Francesca Forrest's Blog, page 126

Two posts from friends

I will have a this-day-in-Pen-Pal post for you later, but first I want to point you to two wonderful posts. One is by mnfaure , and features the work of an amazing poet and spoken-word performer, Anis Mojgani--it is here . And in case you are click-aversive, here is half the wonderment of that post:

#ProjectFilmSupply from The Music Bed on Vimeo.

But you must go to her post for the link to the other poem, "Shake the Dust," which is equally good.

And the other post is by sovay , and is a descripti...

August 23 in Pen Pal: songs children sing

On August 23, writing in her journal, Kaya recalls a traditional song repurposed as a children's taunt for games of chase:

I’m sending, sending, sending the Lady’s birds
To find, find, find what you have hid
They’ll seize, seize, seize your every secret
And pierce, pierce, pierce your many lies.
They’ll leave, leave, leave a burning ember
In the place, place, place of your coward heart
And fan, fan, fan the Lady’s fires
To flame, flame, flame in your fevered eyes

I love children's songs and rhymes--cl...

even bigger

I thought I had found a pretty good-sized hickory fruit until I saw this other one lying by the side of the road.

wild grapes

Went to my one of my favorite spots for picking wild grapes, the place where the grape vines are draped over the abandoned crates of greenhouse glass:



glass so long abandoned, lichens are growing on it:



Grapes and rust, grapes and blossoming mugwort:



Don't say it's not your fault, don't say you're not the enemy

Irom Sharmila rearrested

I wonder what the charge can be :-(

The rearrest was quite forcible and distressing; I saw video.

I know there are ten thousand distressing things out there--police brutality, beheadings, landslides, fevers.

This is one of those ten thousand.

I guess a person just . . . keeps trying. While we're alive, we can keep trying. That's what I'm telling myself, anyway.

August 20 in Pen Pal

I missed posting about what happened on August 20 in Pen Pal because I was posting about Irom Sharmila, a real-life political prisoner. Belatedly, then:

On August 20 in Pen Pal, an editorial in a national paper in Kaya's country questioned the wisdom of the agitation in the mountains.

People in positions of power often have a lot to say about what's wise or unwise for those without power to do. Sometimes they're even well-intentioned (though sometimes they're distinctly not), but they're almos...

Irom Sharmila ordered released

A Manipur court ruled that Irom Sharmila's hunger strike in protest of the Armed Forces Special Powers Act is not attempted suicide, and that therefore it's illegal to hold her on that charge--and, according to news sources, she has been released. (Story in the Guardian here.)

Imprisoning her on suicide charges was always wrongheaded, but this release doesn't address she's actually protesting, which is a law that grants the military impunity in its actions in "disturbed areas." What about the...

under cover of packing paper

Jiji does love him a shadowed area in which to hide and, when opportune, to pounce. He likes underbrush and thickets. Indoors, manmade thickets will do--here, a tangle of packing paper. He dives in it and crouches, waiting. His favorite thing is to have someone toss a tinfoil ball to him in there. Then he goes crazy, chasing it under cover of paper.





go Jiji go!



target: acquired!



the victor in his lair . . . or should I say layer

A well-wrapped present

The other day a friend brought me something, like a giant cigar or a joint, wrapped in bright green leaves. "Open it, open it," my friend urged.



So I started, but my friend had wrapped this present well. If there had been more than just me around, we could have played a game of pass-the-parcel, with each person taking off a layer of leaves.



I unwrapped and unwrapped, but there was always another layer.



Finally I got to the gift within--solid gold! But not for putting in vaults or smithing into a...

Racism and Impunity

barry_king has a scorching assessment of what racism is in here. This is at the heart:

Racism is when you let impunity create a system where
[a group] is denied justice
permanently. Institutionally. Because
"that's the stuff we did/do/will do.
We do this. Because we can,
because nobody will punish us for doing so."

He links to a 2011 Daily Kos article by Hamden Rice, "Most of You Have No Idea What Martin Luther King Did." He says it wasn't about speeches or marches, but about standing up to white p...