“The Noise/Silence of Lasting Peace” [after seeing Yoko Ono "Imagine" exhibit in the Musée des Beaux Arts de Montréal] @ 2009 by James Cockcroft
End wars by noise
of revolutionary
multitudes.
Enduring silence.
1.
At Checkpoint Charlie
customs huts
The death strip – scraped earth
:wildflowers.
Sepia postcard of the Brandenburg Gate.
Organized bus tour. A one-day visit.
2.
Windows are bricks instead of glass.
3.
A summer day, lapis-blue sky.
My husband buys a rucksack.
“These East Berliners look unhappy,” he says.
I remember, his leaving bruises.
The Mauer, the Wall, cuts through houses.
Ripped-up cobblestone.
4.
People are forbidden to wave
to family and friends.
5.
White crosses under an old elm.
A Strasse becomes a cul-de-sac:
from a steel viewing tower
one sees the street life.
Blank faces of passers-by.
6.
People break the Wall with hammers,
take home souvenirs. 1989.
7.
We are a family, divorced.
8.
A piece of Mauer still stands along the river,
one kilometre long. Dandelions, graffiti art.
Centre of the city under construction.
غزوة غزة
بأكتبلَك
من جوه حصار
بأكتبلَك من تحت جدار
كان يوم شايل سقف الدار
بأكتبلك من أرضي الحِبلى بالأحرار
بأسمي وبأسم الشهدا والثوار
… بأكتبلَك
… وفي حلقي مرار
***
غزوة غزة
غارسة في قلبي سيف من نار
جيش جرار
كل سلاحه جبن وعار
وشعبي الأعزل واقف صامد
وإنتوا بتختلقوا الأعذار
***
أنده لك
ألاقيك محتار
أسيادك ماسكينلك ذِلة
وإنتَ حمار
لا بتحسب إيه أخرة صمتك
ولا عارف مين اللي بياكلك
ولا بكره مين راح يحتلك
ما هو لازم حيجيلك الدور :
مرسوملنا كلنا إدوار
***
الأخت الكبرى
بايعة شرفها ، ويّا الغاز ، للسمسار
وولادها لو ولّعوا شمعة
أو قالوا بصوت عالي كلمتهم
العسكر يحرقوا دنيتهم :
أسوار جواها أسوار
***
غزوة غزة
شاهدة عليكوا ليوم الدين
مساكين
باصين لكن مش شايفيين
طول ما إنتوا في ليل الخوف مساجين
على فين رايحيين ما إنتوش عارفيين
***
غزة يا أخويا مش حتموت
ولا حتسلم
ولا تنهار
أقفل بابك ، سد ودانك
الّف الف حكاية خسيسة
مهما حتكدب
مهما حتهرب
حتماً برضه حيجي نهار
The Invasion of Gaza
Besieged
I write
From underneath my collapsed roof
I write
From my persistent land
I write
In my name
and for the fighters
and the martyrs
I write
Bitter …
I write
***
The invasion of Gaza
pierced my heart
with a poisoned spear:
Planes and bombs
Unarmed people
A world
that doesn’t see or hear
***
I call on you
You are confused
Clueless, manipulated, used
For you too they have a plan
but you can’t see your time is near
***
The invasion of Gaza
will scar you
to the end of days
You can’t move
and you can’t think
You’re stuck in fear
***
Gaza, my friend,
will not collapse
surrender
or die
Plug your ears
Close your eyes
Believe their lies
No matter how long
falsehood survives
the sun shall rise
Kolkata Dreams
K. Gandhar Chakravarty
8th House Publishing, Montreal Canada
2009, 75 pages
“I wonder what it must be like
To fuck with a severed penis.”
Montrealer K. Gandhar ‘Ginsburg’ Chakravarty knows his penis from his elbow. He knows the stuff that Bengalis shy away from. He knows that he must say what should not be said. Yeah! Because expatriate Bengalis are just that.
Well! He calls a dick, a dick. Plain and simple. No fig leaves to spare. He did the road trip thing to Calcutta, now Kolkata, lived there for half a year at the age of twenty one and probably did the stuff his parents would not be proud of and probably would have made Allen Ginsburg squirm with delight. (PS: You may want to know that Allen Ginsburg and his partner Peter Orlovsky spent a lot of time in Calcutta and here is a blog about the famous Calcutta Coffee House’s 50th anniversary. It was in Calcutta that the Beat Generation found their contemporaries in The Hungry Poets -http://ginsbergblog.blogspot.com/2009/04/calcutta-college-street-coffee-house.html). But Gandhar did what every Bengali of Montreal origins or every hyphenated Canadian of Indian origins should have done when they realized the smells, the decay, the blessed protuberances in the body and mind of the Indo-Canadian entity. Travel alone, without your parents, without advice, avoid your kakas (uncle in Bengali) and pishis (Aunt in Bengali) and give a wide berth to the maternal and paternal well-wishers. Sounds like this Montreal PhD student in religion and prolific musician as well, hogged the streets and suburbs of Kolkata and got neck deep in its noises, filth, poetry, religious absurdity and the ranking insensitivity of its middle-class. In verses and shout-outs that ring out a thunderous simplicity, Gandhar says this in one of his poems -
Ode to a Riksha-Ola
Oie Riksha-Ola!How much to take me to Chuchra station?
