Paris. Replays of Princess Diana’s deadly car crash—
George Floyd died under the knee of a policeman
throngs of people and three officers looked on
Americans wrenched in pain, my hand flew to my lips
He took his dying breath,
“Mama!”
Americans moaned, Ahhh nooo
That happened?
People all over the world witnessed Floyd’s death
It changed the dimensions of America
That day George Floyd died,
so did the brittle transparent bubble
that separated me from society. Snap!
American consciousness changed.
Now, we say we need to learn about African Americans.
We don’t know who they are.
Black conjures slavery, church-going folks, poverty, drugs, urban crime.
Dialogue flies across the airways
the words pile up between us
we’re not really closer,
not as close as that intimate moment
George Floyd drew his last breath.
So, we’re all dealing with this
taking the measure of all things in our lives
What? Jacob Blake?! Police shot him in the back.
Seven times.
Plucked his shirt, stretched as Jacob bent to get in his car
his three young sons in the back seat
Why?
African Americans: Images of Mammy, plantations, cotton picking
People don’t know the amazing things Africans did.
Mansa Musa, the tenth ruler of the Mali Empire
Was richer than Jeff Bezos
Mansa Musa went to Cairo and spread so much gold around
He broke the economy
Amazon smiles
Jacob Blake’s family knew their history.
His parents were educated, enlightened people,
Helped people in Evanston, where Jacob grew up.
Americans didn’t know that or about
All those years of slavery, abuse
Forced labor even after slavery was abolished
All those years
Shackled to a stone blocking the American dream
After all those years, all that education, all that enlightenment
Jacob Blake is in a coma in a hospital in Kenosha, Wisconsin
handcuffed to his bed.
After all those years,
and all that history,
Jacob Blake, the black man,
is still in chains.
August 23, 2020
GEORGE FLOYD
On May 25, the day George Floyd died
at the hands of the Minneapolis police, both CNN and MSNBC
stopped posting the daily coronavirus count. On that day, everything changed.
What does COVID-19 have to do with the anguished cries of a dying man pinned under the knee of a veteran police officer, hands in his pockets, leaning in with determination?
What does 400 years of institutionalized, cultural and systemic racism have to do with a pandemic?
The police stopped and harassed Mama and my father
driving around St. Paul, Minnesota in the ’40s—
a white woman with a black man.
I can see them now, her blonde hair lilting
she snaps her head around, tense,
and my father, cool, a cigarette dangling from his mouth,
asks languidly, what’s the problem, officer?
He was better educated, more articulate than the police,
probably nattily dressed in slacks and sport coat for his lady.
It wasn’t his first time being stopped.
He attended communist party meetings where they discussed
racial prejudice and revolution.
Police abuse is common knowledge in the Twin Cities,
common as wallpaper,
racial tensions have been simmering at a steady burn since forever.
Floyd George was not the only one. There are countless others.
His killing catalyzed demonstrations across the country,
indeed, around the world,
Floyd George was actually the fifth death
at the hands of Minneapolis police since 2018.
A plague and a pestilence.
Sandra is a renegade artist and writer, and the founder of the Genghis Khan Urban Guerrilla Research Society.
I haven’t written you anything lately. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. It’s so hard to put effort into a nicely shaped paragraph. You also know that I wait until things ask to go out, I never push them to.
Generally; I never push. I always wait, I never feel good pushing. Yes; I made this mistake once with some of them, I pushed too hard that it didn’t work, and I lost.
Dear Love,
I am learning that what comes naturally, stays. Also, what goes naturally, doesn’t hurt.
Dear Love,
I miss you; you know that?
Dear Love,
It’s passed midnight already, and I am not able to sleep. The ghosts of my past are chasing me. As I am so glad that I don’t have roommates anymore, as I feel like I need one right now, just to hear the noise around me that distracts me from thinking about you.
Dear Love,
Overthinking kills.
Dear Love,
I miss you so much.
Dear Love,
Last time I saw you, I felt like I didn’t want to see you again. You were different, you have changed and I didn’t expect myself to be going so far away without feeling bad or upset. How come destiny helped me a lot to get over you? How come I don’t feel anything for a long time!
Dear Love,
I haven’t changed yet, I am still loving at most, I am still giving parts of myself, I am still getting over myself for others and I am still a very hard person to get over.
Dear Love,
I receive many letters from all of them, all are sending me their feelings, they still do carry feelings for me. I also still carry feelings, for myself.
Dear Love,
I have discovered that I have too much curiosity to get to know strangers. I am more comfortable around them. Those who you meet and you are sure that you are leaving. I do open up to them as I was opening up to you someday. Someday I don’t know if I want back.
Dear Love,
I really don’t feel anything.
Dear Love,
I want love.
I want love.
I want love.
Dear Love,
I give love to get love.
I am singing that line right now, I liked it. How come I still like myself and like what I do even if it is never enough?
Dear Love,
I still miss you.
Dear Love,
I don’t know you; I don’t know who you are. Am I still in love just with the idea of love?
Maybe I have never loved you and maybe we have never met!
this is the secret that the ancient sages have told you.
