poetry

On my first day at school I learn to
say ‘yes’ to everything, to accept the dogs’ fight
for the best seat at the open-screen cinema.
I learn the silence of a dry pen,
lost in a great pile of bones.
I learn to agree with the history,
for it has the right to choose terror
over Vermeer’s ‘Girl in Hyacinth Blue’.
All my books have a few missing chapters but
my teacher says that acceptance, not hope,
is the best weapon against dreams.
I learn that I was not born a slave but
I became one.

We fear the night
We praise the day
Watch the beach
Evade the wave
It’s the somewhat rich
that we somewhat adore
It’s the harmless
non-white,
the poor, we deplore.
We issue medals
(oh, how proudly we wave)
camouflaged pop stars
singing their praise
Passing in silence
the villages we razed
Blessing our murderers,
Our leaders depraved
“Don’t call it aggression
Oh, how we hate that expression!”1

this morning
in the garden
your words fell out
your mouth opened
and ran out
of things to say
light abandoned
every corner
you went hard
into the spaces
hid away
you became
another voice
in the wind
no one notices
when the snow
begins and the motels
close and none of the roads
lead home
and none of the homes
even have roads
that could take you there
this morning
you collapsed
in on yourself
and only the air
felt your falling.

peace, why drag supremacy
And fight for superiority?
Why crush silence
And break thine sheath,
That we remain at war?
You waylay unity
And make skulls your crown
You ambush growth
And arrest development,
Peace, why hate thyself
When you are a gem?
Barefooted, you wander afar
Thirsty, you stand aloof
Hungry, you sink beyond
Lonely, you stray away
Peace, why art thou gone?
Come, peace come
Return, O peace
This earth is broken
This world is bruised,
Come, heal the air

Indigo petals, dew beading in their darker folds,
The memory of cinnamon like alms,
A poet’s hidden tune: all was flush
In the days of our setting out
I could rest my cheek against the soil
Dreaming the vastness of lips,
The smooth incomprehensible of touch,
The seething tendernesses shared
And all the fulsome earth our mimicking
Perhaps you knew
About the blade-like line beyond the haze
Under the fell of an eye-less heaven
How could I miss it
In the creases of our bright
Voluptuous streams,

another one left today
a friend only known on an album cover
and by some scratchy music behind his words
and I, here with my hoary beard, grizzled
unkempt, skin dangling off once strong arms
arms that carried my love across a threshold
that lifted toward ancient stars two of my children at a time
and onto a lap that could still be seen three or four
here I remember four decades past
those who left then
was theirs the greater loss or gain
and for who, the ones who were close and cried
time is such a trickster

Born with half a dozen defects and deformities
But always trying to be a damned perfectionist
Never able to pass any English test in a Chinese high school
But managed to obtain a Canadian PhD in English literature
Growing up in the lowest physical conditions
But having the highest quests for spiritual life
With much fewer needs for money than a true puritan
But working like an unserviced coin-making machine
Deep in love with nature
But prisoned in a big city
A man of few words by nature
But making a living by teaching

The power boys are at it like never before.
Speculation and privatization billions
and a fountain full of blood —
weapons a good investment
jobs that we create!
and something for the poor disposables,
a base here
a war there
instability everywhere.
Of two opposing leaders
(their Homeland an unfamiliar echo
from another time, another age)
one is so polite to your face
the other forever weaving to the faster lane.
Tiny parties stand against climate change,
stand up for peace

By Richard Falk
Prefatory Note
The text below is drawn from a talk given at the Spring Festival of the Arts in Beirut, Lebanon on 15 June 2017. Comments welcome.

Is this life?
Is this the life I had dreamed of?
I might have foreseen big, beautiful things
but all I have in my cup now
is a peg of a poet’s anguish and nothing else.