Poetry Friday: #WritersResist

Well, here we are. It's really happening.First, I'd like to thank all of you for your comments on the press conference found poems. Several Poetry Friday regulars have been engaging with transcripts of the president-elect's words. By paring away (or emphasizing) the fluff, these poems help us expose problems with the way language is used by our future president.I'm glad my week began with a #WritersResist event in Baltimore. [Find out more about the Writers Resist movement at this website.]There were so many powerful speakers: military veterans, high school-aged performance poets, an essayist who spoke about the history of neglect that led to Baltimore's recent uprising, young women, elders, the city's first youth poet laureate, academics, and activists.I was invited to read as a representative of the 100 Thousand Poets for Change. I've written about the group before [read my interview with founder Michael Rothenberg here], and about my 2015 trip to the 100TPC World Conference in Italy.The group is an earlier incarnation of the pulse that is driving #WritersResist now. 100TPC was born at the same time as the Occupy Wall Street movement, and has grown -- with concurrent literary readings happening around the globe each September -- ever since.Being part of 100TPC has enriched my life with new and very dear friends, poets whose words take international stories out of the realm of newspapers and TV soundbites and into the real.On Sunday, I shared poems by two of these poets, Michael Dickel of Israel and Menka Shivdasani of India. Both have been turning eye, pen, and heart to human rights issues in their home countries for many years. I am learning from them how to use my own eye, pen, and heart to speak truth to power.So thirsty…by Michael DickelI am almost back perhaps. The long summer ordealof stress, rockets, war, death, killing has moved offinto Syria and Iraq and left us barren for a moment.A bit of rain falling today hints at winter beingwet. We need water. We always need water. So thirsty.The brown hills will green again, and the dry bedsrecently run with blood water will wash thoroughlyso flowers may wave their red-yellow-white-purplecacophony of emotions in winter's permissive grace.We need the water. We always need water. So thirsty.Since between last summer's war and the next,whenever it might fall upon us, this brief momentflickers—a satellite-pretense of being a star glidingacross black night—a mere reflection of sunlight.We want water, we always need more water. So thirsty.The desert will preserve these battles, mummifythe narratives, and wait as scorpions and seeds wait.And to this I return. Almost. Maybe. Turned backfrom the sea and step-by-step making my way to sweetwater. Always water. Like the night sky, I am so thirsty.VeilsBy Menka ShivdasaniThe first veil was whenthe country split,a woman held apartand sliced,crushed under the weightof muscle, bone,and the evil smile.After that, the second veildidn’t matter;the countries hidbehind their nets and little webs.We peeped outfrom behind thefraying thread.Too much had alreadybeen lost.The skin had ripped,and scarredbeneath stitchedexteriors. The third veil,then, was justimpotent cloth.But it mattered whenthey held her down again,this woman bornof country blood,and they whipped heron the streetsso no one daredto take her by the hand.Instead, they tooka video of the veiledand battered face.These veils have begun to bleed on me.They biteinto my fleshand blackened skin.You cannot hidebehind veils much longer;they will not survivethe grenade in your hand.The marketplace is waiting;hurry now.***Michael Dickel, a poet, fiction writer, and photographer, has taught at various colleges and universities in Israel and the U.S. He co-edited Voices Israel Volume 36 (2010). He was managing editor for arc-23 and 24. Is a Rose Press released his new book, The Palm Reading after The Toad’s Garden in 2016. His previous books are War Surrounds Us, The World Behind It, Chaos… and Midwest / Mid-East. With producer / director David Fisher, he received an NEH grant to write a film script about Yiddish theatre. Dickel’s writing, art, and photographs have appeared in print and online.

Menka Shivdasani's first book of poems, the critically acclaimed Nirvana at Ten Rupees, was published by Adil Jussawalla for XAL-Praxis in 1990. Her second collection Stet first appeared in 2001, and her third collection, Safe House, was published recently by Paperwall Media & Publishing Pvt Ltd. Menka is also co-translator of Freedom and Fissures, an anthology of Sindhi Partition poetry, published by Sahitya Akademi in 1998 and editor of If the Roof Leaks, Let it Leak, an anthology of women's writing that forms part of a series being brought out by Sound and Picture Archives for Research on Women (SPARROW). She has edited two online anthologies of contemporary Indian poetry for the American e-zine​ www.bigbridge.org​.Menka's poems have appeared in several publications, both in India and elsewhere. These include Poetry Review (London), Poetry Wales, Fulcrum (USA), Seminary Ridge Review (Gettysburg), the Bloodaxe Book of Contemporary Indian Poets, 60 Indian Poets (Penguin Books India), and the Harper Collins Book of English Poetry. She is also represented in Indian Literature in English: An Anthology, a textbook of the University of Mumbai.Menka is joint coordinator of the Culture Beat initiative at the Press Club in Mumbai and has been a member of Asia Pacific Writers & Translators Association since its inception. As Mumbai coordinator for the global movement, 100 Thousand Poets for Change, she organises an annual poetry festival at the Kitab Khana book store. Menka's career as a journalist includes a stint with South China Morning Post in Hong Kong, and the publication of ​eleven books as co-author/ editor, three of which were released by the then prime minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. In 1986, she played a key role in setting up the Poetry Circle in Mumbai.