Doug Anderson: The Tyrant
The people beat him so badly
that afterward
they could not distinguish him
from the pigs the rebels slaughtered
Majid Naficy: Khomeini’s Visit
My father never told us
That Khomeini had visited him
For medical treatment many years ago
Michael Gregory: Two Songs (audio and text)
I went to the drugstore and I looked inside
Saw my good gal had upped and died
Hung my head down and I cried
Don’t want no more war
Michael Simms: The Four Coups of Joe Medicine Crow
According to the Crow tradition of counting coups, a warrior can earn the title by completing four coups or deeds in battle. The four coups are: lead a war party into battle, sneak into an enemy camp at night and steal a horse, take away an enemy’s weapon, and touch an enemy without being harmed.
Video: Tower
This animated documentary from director Nádia Mangolini mines the memories the four Gomes da Silva siblings whose father went missing and whose mother was imprisoned in a tower during a period oppressive dictatorship in Brazil.
Naomi Shihab Nye, Michael Simms & Friends: Poets for the People of Gaza
Naomi Shihab Nye, the current Young People’s Poet Laureate, and poet Michael Simms gather international poets to share works that navigate themes of identity, displacement, and home in Gaza.
Riad Saleh Hussein: Like a Star in the Sky, Like a Buck in the Jungle
Here is a rock and two eyes
Here is a moon, there is a goose
And still there are more things I could not see
Frida Berrigan: Meatball Subs, Not Nuclear Subs
Or How to Deliver 16,128 Hiroshimas
William Astore: Tough Truths Are Desperately Needed About America’s Lost Wars
Americans may already be lying themselves out of what little remains of their democracy.
Majid Naficy: The Engraver
You put on your eyeglasses
And read me your daughter’s will
Word by word.
Rebecca Gordon: Social Security Versus National Security
The U.S. “national security” budget is still the third rail of politics in this country.
Daniel Burston: An Open Letter to Steve Kowit on his poem “Intifada”
Right now, civil conversation on these subjects is difficult to impossible to sustain because both the Zionist and the Palestinian narratives have been carefully curated to highlight the harms that each side inflicted on the other, and to minimize or ignore the harms that they inflicted on their adversaries.
Patricia Jabbeh Wesley: When I Shut the Door
The news arrived by e-mail — a scribble of a long, single sentence, broken up, like little chunks of wood, the way a year is broken up into months and weeks, days, hours.
