Two examples from mediaeval Odisha’s bhakti tradition show how debates and differences about the sacred were part of devotional practice, and not forced onto us after the institutionalisation of modern, secular, and democratic visions… Each bhakt’s quest toward their own self, or own language, was a gesture to a universal appeal. ABINASH DASH CHOUDHURY Over… Read More Encountering the Bhakt: Transformation in Religious Thought
A song by Single Gun Theory a long time agoI picked flowers and sang on a hillside far awayI’m still singinga long long time agoI felt love for the first timeit’s still with me now through the years, through the years,carried pain and loss with my love a long long time agoyou and I swam… Read More Motherland
The birds they singAt the break of day‘Start again,’ I heard them say‘Don’t dwell on what has passed awayAnd what is yet to be …’ – Leonard Cohen, Anthem +++++++++++ Hour by hour, life is kindly offered usWe have learned but little from yesterdayOf tomorrow, all knowledge is forbidden,And if I ever feared the coming… Read More The present is our happiness
Ahmad Farhad was pushed into vehicle hours after posting about threats from country’s spy agency, says Syeda Urooj Zainab Shah Meer Baloch in Islamabad The wife of a Pakistani poet and journalist who was abducted from outside his house last week has accused the country’s spy agency of responsibility, saying it acted because of his activism.… Read More Pakistani poet was abducted because of human rights activism, says wife
go upright among those who are on their knees / among those with their backs turned and those toppled in the dust / and let your helpless Anger be like the sea / whenever you hear the voice of the insulted and beaten… Two poems by ZBIGNIEW HERBERT (1924-1998) / TRANSLATED BY John and Bogdana… Read More The Adventures of Mr Cogito
Rabindranath Tagore (Written in Bengali on December 31, 1899) THE LAST SUN of the century sets amidst the blood-red clouds of the West and the whirlwind of hatred. The naked passion of self-love of Nations, in its drunken delirium of greed, is dancing to the clash of steel and the howling verses of vengeance. The… Read More Sunset of the Century
NB: There are three kinds of wrongdoing: mistakes; crimes; and sins. Mistakes can be corrected, crimes may be punished; but for a sin, you can only repent: These lines are taken from the 1987 Georgian Soviet film Repentance, by Tengiz Abuladze. The American-backed Israeli Defence Forces call themselves the most moral army in the world. Their… Read More Daughter of prominent Palestinian poet killed in Israeli airstrike in Gaza. Khuda Hafiz
GAZA casualties live statistics On December 7, the beloved Palestinian poet, writer, literature professor, and activist Refaat Alareer was killed in a targeted Israeli airstrike that also killed his brother, his sister, and four of her children. In the week of mourning since, tributes to Alareer’s life, writing, mentorship, and activism have flooded in from around the… Read More Watch Brian Cox read ‘If I Must Die’ by murdered Palestinian poet Refaat Alareer
First posted December 04, 2011 Reading HamletTo the right, wasteland by the cemeterybeyond it the river’s dull blue.You said: ‘Go, get thee, to a nunneryor get a fool to marry you…’ Though that’s always how Princes speak,still, I’ve remembered the words.As an ermine mantle let them stream,behind him, through endless years. ‘Hands clasped under the… Read More Anna Akhmatova: Three poems including ‘Requiem’ / Friendship in the time of terror: Nadezhda Mandelstam’s tribute to Akhmatova
By Graciela Mochkofsky It may come as no surprise that a country as deeply polarized by its recent history as Chile is also at war over the relevance of its preëminent poet, Pablo Neruda. In December, fifty years after the coup d’état that brought General Augusto Pinochet to power, Chileans rejected an attempt to write a new constitution… Read More Black thread in the brightness: the second death of Pablo Neruda
After the truth-shower 