To a Cat

Mirrors are not more silent
nor the creeping dawn more secretive;
in the moonlight, you are that panther
we catch sight of from afar.
By the inexplicable workings of a divine law,
we look for you in vain;
More remote, even, than the Ganges or the setting sun,
yours is the solitude, yours the secret.
Your haunch allows the lingering
caress of my hand. You have accepted,
since that long forgotten past,
the love of the distrustful hand.
You belong to another time. You are lord
of a place bounded like a dream.

- Jorge Luis Borges -

House Approves Bill on Detainees
Check out this article from The Washington Post

I am the autumnal sun

Sometimes a mortal feels in himself Nature
-- not his Father but his Mother stirs
within him, and he becomes immortal with her
immortality. From time to time she claims
kindredship with us, and some globule
from her veins steals up into our own.

I am the autumnal sun,
With autumn gales my race is run;
When will the hazel put forth its flowers,
Or the grape ripen under my bowers?
When will the harvest or the hunter's moon
Turn my midnight into mid-noon?
I am all sere and yellow,
And to my core mellow.
The mast is dropping within my woods,
The winter is lurking within my moods,
And the rustling of the withered leaf
Is the constant music of my grief....

- Henry David Thoreau -

golden sunset

© luisa brehm

i could lose here my soul
looking across the hills
hearing the whisper of trees .....
everything shines as a dream
everything speaks of solitude .....
this golden land is my home !!!

Bush Bows to Senators on Detainees
Check out this article from Los Angeles Times

the door

© luisa brehm

the door to autumn, my karmic season,
opening shadows of impossible dreams
to make them true .....
this is the time to pass through !!!

Yo Netzahualcóyotl lo pregunto:
¿Acaso de veras se vive con raíz en la tierra?
No para siempre en la tierra:
sólo un poco aquí.
Aunque sea de jade se quiebra,
aunque sea de oro se rompe,
aunque sea plumaje de quetzal se desgarra.
No para siempre en la tierra:
sólo un poco aquí.

english translation

I Netzahualcóyotl ask this:
Is it true one really lives on the earth?
Not forever on earth:
only a little while here.
Though it be jade it falls apart,
though it be gold it wears away,
though it be a quetzal feather it will wither.
Not forever on earth:
only a little while here.

- Netzahualcóyotl -
poet and king of Tezcoco 1402-1472

rebirth

© luisa brehm

birth-life-death-rebirth,
the eternal change of destiny .....
or is this just a dream ???
if i could fly between .....

Conceive these images in air,
Wrap them in flame, they're mine;
Set against granite,
Let the two dull stones be grey,
Or, formed of sand,
Trickle away through thought,
In water or in metal,
Flowing and melting under lime.
Cut them in rock,
So, not to be defaced,
They harden and take shape again
As signs I've not brought down
To any lighter state
By love-tip or my hand's red heat.

- Dylan Thomas -

stone' story

once upon a time
a little stone lived quietly in the edge of the sea .....
one day a soft wave came to refresh it from the hot sun .....
it felt sooo good sooooo cool ;-)))))))

 
but stories haven’t always a happy end .....
and ooooppppsssssssssss no more stone ;-(((((((

© luisa brehm

but if a living dance upon dead minds
why, it is love; but at the earliest spear
of sun perfectly should disappear
moon's utmost magic, or stones speak or one
name control more incredible splendor than
our merely universe, love's also there:
and being here imprisoned, tortured here
love everywhere exploding maims and blinds
(but surely does not forget, perish, sleep
cannot be photographed, measured; disdains
the trivial labelling of punctual brains...
-Who wields a poem huger than the grave?
from only Whom shall time no refuge keep
though all the weird worlds must be opened?

- E. E. Cummings -

mind cloning

© luisa brehm

who knows ???
there is Mind Control experiments anyway
and this is the Ultimate Fear !!!

A Moment of Silence

Before I start this poem, I'd like to ask you to join me in a moment of silence in honor of those who died in the World Trade Center and the Pentagon last September 11th.

I would also like to ask you to offer up a moment of silence for all of those who have been harassed, imprisoned, disappeared, tortured, raped, or killed in retaliation for those strikes, for the victims in both Afghanistan and the U.S.

And if I could just add one more thing
A full day of silence for the tens of thousands of Palestinians who have died at the hands of U.S.-backed Israeli forces over decades of occupation.

