Poem of the Week: Shadab Zeest Hashmi

         

Ghazal for the Ninth Month

Your august birth, my taking oath as an American, were only weeks apart.
The most I can remember is your rocking to a dull ache before we were apart.

Our hill was plush, the whole place soaked up the scent of raisin pulao. On
the last day of July the umbilical cord was cut, yet still we were barely apart.

I had sworn to bear arms for this country. A cat prowled between the young
apple tree and dry lobelia; camouflaged, I couldn’t tell her parts apart.

I acted mother first when I frantically covered you, half-dreaming you were
the tender bird of prey and a feline form was the country of which I was a part.

Bear arms? Kill like a predator? In other dreams I bore you through the cold months,
through snow in Julian, rain in Sedona. Not for a single minute were we apart.

-Shadab Zeest Hashmi

Used by permission

From Kohl & Chalk (Poetic Matrix Press, 2013)

Shadab Zeest Hashmi is a Pushcart nominee and winner of the San Diego Book Award for poetry for Baker of Tarfia—a book based on the history of interfaith tolerance in Al Andalus (Muslim Spain). Her work has been included in the Seeds of Peace concert with the award-winning Al Andalus Ensemble, in the film Cruzando Lineas: Crossing Lines, and has been translated into Urdu by Pakistan Academy of Arts and Letters. She has presented her series of poems and photographs titled "Across the Windowsill" at San Diego Museum of Art. She has served as an editor for the annual Magee Park Anthology and the online journal MahMag World Literature and has taught as a visiting professor in the MFA program at San Diego State University. She has published her poetry and prose in numerous journals worldwide and represents Pakistan on UniVerse: A United Nations of Poetry.

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Spend a "Night Out" with Split This Rock @ The Laramie Project!

 

Buy tickets!

What: a performance of The Laramie Project, in support of Split This Rock!

When: Friday October 18, 2013 - 7:30-10pm

Where: Ford's Theatre - 511 10th St. NW Washington, DC 20004

Tickets: $50/person. Buy yours here!  (All proceeds benefit Split This Rock. Must buy tickets online to receive discount).

 

Post-Show Drinks: Bistro D'Orc - 518 10th St. NW  Washington, DC 20004

 

 

About The Laramie Project

 

By Moisés Kaufman and  

Members of the Tectonic Theatre Project  

Directed by Matthew Gardiner

The Laramie Project presents a deeply complex portrait of a community's response to the 1998 murder of Matthew Shepard, a young gay man living in Laramie, Wyoming. In a series of poignant reflections, the residents of Laramie react to the hate crime and surrounding media storm with anger, bewilderment and sorrow. The play portrays the seismic and deeply personal impact Matthew's death had on this small town while also demonstrating the power of the human spirit to triumph over bigotry and violence. Fifteen years later, Matthew Shepard's story still reverberates, urging us on with its clarion call to confront the destructive power of bullying and hate, in all forms. The Laramie Project is the third offering in the multi-year Lincoln Legacy Project-an effort to generate dialogue around issues of tolerance, equality and acceptance. Experience the story that TIME magazine calls "a pioneering and powerful stage event."

Inaugural Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism

We are very excited to announce the first ever Split This Rock Freedom Plow Award for Poetry & Activism!  

The award, made possible through the generosity of the CrossCurrents Foundation, recognizes and honors a poet who is doing innovative and transformative work at the intersection of poetry and social change. We anticipate that the prize, like Split This Rock Poetry Festival, will become an essential, enduring part of our mission to promote the growing field of art and social activism on a national level.

This inaugural winner will be chosen by a panel of prominent judges: E. Ethelbert Miller, Martha Collins, and Carlos Andres Gomez.

You are invited to help us celebrate the winner of the Freedom Plow Award and his/her achievements at a gala awards ceremony and reading at the Goethe-Institut of Washington, DC on the evening of 

November 1st, 6-9pm.

Here at Split This Rock we are thrilled to honor those who infuse activism with the creative power of the arts. We hope that you will join us in celebrating the vital work that Langston Hughes describes in the lines that inspired the name of the award:

The plow plowed a new furrow

Across the field of history.

