I’ll spare you the boring details, but I have been a bit discouraged by bureaucratic delays in the project lately. In addition, a few conversations with highly enthusiastic undergrads from the Netherlands has left me feeling slightly jaded. In need of a healthy dose of inspiration, I pulled out a number of old poems I’ve fallen in love with over the years. Thought I’d share a bit from one here. So if you will kindly forgive the dramatics:
‘…I live in my Western skin,
my Western vision, torn
and flung to what I can’t control or even fathom.
Quantify suffering, you could rule the world.
2.
They can rule the world while they can persuade us
our pain belongs in some order…
our powers expended daily on the struggle
to hand a kind of life on to our children,
to change reality for our lovers
even in a single trembling drop of water.
3.
…Quantify suffering? My guilt at least is open,
I stand convicted by all my convictions -
you, too. We shrink from touching
our power, we shrink away, we starve ourselves
and each other, we’re scared shitless
of what it could be to take and use our love,
hose it on a city, on a world,
to wield and guide its spray, destroying
poisons, parasites, rats, viruses…
4.
The decision to feed the world
is the real decision. No revolution
has chosen it. For that choice requires
that women shall be free….’
~ In The Dream of a Common Language