Six months of silence for the million and-a-half Iraqi people, mostly children, who have died of malnourishment or starvation as a result of a 11-year U.S. embargo against the country.

Before I begin this poem, two months of silence for the Blacks under Apartheid in South Africa, where homeland security made them aliens in their own country

Nine months of silence for the dead in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, where death rained down and peeled back every layer of concrete, steel, earth and skin and the survivors went on as if alive.

A year of silence for the millions of dead in Viet Nam - a people, not a war - for those who know a thing or two about the scent of burning fuel, their relatives' bones buried in it, their babies born of it.

A year of silence for the dead in Cambodia and Laos, victims of a secret war ... ssssshhhhh .... Say nothing ... we don't want them to learn that they are dead.

Two months of silence for the decades of dead in Colombia, whose names, like the corpses they once represented, have piled up and slipped off our tongues.

Before I begin this poem,
An hour of silence for El Salvador ...
An afternoon of silence for Nicaragua ...
Two days of silence for the Guetmaltecos ...
None of whom ever knew a moment of peace in their living years.
45 seconds of silence for the 45 dead at Acteal, Chiapas
25 years of silence for the hundred million Africans who found their graves far deeper in the ocean than any building could poke into the sky.
There will be no DNA testing or dental records to identify their remains.
And for those who were strung and swung from the heights of sycamore trees in the south, the north, the east, and the west ... 100 years of silence...

For the hundreds of millions of indigenous peoples from this half of right here,
Whose land and lives were stolen,
In postcard-perfect plots like Pine Ridge, Wounded Knee, Sand Creek, Fallen Timbers, or the Trail of Tears.
Names now reduced to innocuous magnetic poetry on the refrigerator of our consciousness ...

So you want a moment of silence?
And we are all left speechless
Our tongues snatched from our mouths
Our eyes stapled shut

A moment of silence
And the poets have all been laid to rest
The drums disintegrating into dust

Before I begin this poem,
You want a moment of silence
You mourn now as if the world will never be the same

And the rest of us hope to hell it won't be.
Not like it always has been

Because this is not a 9-1-1 poem
This is a 9/10 poem,
It is a 9/9 poem,
A 9/8 poem,
A 9/7 poem

This is a 1492 poem.
This is a poem about what causes poems like this to be written

And if this is a 9/11 poem, then
This is a September 11th poem for Chile, 1971
This is a September 12th poem for Steven Biko in South Africa, 1977
This is a September 13th poem for the brothers at Attica Prison, New York, 1971.

This is a September 14th poem for Somalia, 1992.
This is a poem for every date that falls to the ground in ashes
This is a poem for the 110 stories that were never told
The 110 stories that history chose not to write in textbooks
The 110 stories that that CNN, BBC, The New York Times, and Newsweek ignored
This is a poem for interrupting this program.

And still you want a moment of silence for your dead?
We could give you lifetimes of empty:
The unmarked graves
The lost languages
The uprooted trees and histories
The dead stares on the faces of nameless children

Before I start this poem we could be silent forever
Or just long enough to hunger,
For the dust to bury us
And you would still ask us
For more of our silence.

If you want a moment of silence
Then stop the oil pumps
Turn off the engines and the televisions
Sink the cruise ships
Crash the stock markets
Unplug the marquee lights,
Delete the instant messages,
Derail the trains, the light rail transit
If you want a moment of silence, put a brick through the window of Taco Bell,
And pay the workers for wages lost
Tear down the liquor stores,
The townhouses, the White Houses, the jailhouses, the Penthouses and the Playboys.

If you want a moment of silence,
Then take it
On Super Bowl Sunday,
The Fourth of July
During Dayton's 13 hour sale
Or the next time your white guilt fills the room where my beautiful people have gathered

You want a moment of silence
Then take it
Now,
Before this poem begins.
Here, in the echo of my voice,
In the pause between goosesteps of the second hand
In the space between bodies in embrace,
Here is your silence
Take it.
But take it all
Don't cut in line.
Let your silence begin at the beginning of crime.

But we,
Tonight we will keep right on singing
For our dead.

- Emmanuel Ortiz -
9.11.02

look at me

© luisa brehm

in seconds they kill my eternity !!!

