SPRING NIGHT

Dark night, for late spring.

But then, a dark time.

A midnight of humanity.

19.05.2024

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HOW DO WE SAVE THESE PEOPLE - AND THE WORLD FROM THEM?

When someone is told a lie

that fits their prejudice,

they embrace it, they don't let it go,

no matter true facts they're given.

They were told the Holocaust

is a lie, so they go on about 'Holohoax"; 

told death toll in Gaza was halved,

so they now talk about 'Pallywood'.

Tell them vaccines cause illness,

and they will be friends of a deadly virus,

tell them Big Oil is a friend and a victim

and they rage against environmentalists.

What shall we do with these people?

Cut off the lying tongues that rule them,

take their screens off them, quarantine

them like the plague victims.

18.05.2024

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WHAT'S THE DIFFERENCE

The young ones think that pop stars

are to be admired because they are famous

and mountains of money and oceans of hours

were spent to make them look good in public.

 The old ones think that politicians

are to be admired because they are famous

and mountains of money and oceans of hours

were spent to make them look good in public.

18.05.2024

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LATE SPRING, WARM NIGHT

Bright spring night, walking

to get the mail, listening

to birdsongs; engulfed

by warm air, hard to

believe it snowed

two weeks ago.

17.05.2024

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AFTER FIVE AND A HALF HOURS AWAKE

Finally made it to the outside,

escaped the confines of the cool

rooms in endless gloom, drinking

coffee, eating sandwiches on

the porch in the warm spring

evening, listening to birds

singing, reading Wang Wei,

more than mere dust, living

in words beyond my moment.

17.05.2024

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TIMESLIP

In this warm spring evening, all

the warm spring evenings I ever

lived; sitting on the porch, I'm

back roving on the dark waters

of the lake of my childhood,

time fluid as the unreflecting

surface which the oars broke.

17.05.2024

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MAKING A NEW POT OF COFFEE

I promise myself, this pot

of coffee I will take outside,

with piles of books, to sit

there in the afternoon heat,

leaving these cool, shadowed

rooms where no song of birds

disturbs my solitude.

So many broken promises,

even these little ones,

to myself.

17.05.2024

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NOT IN THE LIGHT, BUT IN THE SHADOW

So many summers gone past

without truly living, this one

will be yet another, spent in

shadowed, cool rooms,

not where the sun drenches

the burgeoning green.

17.05.2024

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SPRING AFTERNOON

I awaken late, deep into the afternoon,

the house in cool shadow, spring

all bright colours from the road's edge

to where ploughed fields climb the ridge.

Warming old coffee I sit down, plan

a day spent in idleness.

17.05.2024

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DEEPEST SPRING NIGHT

That part of the night

that is dark, this time

of the year, brief hours

between spring light,

and somehow mind

half believes it's

autumn, winter

hiding in the dark.

16.05.2024

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IF, ON SOLAR WINGS

Lives are short, not enough

of time and experiences for

eight billion living, tens of

billions who lived; curtailed

lives, aspirations lost, dreams

shredded, autumn leaves

sinking in dark waters. But

of death, of death there is

enough for all. Even if on

solar wings we would spread

and inhabit the Milky Way,

the great fountain of Death

would never run dry, quasars

can go silent, Death never

will as long as there are

mortal beings dreaming

in fear and hope.

15.05.2024

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TO BE SWIFTLY ERASED

Only by reading we become able

to write the fading echoes of

our existence into flowing time,

but long before it runs dry

those echoes are gone, lost;

yet the feelings they carry

repeated in what has taken

their place; for most human

beings are in essence one and

the same, with superficial

variation. Like one ladybird

opening its wings, one human

reaching for failed immortality

is little different, from another

ladybird opening, closing its

wings, of another human

writing their name in flooding

time to be swiftly erased.

15.-16.05.2024

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BIOGRAPHIES FROM THE FRINGE INWARDS

There's always something new

to be found in a life unburdened

by the elaborate veils and shrouds

of excuses and justifications,

the loud authorial voice made

into a whisper, and the voices

on the side of the way from

the life-giving womb to

the grave listened to; lives

build up from their periphery,

from contacts made and forgotten,

unmoored encounters, passing

touches. A shape of life a bit

more real, perhaps, than what

the actor playing the role told,

although in the great hollow

inside echoes ring.

01.04.-15.05. 2024

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IN THE SILENCE OF THE SPRING AFTERNOON

The walls are thick enough

to silence the singing of birds,

the sound of the rising wind,

and I long to open the window;

but that would lead to the cat

leaping three meters into

the ground below when

I would be lost in thought,

and I'm not entirely sure

his old legs would take it,

or he find his way back

home again in the blue-green

vastness of the world outside,

where the fox will be seeking

mice on the fallow fields.

