.
Perhaps my language is too precise, and therefore difficult to understand?
We have not, all these years, felt what you call happiness.
But at times, with good fortune, we experience something close.
As our life resembles life, and this garden the garden.
And in the silence surrounding what happened to us
it is the bell to awaken God that we've heard ringing.
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Currently Playing
THE BLUE HOUR
Composers
Rachel Grimes, Angélica Negrón, Shara Nova, Caroline Shaw, Sarah Kirkland Snider
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Carolyn Forché
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A Far Cry
Shara Nova
#currently playing#Rachel Grimes#Angélica Negrón#Shara Nova#Caroline Shaw#Sarah Kirkland Snider#A Far Cry#Carolyn Forché
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