Once upon a time, I, Chuang Tzu, dreamt I was a butterfly,
fluttering here and there, to all intents and purposes a butterfly.
I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly,
unaware that I was Tzu. Soon I awaked, and there I was,
veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether
I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly,
or whether I am now a butterfly dreaming I am a man.
Between a man and a butterfly there is necessarily a distinction. The transition is called the transformation of material things.

- Chuang Tzu -

fly again

an invasion of butterflies and moths
flying nuts against the light landing on the windows everywhere .....
i thought my spirits were coming home
free to fly again !!!

© luisa brehm

Bush Acknowledges Secret Jails
Check out this article from Los Angeles Times

Pentagon issues new guidelines on detainees, interrogations
Check out this article from CNN

Safety

Dear! of all happy in the hour, most blest
He who has found our hid security,
Assured in the dark tides of the world that rest,
And heard our word, 'Who is so safe as we?'
We have found safety with all things undying,
The winds, and morning, tears of men and mirth,
The deep night, and birds singing, and clouds flying,
And sleep, and freedom, and the autumnal earth.
We have built a house that is not for Time's throwing.
We have gained a peace unshaken by pain for ever.
War knows no power. Safe shall be my going,
Secretly armed against all death's endeavour;
Safe though all safety's lost; safe where men fall;
And if these poor limbs die, safest of all.

- Rupert Brooke -

safe it was you

© luisa brehm

to all Kids who have lost their mothers
and to mine too .....
For a better World !!! Always !!!

Sun of the sleepless! melancholy star!
Whose tearful beam glows tremulously far,
That show'st the darkness thou canst not dispel,
How like art thou to joy remember'd well!

So gleams the past, the light of other days,
Which shines, but warms not with its powerless rays;
A night-beam Sorrow watcheth to behold,
Distinct but distant -- clear -- but, oh how cold!

- Lord Byron -

sleeping

© luisa brehm

In Tunkashila, there is no time.
Everything moves in the blink of an eye.
It's as fast as thought. So there is no speed there.
There is no time in between.

- Wallace Black Elk -
Lakota

brokenpromises

© luisa brehm

broken promises in pieces all over the ground .....
what is this silence ???
is it a cry a whisper or a tear for the fallen ???
no need to light candles, they will not reach the stars
and there is no gods to listen your prayers .....
there is just struggle and an endless survival !!!

© luisa brehm

brother

Murdered by the State
(August 31, 2006)


The state of Texas gave us another reason to forever
commemorate Black August and to rededicate ourselves
to the revolutionary struggle.

At 6:00 this evening, they executed our brother, Hasan Shakur,
the Minister of Human Rights of the New Afrikan Black Panther
Party-Prison Chapter. He had recently turned 29 years old.
At 19, he was framed for murder. He was called Derrick Frazier,
then, a poor Black youth who had grown up on the mean
streets and in the juvenile halls of Texas, after his mother died
of a crack overdose.

Tricked by police into confessing to a crime he did not commit,
which they knew he did not commit because they already had
the confession of the youth who had done the murder,
Derrick Frazier was the victim of a racist hate crime,
a frame-up, for no other reason than the cops could do it and get away with it. Cynically, they convinced Derrick they were doing him a favor that would save his life.

They didn't tell him that he had a right to an attorney
or that he could not plea bargain without one.
They didn't tell him they had nothing on him, they
told him he would die unless he took some blame
to show he was cooperating...blame for another's actions
he did not even witness. In a very real sense,
Derrick Frazier died in that police station.

Hasan Shakur was born on death row.
It didn't happen automatically. It came out of the depth
of despair and with his conversion to Islam and the teaching
of a prisoner iman who was a veteran of the original
Black Panther Party. In prison he awakened
to the teachings of Malcolm X and Mao Tse-tung,
of Huey P. Newton and George Jackson.
And his living mentor, former BPP/BLA
political prisoner/prisoner of war, Russell "Maroon" Shoats.

Hasan did not fear his death, nor was he afraid to go on living,
because he had found a purpose to his life and death - REVOLUTION!
He was prepared to meet the enemy standing on his feet, standing tall!
Because in life or death he stood for the people!

Today they killed his body, but his spirit will live on,
like that of Che, Fred Hampton, Sr. and George Jackson.
He will march beside us in the streets
and stand with us at rallies and on the barricades.
And when the final victory is won,
he will be there in the bright future of humanity
that will have been bought with martyr's blood
and the struggle of generations against
all oppression and for the human rights of all!

by Tom Big Warrior,
Red Heart Warriors Society