15.05.2024

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TRANSLATING 'THE SHIELD OF ACHILLES'

In the afternoon light, I'm sitting

in the cool dimness of the living room,

translating the lines of Auden falling

in rhythm more consistent than

the hammer of my father on nails &

making objects out of carved pieces

of wood; discarding that rhythm of

an alien language, I take the languid

language of the landscape outside

the tall windows, its blue stillness,

the slow movement in the breeze of

the branches of the fir tree we planted 

fourty years ago, and try to give

something of that to replace the alien

rythm, a movement that doesn't try

to hammer the world into a metal

shield. A wooden one will do.

15.05.2024

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FINNISH JOURNALISTS AND THEIR MASTERS

The local ruling Far-Right declare they support

Apartheid Israel's regime and the genocide

of occupied Palestinians because supporting

crimes against humanity "annoy the Left"

and the local press, those loyal

stenographers of the Fascists, who made

the freaks and criminals into "populists"

and put them twice into the cabinet,

report this without a line given

to those who oppose the genocide

nor to the victims of the genocide,

genocide itself not being newsworthy.

14.05.2024

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ZIONISTS CLAIM THAT THE GENOCIDE WILL END IF THOSE WHO FIGHT AGAINST IT SURRENDER

According to Apartheid Israel's regime

and its supporters, a genocide

can be ended if those who fight against

it surrender to the genocidaires.

Did the surrender of the resistance fighters

in the Warsaw Ghetto end the Holocaust?

No.

Same goes with Palestinian resistance.

Surrendering to genocidaires

won't end a genocide.

14.05.2024

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AFTER CATULLUS, TIBULLUS AND PROPERTIUS

There are poets who write

from knowledge of love

and lust and wine and all

that makes life bearable,

and then there are poets

who read what others

wrote and, apt pupils,

reach their heights,

and when time has run farther

in its meandering course,

even the learned ones

will not know

who truly lived and who

only dreamed, based

on what others wrote

after having lived.

14.05.2024

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THOSE PEOPLE OF THE FUTURE

The future none of us

will live to see will be

build on the foundations

of our own time.

They will curse us,

those future people.

14.05.2024

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THE WISDOM OF STRANGERS

One of the problems

in life is that prejudices

and vices often come

from those close by,

and wisdom and virtues

come from contact -

if only by reading -

with strangers.

14.05.2024

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WHATEVER ELSE YOU DO

Don't hurt others.

Whatever else you do

in your life, just

don't hurt others.

If you can do that, at

least most of the time,

then you are among

the better ones.

14.05.2024

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NEVER AGAIN - AS LONG AS NO ONE MISSES A BUS

Opposing a genocide

"disturbs the common people",

the Zionists declare;

no one should be a little late

to work or home

so that others could live

is the Zionists' message.

14.05.2024

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ZIONISM AS IT'S MEANT TO BE

Illegal Israeli colonialists attacked

and destroyed an aid convoy to Gaza

on the occupied West Bank,

and all those people who rage

against anti-genocide demonstrations

have nothing to say against that.

To them saying "Never Again"

is antisemitic hate, to them

demonstrations are "Hate marches".

And this destruction of aid

for starving genocide victims is

just Zionism as it's meant to be.

14.05.2024

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ISRAELI HOSTAGES

Around 50 Palestinians imprisoned by occupier

Israel have died in captivity in the last seven months.

The real number could be higher.

You won't hear them mentioned by 'Western'

politicians, press or even humanitarian aid

organizations like the  ICRC.

Instead those go endlessly about "Israeli

hostages" of a different kind; these 50 being

wrong kind of "Israeli hostages" to them.

08.05.2024

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IF YOU HAVEN'T DONE SO YET, PICK UP THIS VICE TODAY

Few people have ever regretted,

at the end of their lives, that they

would have read too many books. 

As vices go, it's a safe one.

08.05.2024

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IN THE SPRING OF MY AUTUMN

After tweeting about ethnic cleansing in Negev,

sitting outside drinking coffee, reading

about Tutankhamon, raking last autumn's

leaves, the sorrows of a lifetime.

It's a cold day, full of light.

08.05.2024

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THOSE WHO DON'T OPPOSE THE ONGOING GENOCIDE, A QUESTION FOR YOU

If you won't oppose an ongoing genocide,

what on Darwin's blue Earth would

you then oppose? What might

rouse your conscience

from its coma?

