Tag Archives: land

I return to my beloved world #Sotomayor #SCOTUS #poem #ValentinesDay

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0463_Puerto_Rican_Tody_Nate_Zeman.jpg
http://www.natezeman.com/photo/san-pedrito/

Forgive the exile

This sweet frenzy:

I return to my beloved world,

In love with the land where I was born.

– from “To Puerto Rico (I Return),” by José Gautier Benítez

SF Gate: Born in New York, she returns to Puerto Rico as a child to visit her family and recapture the sights, the blue of the ocean where it meets the sky and the almost sweet taste of coconut milk sipped by a straw through a hole punctured in a fresh green coconut, not one of the “shriveled hairy brown things” sold on the streets of the Bronx. Sonia sips and tastes her “beloved world” – filled with exotic flavors and savored most often in the company of her vast extended family.

Australian (Aboriginal) poetry- Sam Mitchell (m), J.S. Harry (f), Kate Llewellyn!

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Thunderstorm

After sundown the clouds start to burn,
A big one is bending low, stays and breaks up,
Then it rounds again and raises its forehead high.
On both ends sheet lightning shines.
In the middle where the first layer is gone,
You can see the flash, even inside your home.
Everything dissolves.
In the desert, wide-spread falls the cloudburst,
Drenching all the trees between the two sandhills.

Song by Sam Mitchell, sung in Njangumarda language and translated by S. Mitchell and Georg Brandenstein.

Honesty-Stones

The land between us
had grown so bare
the landscape so denuded—
all we had left was what we knew—
just the rocks and the shades they cast—
your eyes my eyes, across them.

We did not need to speak, to talk.
Everything was in the rocks.
It had been said before.

We could not live there.

J.S. Harry

Colonel

He rode a white horse
heading the Anzac Day Parade
fought at Ladysmith
and Gallipoli
was 90
tall
and treated me
as his batman

helping him
down the hospital corridor
seemed holding rare archeology
by the elbow

I apologized for clumsiness
he said ‘Never mind Sister
every beginning is difficult’
but he said it in Latin

his marriage of 60 years ended
when she died
he ran the funeral elegantly
with military style
and died a month later

Kate Llewellyn

The New Oxford Book of Australian Verse, chosen by Les A. Murray.

USED: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=14144434264

NOURISHING TERRAINS, Australian Aboriginal Views of Landscape and Wilderness:
http://www.environment.gov.au/system/files/resources/62db1069-b7ec-4d63-b9a9-991f4b931a60/files/nourishing-terrains.pdf

Moon in virgo- James Lee Jobe

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You are not beaten. The simple music rises up,

children's voices in the air, sound floating out

across the land and on to the river beyond,

over the valley's floor. No, you cannot go back

for those things you lost, the parts of yourself

that were taken, often by force. Like an animal

in the forest you must weep it all away at once,

violently, and then simply live on. The music here

is Bach, Vivaldi; a chorale of children, a piano,

a violin. Together, they have a certain spirit

that is light, that lets in light, joyful, ecstatic.

"Forgive," said The Christ, and why not? Every day

that you still breathe has all the joy

and murderous possibilities of your bravest dream.

Forgive. Breathe. Live. The moon has entered Virgo,

the wind shifts, blows up from the Delta, cools this valley,

and you are not beaten; the children sing, it is Bach,

and you are brave, alive, and human.