Into that furrow the freedom seed was dropped.

   

Stay tuned for more details, and the announcement of the 2013 Freedom Plow Award winner!

Poem of the Week: Carlos Parada Ayala

       

Vaivén de fantasías

 

Los argonautas se albergaron

en la oscuridad de mis zapatos
y un dragón azul acudió
a encenderme la estufa.
El cielo limpio se escondió
en las gavetas del armario,
lo que explica el silencio
de los pájaros y el exceso
de neblina en la ropa que me puse.

Hoy la soledad es un vaivén

de fantasías.

Mejor así.

Ayer el día desató un

huracán de anzuelos

que dejó al mar vacío 

y al sol humedecido

como ojo de ballena herida.

Marooned

The argonauts took shelter

in the darkness of my shoes

and a blue dragon arrived

to light the stove for me.

The clear sky hid

in my dresser drawers

which explains the silence

of the birds and the excess

of mist in the clothes I put on.

Today solitude is an ebbing and flowing

of fantasy.

Better this way.

Yesterday set off a

hurricane of fish hooks

that left the sea empty

and the sun slick                              

like the eye of an injured whale.

- Carlos Parada Ayala

[English Translation: Andrea Johnson]

Used by permission.

Carlos Parada Ayala is the author of the poetry book, La luz de la tormenta/The Light of the Storm (Zozobra Publishing, Maryland, 2013) and co-editor of the anthology Al pie de la Casa Blanca: Poetas hispanos de Washington, DC (North American Academy of the Spanish Language, New York, 2010.) This poetry anthology, co-edited with Argentinian poet Luis Alberto Ambroggio, was selected by the US Library of Congress to celebrate 400 years of poetry written in Spanish in the United States. Parada Ayala is a recipient of Washington, DC's, Commission on the Arts Larry Neal Poetry Award and has received the Commission's individual artist's fellowship.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

If you are interested in reading past poems of the week, feel free to visit the blog archive.   

Poem of the Week: David Mura

         

Minneapolis Public  

 

There are 150 first languages in our schools

and so many aliens even E.T. would go unnoticed,  

though if your tongue moved one way in the land of your birth

it must move another now, awkward at first.

There are blacks here who've never been to Africa;
Africans who've never heard a Baptist prayer,
much less the solemn dirges of Lutherans
or how the artist formerly known is some sort of Prince.

In the anthology of American Buddhist poetry
you will find not one face of a Tibetan
but they are here with girls and boys named Tenzin
and one, my son's good friend, throws a hard mean spiral.

Esmir is not the name of a girl but a Bosnian
boy who crouches at a table and glues a lamp together
and later with my other son conspires on a book--"A Touch
of Rabies"--a heartbreaking tale of good dogs gone bad.

(Why tell a soul of the sieges that brought him here
or stories of the Dali Lama or the temples destroyed
or troops of the war lords in the streets of Somalia,
the borders dividing death from safety if not evil and good?)

Say you're Egyptian or Haitian: Here you're singular,
not part of a Big Apple ghetto. If you're Chinese,
most likely you're adopted, or else your parents study
engineering at the U. And have I mentioned the Mexicans?

In West Side Story the rumble starts with Puerto Ricans
and working class whites in a high school gym;
this year Maria's still Natalie Wood white to Jamaica's
half-black Anita and the Jets sport blacks, one Tibetan,

and my happa daughter who still doesn't question
such casting, or why Bye Bye Birdie last year
just might not be the choice of half the school
for a song and dance they could take on as their own.

Still at the spring school dance J-Lo and Ja Rule
set the awkward bump and grind of junior high girls
and the boys watch on the sidelines as boys that age do,
whether Bosnian, black, white, Somali, Tibetan.

I'm told we live in the Land of Great Lake Wobegon
where all the women are strong, the men good looking,
and the children above average--and, I always add,
everyone's white. Hey, Tenzin, Nabil, go tell Garrison:

Not now. Not quite.

