Third Intifada

The least that Palestinian youths facing Israel's bullets with stones in occupied E. Jerusalem, West Bank and Gaza deserve is that the world notices them

Look at them, the Palestinian youths whom Israel's friends in the "West" would happily see occupied, imprisoned & caged all their lives.

If you are not going to help, at least acknowledge that they exist, that they matter, that they bleed, get wounded, that they die.

If you are not going to be their ally, be at least witness to their courage, their moment of defiance, their wounds, their deaths.

That's the least which can be asked from you - that you open your eyes, look and see these youths' ongoing struggle in the same world in which you live.

25.10.2015

Tom Disch(1942-2008)

One day Tom Disch,

Tom Disch the once good author,

Tom Disch with the great future behind him,

stopped spouting racist vitriol in the web

long enough to notice

that most he hated himself.

BANG!

24.10.2015

Those who claim

that suffering ennobles

have never suffered.

Suffering breaks,

twists, crows ice around

your heart,

makes you lash out

in anger and pain,

makes you someone else.

23.10.2015

The only thing we really need

until the end

is hope.

17.10.2015

Be the final wave

to come up to my shattering shore,

sweeping it away

in your embrace.

17.10.2015

Immortality in literature

Blessed is the author

known by the future generations only

from her or his great fame

without having any surviving work

to blemish it.

14.10.2015

The Nobel Prize for Literature

The only prize Philip Roth deserves

or needs is a

castration without painkillers

and having to eat his

dick raw.

14.10.2015

Gaius Cornelius Gallus(70-26 BCE)

1

You should not have been so eager

to wash away the shame of ambition

with death's bitter remedy,

as at one pentameter and nine lines 'of inferior quality'

stands your lyric legacy

after time more merciless than Octavian

has wrought its punishment

and left these as your poetic monument.

2

You should have pushed death's release away,

put words down and sought Octavian's forgiveness

as poet through flattery and praise,

and your political ambition

would have been forgiven if not forgotten,

your ambition to be remembered as a statesman

buried, like those nine lines in the sands of Nubia.

14.10.2015

Peter Whigham(1925-1987)

Oxford, I read, and sighed

and was ready to consign you

to one of the lower reaches of

Dante's Hell, but then those

redeeming words "largely self-educated";

no Don then, from privileged background

taught by Dons from privileged backgrounds

lecturing youths from privileged backgrounds.

Curse the Ford of Oxes.

Sleep well, or travel

from Purgatory to the Celestial Paradise.

14.10.2015

Gone is the poet; we shall not mourn

We shall not mourn Catullus;

he was privileged, he raped boys

and he enjoyed great happiness as

much as he suffered great sorrow;

great love was his, great gift of poetry

was his, as he is now Hades'.

14.10.2015

Time to start all wars

Once they fought a war

to end all wars,

now we heirs

live in a time

to start all wars,

the waves of violence

rising high

crashing lives and countries

and all certainties,

begetting lineages of conflicts

towards a darkening future.

11.10.2015