A Haiku for Today

On the road through the clouds

Is there a short cut

To the summer moon?

- Den Sute-Jo

from: Women Poets of Japan. Copyright 1977.

Ariel

by Sylvia Plath  

Stasis in darkness.

Then the substanceless blue   

Pour of tor and distances.

God’s lioness,   

How one we grow,

Pivot of heels and knees!—The furrow

Splits and passes, sister to   

The brown arc

Of the neck I cannot catch,

Nigger-eye   

Berries cast dark   

Hooks—

Black sweet blood mouthfuls,   

Shadows.

Something else

Hauls me through air—

Thighs, hair;

Flakes from my heels.

White

Godiva, I unpeel—

Dead hands, dead stringencies.

And now I

Foam to wheat, a glitter of seas.   

The child’s cry

Melts in the wall.   

And I

Am the arrow,

The dew that flies

Suicidal, at one with the drive   

Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

from: Collected Poems. Copyright 1960.

Graffiti as Social Commentary

Shop till you drop!

Stressed? Looking for solace in an increasingly turbulent world?

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And

Let

Go

!

In the Military Mobile Hospital

 by - Elisha Porat

Who was born like me, in 1938,
Who looked for partners in his trip through life;
What other baby was conveyed home on the floor
Of an armored bus, while his young mother
Knelt over him, sheltering;
Or who else became a tourist 
crossing over alien lands
his whole life but leaving 
behind his shuddering 
heart, flapping back there, 
still in the military mobile hospital?
 

Always I remind myself:
We were only one year old when
The fate of our world was moulded and altered
by a bloodbath, and our first words --
Compressed words, bad words -- became
Precisely the ancient amulet.

translated from the Hebrew by
the author and Ward Kelley

Copyright 2006.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

"There’s a fucking art to the first term because you’re always running for a second term the whole time. It’s like Clinton’s first term. You can’t really do your gangsta shit until your second term. … 

Even Bush couldn’t really fuck up the world until his second term. That’s when he put the hammer down. 

I’m like everybody, I want more action. But I understand that he’s trying not to piss off a lot of people. 

But I believe wholeheartedly if he’s back in, he’s going to do some gangsta shit,"

- Chris Rock.

QUOTE OF THE DAY

Thanks to “Anonymous,” undergraduates will be confidently asserting that Shakespeare wasn’t Shakespeare for the next 10 years at least, and profs will have to waste countless hours explaining the obvious. 

“Anonymous” subscribes to the Oxfordian theory of authorship, the contention that Edward de Vere, the 17th earl of Oxford, wrote Shakespeare’s plays.

Among Shakespeare scholars, the idea has roughly the same currency as the faked moon landing does among astronauts.

- NYT Magazine.

PLATO, Sort of

Phaedo

By Zeus, Socrates!

It seems you're right once again!

Time for your hemlock.

Haiku U, by David M. Bader.