standingatthefence

[standingatthefence]

/ Masahisa Fukase, Family Portrait, 1972

[standingatthefence]

The guitar makes dreams cry. The whimpering of lost souls escapes from its round mouth. And like the tarantula, it weaves a great star to hunt down sighs that float in its black wooden well.

Lorca

[standingatthefence]

“The Awakening Mind should be understood to be of two kinds; in brief: the Mind resolved on Awakening and the Mind proceeding towards Awakening. The distinction between these two should be understood by the wise in the same way as the distinction is recognized between a person who desires to go and one who is going, in that order.”

— Śāntideva, Bodhicaryāvatāra, Crosby & Skilton tr. (1:15-16)

[standingatthefence]

Kōtarō Takamura, tr. by Hiroaki Sato, from Chieko & Other Poems; "Fountain of Mankind,"

[standingatthefence]

Terrace paddies in North Vietnam [Shortlisted in National Geographic Photo Contest 2015] by Quynh Anh Photography on Flickr

[standingatthefence]

“Between your love for me and mine for you lies star-filled air and the trembling of a plant.”

—

Federico García Lorca, from “Sonnet of the Garland of Roses,” Selected Verse (Farrar Straus Giroux, 1996)

[standingatthefence]

“I have to constantly re-identify myself to myself, reactivate my own standards, my own convictions about what I’m doing and why.”

— Nina Simone

[standingatthefence]

[standingatthefence]

If my mother was in a singing mood, it wasn't so bad. She would sing about hard times, bad times, and somebody-done-gone-and-left-me times. But her voice was so sweet and her singing-eyes so melty I found myself longing for those hard times, yearning to be grown without "a thin di-i-ime to my name." I looked forward to the delicious time when "my man" would leave me, when I would "hate to see that evening sun go down…" 'cause then I would know "my man has left this town." Misery colored by the greens and blues in my mother's voice took all of the grief out of the words and left me with a conviction that pain was not only endurable, it was sweet.

– Toni Morrison, The Bluest Eye

[standingatthefence]

June Jordan, “Free Flight.” Haruko/Love Poems

[standingatthefence]

An absolutely devastating loss. One of my favorite actresses. Her work in Bushmama and Daughters were reasons I went to Howard

[standingatthefence]

Abbas Kiarostami: Where Is My Friend’s House? (خانه‌ی دوست کجاست؟), 1987 Life, and Nothing More… (زندگی و دیگر هیچ), 1992 Through the Olive Trees (زیر درختان زیتون), 1994

[standingatthefence]

Around Jerusalem thousands of acres of pine forests were planted by the Jewish National Fund, forests which are both intended to camouflage destroyed Palestinian villages and fashion a new pastoral 'biblical landscape', create a new collective memory and give the impression of an 'authentic' timeless biblical landscape in which trees have been standing forever. But this 'natural landscape' is a carefully constructed scene to camouflage the systematically expropriated land of Palestinian villages, the destruction of olive groves and the ethnic cleansing of the Nakba.

Nur Masalha, Palestine: A Four Thousand Year History (p. 376)

[standingatthefence]

125th Street (Red Heart) New York, Photo by Todd Webb. 1946.  

[standingatthefence]

Victoria Chang, from Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief; “Dear Teacher,”

[Text ID: “The language of poetry reminded me to stay alive. It reminded me that, when it felt like I had nothing, I was nothing, I still had words. I could ride language as if on a horseback, and it could take me anywhere, including deeply into myself.”]

[standingatthefence]

Aimé Césaire, (1939), The Original 1939 Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, Edited by A. James Arnold and Clayton Eshleman, Original art by Wifredo Lam, «Wesleyan Poetry», Wesleyan University Press, Middletown, CT, 2013, Bilingual Edition

[standingatthefence]

Cailin and Gilermo by Samuel Bradley