07.05.2024

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AFTER ISRAELI BOMBING OF A FAMILY HOUSE AT GAZA STRIP'S RAFAH LAST NIGHT

Not even intact limbs or

torsos to gather, just bits

of torn flesh, nothing else

left, just bits of humanity

spread across the rubble of

a home in Gaza, Palestine.

07.05.2024

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LEDA SPEAKS TO POSTERITY

A swan made love to me,

a god fucked me; was

I seduced, was I ravished,

raped on that riverbank?

You tell it in so many

ways, I a willing maiden

embracing a magnificent

god made into strange flesh,

and I, a victim taken

violently by a beast

driven by an alien mind,

to weave the future

into flesh in my womb,

whether I opened my legs

or whether they were

pulled apart, bloody.

Let us say I fought hard,

that I didn't resist, that

I welcomed it. Those wings

beating above me,

that future placed

into me, growing inside

me. All that was to come -

does it matter, now?

I had no choice,

whatever choice

I was to make, made,

preordained.

The future is set, the past

is what you make of it,

of me forever under those

beating wings of the swan.

My life was never mine.

My life belonged to my family,

the husband they chose for me,

the gods we worshipped,

to the god in the guise of a swan

who swam across the river to me.

And now it belongs to you, and I

now under your beating wings.

07.05.2024

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THE DEAD SPARROW

A cold, cloudy day,

three, four degrees centigrade,

and suddenly the spring

is as dead as the sparrow

laying on the road.

We know who made

this cold spring - it was

us, with our industrial

civilization - but who or

what killed the sparrow?

It lies there without

a wound, an adult,

springs outstreched

against the gravel ground,

like still flying in death.

A flight interrupted,

a life interrupted.

Perhaps it was sick, and

thus the fox, smelling

that, doesn't take it.

Perhaps. I know who

are sick - those who

lord over us, those who

we allow to fly us into

our shared deaths.

07.05.2024

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THE 'WESTERN' WORLD SYSTEM

When the Zionists commit a genocide,

genocide becomes "just war",

in both meanings of the phrase,

to the lords of the 'West';

the whole mass slaughter of

over 45 000 people

turned into "an unavoidable"

thing that "just happens",

without anyone being guilty

of killing them.

07.05.2024

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ALL EYES ON PALESTINE

All eyes on Palestine,

now that Apartheid Israel

burns and slaughters Rafah

in devastated Gaza.

Yes, all eyes on Palestine,

but remember to gaze long

at Sudan also, and all the other

places where the powerful ones

of the planet have for decades

stood with the oppressors, or

just ignored the suffering;

from East Turkestan to West Papua

from Chechnya to Western Sahara,

from Cyprus to Western Sahara,

from Kashmir to Tibet,

from Kurdistan to Eritrea.

All eyes on Palestine,

yes, but let's have enough

eyes for the suffering

of the whole world.

07.05.2024

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LEDA

Looking at the male specimens

of our species, one isn't that

surprised about the ladies

in the myths of antiquity

embracing swans or bulls

instead of men burning,

pillaging and raping

their way through Troy

and other flaming cities.

07.05.2024

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THE PURPOSE OF LIFE

 What was life meant to be?

Surely not this. 

(Forget what we think

life 'owed' to us, what

our 'destiny' should

have been - all of that

was down to chance.)

For life was meant to be

a rather simple thing:

A biological organism

reproducing and protecting

the begetted offspring

until they can survive

on their own.

That, simply, is

what life was meant to be.

Everything else, what we

should have achieved,

what the world should

have 'given' us, was just

to be foam on the waves

of life's ocean.

07.05.2024

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1948

"It's the Arab view that Palestinians

were expelled from their homes,"

writes a 'Westerner', "but the Israeli

view is that one day the Palestinians

just left, out of their own volition,

leaving everything to the Jews."

The 'Westerner' pauses, before

continuing "It's not our place to

say which view is correct, but we

must accept that the mere passage

of time itself gives credibility to the

Israeli view, whatever its faults

when it comes to historical veracity."

05.05.2024

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LET THEM BE

Let the roses be,

stay your trembling hand,

don't pick their flowers

to die in a vase.

09.10.2014-30.04.2024-05.05.2024

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THE AMOUNT OF MERCY THAT A KINGFISHER CARRIES IN ITS BEAK

What we need is a universal

revolution, a bloody universal

revolution of blood and wine

and roses and thorns and flags

waving on barricades, drones

brought down on nets carried

by Gaza kites, the capitols

of the globe pouring into

helicopters that will have no

place to land, and fascists

hanging upside down, shot

by partisans. No amnesties,

just the amount of mercy that

a kingfisher carries in its beak.

05.05.2024

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