Global Aid Freeze Tracker

Hi Mark, these guys are mapping aspects of it.

www.globalaidfreeze.com

Do you hear the people sing?
Singing the song of angry men?
It is the music of the people
who will not be slaves again!
When the beating of your heart
echoes the beating of the drums
There is a life about to start
when tomorrow comes!

Taking a training on needs assessment and evaluation through Region 6 South Central Publix Health Training Center and two lines ring painfully relevant:

What gets measured gets changed.
If we have no data, we have no problems.

Image of wisteria Text: Enough of calling to ghosts. Enough of blood blooming, rain-slicked skin, and incense blackening. Hannah Han www.glass-poetry.com/journal.html

Today on Glass!

"Ars Non Poetica" by Hannah Han!

www.glass-poetry.com/journal.html

"We need beauty
because
it makes us ache
to be worthy of it."

- Mary Oliver

Artist: Alberta Tiburzi

A chain-smoking corporal stoops to examine
the drowned prisoner’s upturned soles. Measurements
are taken. & thus David Wojahn has found some content,
another web search satisfied – prurient, calculated, cruel
-David Wojahn, Fifty-eight Percent is Concrete Road, 12 Percent Loose Sand #poetryisprotest

I just reread the poem "Home" by Warsan Shire and I'm posting it here in its entirety because a reminder is warranted.

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

Over the last two weeks, this #poem keeps coming to mind. #poetry #poems

Tired
By Langston Hughes

I am so tired of waiting,
Aren't you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two—
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.

And look! look! look! I think those little fish
better wake up and dash themselves away
from the hopeless future that is
bulging toward them.

*

And probably,
if they don’t waste time
looking for an easier world,

they can do it.

- Mary Oliver, Dogfish

#poetryisprotest

Lord, if I say Bless the cold water your throw in my face, /
does that make me a costume party? Am I greedy for comfort /
if I ask you not to kill my friends

- Franny Choi, Catastrophe is Next to Godliness

#poetryisprotest

If I say /
my body is its own crumbling /
country, if I say I am always /
my own home--then /
what does that make me?

- Erika L. Sánchez, A woman runs on the first day of spring

#poetryisprotest

The world needs poetry now more than ever

#poetryisprotest

At this point in time, I believe that women carry within ourselves the possibility for fusion of these two approaches so necessary for survival, and we come closest to this combination in our poetry. I speak here of poetry as a revelatory distillation of experience, not the sterile word play that, too often, the white fathers distorted the word poetry to mean - in order to cover a desperate wish for imagination without insight. For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action. Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought. The farthest horizons of our hopes and fears are cobbled by our poems, carved from the rock experiences of our daily lives.

“For women, then, poetry is not a luxury. It is a vital necessity of our existence.

Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”

-Audre Lorde, 1977
(Sister Outsider, Crossing Press,1984)
#everynightapoem
#BlackHistoryMonth