“When despair for the world grows in me and I wake in the night at the least sound in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be, I go and lie down where the wood drake rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things who do not tax their lives with forethought of grief. I come into the presence of still water. And I feel above me the day-blind stars waiting with their light. For a time I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.”
Wendell Berry
The untainted nature; the poet;
wild;
a light heart and a free mind.
Sometimes hope.
there is a house inscribed with ancient pictographs
front walls center back
was she a political prisoner
was he a effigy of academia, ideal, enlightened
was she a magdalen scraped too many times her precious inner pearl empty desecrated tombs
no birth but this no child but this
hungry wood beamed door crying truth into the wilderness and thorns
they kissed every word from the chairman’s lips
they stole every world from the sundial
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Nadav Kander - Yangtze: The Long River (2009-12)
“Finishing Yangtze: The Long River required three years and five trips to China, ‘a place that is moving and changing so fast that it can only be unnatural,’ [Kander] said.
In 2005, around the time Mr. Kander started thinking about the project, he was intrigued by China’s rapid growth and constant change. ‘It was a place that I wanted to stand in,’ he said.
The Yangtze, flowing nearly 4,000 miles from Qinghai Province to the East China Sea, seemed a natural yet challenging path to trace.
‘I love the metaphor of water,’ Mr. Kander said. ‘Like life, like humanness, it becomes a cloud. It’s an ever-changing cycle. I find it comforting.’
Because what he was seeing wasn’t so much about China — grand structures or tourist vistas — as it was about compassion. He saw a beauty in the moments he witnessed, as people lived out their daily lives and traditions in circumstances so much different from his own.
‘It’s much more about what you don’t show than what you do show,’ he said. ‘I think work that asks you to question what more there is is much more interesting.’”
(Source: stuckbetweeniraqandahardplace)
(Source: growing-orbits)
For the heads in baskets
for the soldiers with their hand on the cheek of a child
May the Forces of War smile on thee, free product of our struggle
loved for the half sand reflection in their oval eyes
Sand in our boots
we cross the ocean and pour it out in lovers palms
but the sand has become skin and it cracks in the cold
shell upon shell bomb
falling
the horror of empty life with acceptance
its jaws wide to swallow the breath
it can never hold more than a second
displaced heat gasps
and the shock pours over the roofs
Great rolling waters of Justice
years away they lie in a ditch aloof
stagnant
full of rotting corpse and a dying king
A Child finds a man
she holds his hand
he draws breath
And tells her the Story of the World
Men rise and downfall of Civilizations
he coughed
the truth when the words failed
She wept on his seamed and sorrowed face
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