That much!?
No, I’ll give you only twelve.
Yes, I know that you can barely feed your family,
And your feet have calluses two inches thick,
And I know that it must hurt your back
To keep peddling around these fat cat pricks
And, sure, you can barely feel your own ass
After each day’s work.
But three rupees mean just that to me.
Hell! This sounds so familiar. It is just the type of riposte one would hear from a CPI(M) (the Communist Party in West Bengal has ruled for thirty years) supporting, raging bull Calcutta middle-class charlatan liberal.
Gandhar Chakravarty covers a wide spectrum of Kolkata reality in a mordant, acerbic and extremely entertaining style. He picks up on Kolkata, where the Hungry Poets left off. And he is only in his twenties.
“Öne poem, two poems, Under a tree he sat, Finding Rhymes To pass the time.”
Starting out from Kalifornia, slowly Gandhar winds his way into Kolkata, right past Dom Dom– that is how Bengalis pronounce Dum Dum, the Airport town where the Brits developed the bullet with the same name.
Kolkata is falling apart.
Destruction would be a welcome fresh start
To resurrect a city that’s falling apart.
A welcome relief
From years of breathing
Diesel grief.
Chakravarty covers it all from the cutting of Coconuts for life-giving fresh water inside, the marauding mosquitoes, the topsy-turvy world of Park Street discotheques, roadkill, Gandhi on bills, the green suburbs and the inevitable Ma Kali-
Now the tongue,
Stuck out and bitten,
Serves as the nation’s expression
For wrath and shame,
All the same,
Almost blood red
When stained by Paan.
Kolkata Dreams is a great read, especially for those who are always looking for new voices in Montreal’s various spoken word scenes.
June 04, 2009
Note for readers of Serai: I recently composed this poem in homage to my dear Cuban friend Celia Hart for a book being published in her memory by Havana’s Martí Studies Center. The poem’s title in English is “With the soul ablaze with new lights,” a phrase coined by Celia in an E-mail to me to describe the inspiration she felt after a stroll through the blossoming lilacs of Montreal’s Botanical Garden in May 2008, a few months before she and her brother Abel died in an automobile accident in Havana, at ages 45 and 48 respectively. The reference in the poem to Celia’s “padres” (parents) is to Armando Hart and Haydée Santamaría, famed revolutionaries of the July 26th Movement that led the Cuban Revolution of 1959. As Minister of Education, Armando launched the UN-praised “Yes I Can” literacy campaign now used throughout the world, including some of Canada’s First Nation communities. Haydée (d. 1980) founded the Casa de las Américas, a publishing and cultural center currently celebrating its 50th anniversary. Celia Hart is a widely published revolutionary intellectual whose last public address and interview outside of Cuba took place in Montreal’s Centro Cultural Simón Bolivar and was carried live by Montreal’s Radio Centre Ville. In my poem, the phrases in quotation marks are the words of Celia, with the exception of George W. Bush’s “los rincones oscuros” (“the dark corners” of the world used by Bush as a racist caricature of supposed backward less developed nations suspected of harboring terrorists).
Celia Hart, ¡presente! – James Cockcroft
“CON EL ALMA ENCENDIDA CON NUEVAS LUCES” (homenaje a Celia Hart)
por James Cockcroft
“Con el alma encendida con nuevas luces”
me escribiste en un E-mail de junio,
tu típica manera de ver y vivir…
Desde aquel baile hace tantos años
tu sonrisa explosiva e ideas revolucionarias
enardecieron y desafiaron mi ser.
Durante nuestro paseo de mayo en le Jardin botanique de Montréal,
sin saber del futuro, las lilas radiantes encendieron nuestras almas…
y me di cuenta de que tu ser tan vital encandila a todo el mundo.
Demasiado fácil sería atribuir a tus padres revolucionarios y ejemplares
tus calidades excepcionales, incluso tu pasión,
sin sospechar ni un segundito de la complejidad de lo originario en ti misma.
Fiel hasta la muerte a la Revolución que te creó,
amaste a tus padres tal cual a esa “cofradía comunista…
los niños en Cuba… los únicos que saben querer”.
Cuando no estaba de moda,
rescataste el pensamiento de León Trotsky
de la condena terrorista estalinista…
Para agregarlo al legajo invalorable de
Maceo, Martí, y Mella,
de nuestro Haydée, de nuestro Che.
