December 2010
18 posts
Mother, you are a child still. At eighteen. More of a child since you are always ill. They have sheltered you from life. Still, you speak the tongue the mandatory language like the others. It is not your own. Even if it is not you know you must. You are Bilingual. You are Tri-lingual. The tongue that is forbidden is your own mother tongue. You speak in the dark. In the secret. The one that is...
FRAGMENT Betti Alver (Estonian, b. 1906)
Great events grow in the shadow. What doesn’t grow in shadow, has no worth. The victor’s power and road-side berries share the same taste of dust. Important ideas will rob your peace, confused ones curl up in pleasure; the most important ones will never find form in words.
Heaviness and tenderness — sisters: the same features. Bees and wasps suck the heavy rose. Man dies, heat leaves the sand, the sun of yesterday is borne on a black stretcher. Oh the heavy honeycomb, the tender webs — easier to hoist a stone than to say your name! Only one purpose is left me, but it is golden: to free myself of the burden, time. I drink the roiled air like a dark...
thinking about community
Proponents frequently privilege face-to-face relations in reaction to the alienation and domination produced by huge, faceless bureaucracies and corporations, whose actions and decisions affect most people, but are out of their control. Appeals to community envision more local and direct control. A more participatory society should indeed encourage active publics at the local levels of...
for a heart in winter
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KREMENEZ by Hanns Cibulka (East German, b. 1920)
Land, I have half-forgotten your language, my grammar has gone barbaric, but year after year, when the December wind comes, I return to Kremenez, to the village with the different sky.
There my thoughts do not tap at the window like a homeless bird, there you spread for me a table with your words, there the grain, even in ringing frost, still...
