Arabic Mantra

When you feel like you’re far from home and you are When you choose to breathe in and breathe out When you approach a preoccupied stranger in the sooq When you see a five-year-old boy…

Three Poems by Hồ Chí Minh

Advice to Oneself Without the cold and desolation of winter There could not be the warmth and splendor of spring. Calamity has tempered and hardened me, And turned my mind to steel.

Reading/Writing/Seeing

for Emily, Kelley, and Lindsay 1. In reality every reader is, while she is reading, the reader of her own self.  The writer’s work is merely a kind of optical instrument which he offers to…

This Palestinian Life

Mounif is calling me In America From Qatar About Fahim’s martyrdom In Beirut And burial In Kuwait And about the necessity Of informing Sitti Umm ‘Ata In Deir Ghassanah And his maternal grandmother In Nablus…

M. K. Gandhi & Sri Anandamayi Ma

Through the sincere efforts of both Kamal Nehru and Sethji, a meeting was arranged between Ma and Mahatma Gandhi. Upon entering his room, Ma cried out, “Father! Your crazy daughter has come to visit you!”…

Bach/Gould/Said

Bach’s music was for [Glenn] Gould an archetype for the emergence of a rational system whose  intrinsic power was that it was, as it were, crafted resolutely against the negation and disorder that surround us…

Thơ

Little Sister At the end of our lesson At the Bread Co on South Grand You gave me a simple assignment: “Write a four-line poem in Vietnamese” You came to this country at age eight…

Subversives

In the New Directions collection, Zero Hour and Other Documentary Poems, Ernesto Cardenal includes an “Epistle to Monsignor Casaldáliga (whom Mev Puleo interviewed in her book The Struggle is One, and from which I quoted…