- David Mura 

From Angels for the Burning (BOA Editions, 2004)

Used by permission.

David Mura will publish his fourth poetry collection, The Last Incantations, with Northwestern University Press in March, 2014. Mura's other poetry books are Angels for the Burning, The Colors of Desire (Carl Sandburg Literary Award), and After We Lost Our Way (a National Poetry Series Contest winner). He has also published two memoirs, Turning Japanese and Where the Body Meets Memory, and a novel, Famous Suicides of the Japanese Empire. His book of poetry criticism is Song for Uncle Tom, Tonto & Mr. Moto: Poetry & Identity. He teaches at the Stonecoast MFA Program and the VONA Writers' Conference.

Poem of the Week: Kathi Wolfe

 

Blind Ambition 

I'm in my seat,

averting my eyes,

those funhouse mirrors,

from the numbers

swimming across the blackboard.

Figures are slimy

monsters who slobber

all over your picnic

basket on the beach.

I grab my white cane

and run away from them.

"If you were Helen Keller,"

my teacher says,

"you'd get a gold

star in arithmetic."

Her voice sounds

like she's just

met Prince Charming.

"You would be a perfect

young lady," she says.

I don't want

to make friends

with fractions

or skip rope

with multiplication tables.

I want to chase

lightning bugs,

pull my brother's hair,

open up all the presents

before the company

comes on Christmas morning.

I don't want to be any

Goody-Two-Shoes Helen.

I want to baptize

my new sneakers

in the mud.

-Kathi Wolfe


From The Green Light (Finishing Line Press, 2013)

Used by permission.

Kathi Wolfe is a writer and poet. Her chapbook The Green Light was published by Finishing Line Press in Summer 2013. Wolfe is a contributor to the anthology Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, an American Library Association 2011 Notable book. Her chapbook Helen Takes the Stage: The Helen Keller Poems was published by Pudding House in 2008. Wolfe's poetry has appeared in Gargoyle, Beltway Poetry Review and other publications. In 2008, she was a Lambda Literary Foundation Fellow. Wolfe is a senior writer/columnist for the arts magazine Scene4 and a contributor to The Washington Blade.

Please feel free to forward Split This Rock Poem of the Week widely. We just ask you to include all of the information in this email, including this request. Thanks!

September Sunday Kind of Love: Carlos Parada Ayala & Kathi Wolfe

 September
Sunday Kind of Love
Featuring

Carlos Parada Ayala &
Kathi Wolfe

    

   

Sunday September 15, 2013

5-7pm

Busboys & Poets

2021 14th St. NW

Washington, DC 20009

Hosted by

Sarah Browning & Katy Richey
$5 online or at the door

As always, open mic follows!

Co-Sponsored by Busboys and Poets &
Split This Rock

Carlos Parada Ayala is the author of the poetry book, La luz de la tormenta/The Light of the Storm (Zozobra Publishing, Maryland, 2013) and co-editor of the anthology Al pie de la Casa Blanca: Poetas hispanos de Washington, DC (North American Academy of the Spanish Language, New York, 2010.) This poetry anthology, co-edited with Argentinian poet Luis Alberto Ambroggio, was selected by the US Library of Congress to celebrate 400 years of poetry written in Spanish in the United States. Parada Ayala is a recipient of Washington, DC's, Commission on the Arts Larry Neal Poetry Award and has received the Commission's individual artist's fellowship.

  

Kathi Wolfe is a writer and poet. Her chapbook The Green Light was published by Finishing Line Press in Summer 2013. Wolfe is a contributor to the anthology Beauty Is a Verb: The New Poetry of Disability, an American Library Association 2011 Notable book. Her chapbook Helen Takes the Stage: The Helen Keller Poems was published by Pudding House in 2008. Wolfe's poetry has appeared in Gargoyle, Beltway Poetry Review and other publications. In 2008, she was a Lambda Literary Foundation Fellow. Wolfe is a senior writer/columnist for the arts magazine Scene4 and a contributor to The Washington Blade.