Listening to the light pass through your body and play Guqin in your bones
noticed an old man, who was 30000 years old, sitting in a palace on the mountains top.
There is an island in the depths of the ocean,
the goddess was so brilliant before the world had been born.
Her eyes will make you forget the sadness,
for an instant, take you through those free and unfettered days outside.
在身体里有一个更大的世界
在身体里有一个更大的世界
这就是古代圣人告诉你的秘密
倾听光线穿过你的身体在骨骼里弹琴
看到一个老人三万岁了坐在山巅的一座宫殿
在海洋的深处有一座小岛
那位女神在世界诞生之前就如此灿烂
她的两只眼睛会让你忘了忧伤
一瞬间带你穿越那天外逍遥的日子
2020.05.12
The World is Just a Lie
The world is just a lie,
truth is on the other side of the world.
We can neither see the light of time
nor know that everything is a shadow on the running water.
There is another me on another planet,
you have never been born or died.
When the maze becomes transparent, the door of time-space opens,
you will shake hands and smile with the giant in the heavens.
The words are both music and the epic of the soul,
Telling you that the palaces of outer space are incomparably lofty,
as if they are as endless as the mountains of gold.
世界只是一个谎言
世界只是一个谎言
真理在世界的另一面
我们看不到时间之光
不知道一切只是流水之上的影子
另外的星球上有另外的自己
你不曾出生也不曾死去
当迷宫透明时空之门敞开
你将和那天上的巨人握手微笑
那词语是乐曲也是灵魂之史诗
告诉你天外的宫殿无比的巍峨
如黄金之山岳连绵而无际
2020.03.17
The Hymn of Sweet Soul
Drape the night over my shoulders like a cloak of the world,
call the birds of the stars from outer space and fly near my city garden.
Sing a song of the giants from huge city of platinum,
awoke the drowsy city of the world with a start.
Oh, the lightnings are in full bloom in the vault of heaven-
the hymns of sweet soul.
Your bones became transparent suddenly,
its light was flickering all over the body like the wings,
in a flash, the body became huge, higher than the large building down the street.
06.12.2020
那甜蜜灵魂的圣歌
把黑夜披在肩上如一件世界之斗篷
召唤天外的星辰之鸟飞临我的城市花园
唱一曲白金巨城的巨人之歌
惊醒这昏沉的人间之城
哦 闪电在天穹盛开 那甜蜜灵魂的圣歌
你的骨骼骤然透明 光芒如翅翼在周身闪烁
一刹那身体巨大 高过了街边的巨厦
2020.06.12
Bio: Yuan Hongri (born 1962) is a renowned Chinese mystic, poet, and philosopher. His work has been published in the UK, USA, India, New Zealand, Canada, and Nigeria; his poems have appeared in Poet’s Espresso Review, Orbis, Tipton Poetry Journal, Harbinger Asylum, The Stray Branch, Pinyon Review, Taj Mahal Review, Madswirl, Shot Glass Journal, Amethyst Review, The Poetry Village, and other e-zines, anthologies, and journals. His best known works are Platinum City and Golden Giant. His works explore themes of prehistoric and future civilization.
Yuanbing Zhang (b. 1974), who is a Chinese poet and translator, works in a Middle School, Yanzhou District , Jining City, Shandong Province, China. He can be contacted through his email- 3112362909@qq.com.
Address:No.18 middle school Yanzhou District ,Jining City, Shandong Province, China Yuan Hongri
Glenn Gould’s Sonatas – Fantasies Variations over & over, day after
day. Sublime, tragic, joy-sorrow-
ful, heart-rending, heart-
filling.
Vibrating strings pull the soul’s sinew, tiptoe over your grave of dreams. Awake to lull
into neverending sleep.
So you dance, a marionette of his fingers, the sensitivity of his touch on your black
& white keys
cast
in sunlight and shadows over the ground outside.
Can your dangling feet dance faster? Slower?
Pitch
of splintering
glass.
A colossal public square,
churches and music halls,
crystal panes
raining.
Sharp shards in air.
Empty courtyard, mist lit by a rising sun,
the silverless mirrors, prismatic—
never hit-
ting
the catastrophe of ground.
Intense chromatic moments of notes waver in-process,
delicacy & trails & lively crescendos.
Time becomes space.
Trill floating
Escher glass-stairs of notes.
A cathedral of crystalline arrhythmic intervals.
Without tonal centres,
clusters echo clusters,
flutes, violin, saxophone,
this lullaby of gentle notes,
that tempest of cymbals drumming a glass-
bottomed boat torpedoing
a furious ocean.
Loneliness, an open-ended disjunctive divine embrace.
Fresh, clear
as the thrill of dawn.
Inspired by Tatar-Russian composer, Sophia Gubaidulina’s Modern Classical oeuvre.
Brenda Clews is a poet who dances. She’s had two books published, Tidal Fury (Guernica Editions, 2016) and Fugue in Green (Quattro Books, 2017). She’s also an artist, a video poet, an editor. and runs a quarterly poetry and singer/songwriter event called Minstrels & Bards in Toronto, Canada. Her website is brendaclews.com