Caminabas, mejor dicho corrías, con “nuestros Cinco” y Fidel,
para que la gente en “los rincones oscuros” del Occidente
supieran de la belleza de la siempre imperfectiva Revolución Cubana…
Y para que se la defendieran en la mejor forma posible:
crear dos, tres, muchas revoluciones,
e internacionalizarlas.
Ofreciste tus críticas, tus sentimientos, y tu amor
a todas y todos en la única manera que conocías:
honestamente desde el corazón.
Seis días antes de tu muerte inesperada
respondiste a mi preocupación acerca del Huracán Gustav:
“¡Solo una revolución puede salvar vidas frente a esta herrumbre del consumismo!”
Te honro, mi pasionaria,
“mi amor de lilas”…
¡Celia Hart, siempre presente!
Standing on the sidelines of
the parade grounds, they are old now,
grandmothers, great-grandmothers;
women who forfeited their lovers
to the bagpipe sirens:
the tangled sheets cooled
by waving flags.
Penelope knew the secret,
the dark unraveling of the tapestry
keeping her fingers busy.
Never bury the dead.
Let them linger and take
their own time leaving.
Less anger that way. Less grief.
May you die, in a coffin buried with tears,
Buried with the youth of my years,
Buried with the breadth and depth of your fears,
May you die, in my eyes one more night,
Buried from my sight,
Buried in your fright
May I one day, forgive forgiveness
Forget memory
And tremble in bravery
May you die, in the night of my eyes,
In the passion of a fiery sunrise.
Let your frigidness of snow be the death of season,
For I am the unlaw: I am passion free of reason
Because if you pass away, your soul will be born.
You are the living dead.
You have the emotions of a plastic card,
Full of the pity of capitalistic disregard,
Like a union organizer’s severed head.
May you die, in the night of my eyes,
So that from your body, a soul will arise,
You are the sea, walking in the streets,
Its waves, and shores, ebb over town as it retreats,
Washing across the doors, skipping heartbeats,
Ah, the sea, the sea, and nothing but the sea.
The reefs are bleached, the fish are dead,
The salt has reached the world instead
Ah, the sea, the sea, and nothing but the sea.
Let water burn fire, and fire drown water.
May you die, in the night of my eyes,
For one evening, and learn the explosion of musical ecstasy,
And that the nuclear blast of love is but a bridge to eternity,
And learn the beauty of kindness creates the greatest destiny,
May you die, in the night of my eyes,
And learn what is bliss,
And wake up in a full nothingness,
And find God beyond kiss
I will make your tears a tapestry of a thousand stars,
Notes to be play on the Arabic oud and Spanish guitars,
May you die in harmony!
May you die in agony!
May you die in ecstasy!
In the shadow of the night of my eyes,
May your soul become a constellation that will guide travelers of every nation to sunrise.
And may I awake in the amnesia of nectar and ambrosia divine, and rivers of holy wine.
And disappear forever in mourning of morning skies.
http://www.maria-al-masani.com/
From thickset specky windows
he eye-balls
the tough job warp and weft
of the launch pad
as it floats itself
for the copter’s sea-strip.
Then the kitchen’s remodelled
- Tony bumps the eggbeater
off its base
buoying the bobbish sponge-backed slab,
hosing it into the bowl
to plane a cruddy pan.
In a fumbling presto
it slips into quick-sight
blades limiting a circle,
a cascade lighting on horizon.
Landing’s right as a trivet.
Look through grandmother’s kitchen window:
a concrete airstrip, wheat fields,
red poppies, cornflowers.
Forsythia, osier willows in bomb craters.
We moved to Halle 7, in 1950,
two-story, red-brick house attached to a shed.
Windows blasted, front door, missing. Roofless hallway.
Linden tree, gooseberry, red currant shrub.
Bavarian Forest foothills ridge,
after the war, refugees settled in the ruins
of the military airfield, Neutraubling.
Pigtailed, Hungarian girl of eight.
My friend Ingrid, her family, Silesian farmers.
A two-room school. Father Böhm’s chapel.
Nuns in black habits and veils.
Saturday classes, sewing and knitting.
If the purple crabapple could speak
what would it say? Electrified barbed wire.
Apartment building whose backyard served
as a sub-camp for slave labourers and war prisoners.
These silent stalks of grass, April 1945:
inmates were herded together and marched to Dachau.
The small pond children played in,
was used as a reservoir for the fire watch.
Streets, littered with rubble.
Striped marsh frogs. Blue iris.
Yellow poplars.
Keep walking until you reach a round well.
A graveyard where prisoners were once buried.
Their remains were dug up and moved
to a mass grave at Flossenbürg.
Through grandmother’s kitchen window:
white plum tree blossoms.