the dark ones, without inheritance, who slipped by unnoticed by history, exiles in their own country. we had to imagine ourselves back into a culture, a life that wasn't ours and never would be...
Wales, my whore.
---Dylan Thomas(?)
what could be more beautiful than seeing England trounced, trashed, thrashed? Defeat always leads to speechlessness or lyricism but sometimes victory is permitted a word or two. The Palestinians, for example, or the Red Man. If This is Man, then sometimes what you have can prevent you from understanding. The outcasts, the outsiders, the lost and forgotten..all will have their day in the sun when the world is turned upside down. Of that much you're sure, except the sun's light will be black...
~~~
Walking in the sun, in mid-afternoon, your skin burning, your eyes slightly dazed, unfocused. The southern sun reduces the number of words we have for different types of light, it eliminates "glimmer," for example. It has none of the deep clarity of coastal cities, none of the calm intensity of evening blue; none of the desert's monotheistic light that can isolate an object or person. The high afternoon, the sunken hour, the coarseness of our insights, my old voice returns when it thinks of home. Shadows had stained the afternoon, or held it together. There must have been a thousand days like this before. The perfect stillness of a man walking without reason, light glinting off long windows, flowers wilting, children dreaming in the verandas, marriages continuing somehow...
1981, summer cricket in Victoria Park, tennis in the dying days of the season; the grass worn down to a scrub light as hay. T-shirts off, Robinson's, deck chairs in the shade, the end of an era. My star is fading, yours just emerging. An Irish woman looks at me with kind eyes, drunkenly, wondering what I'll be when I'm older. We were beautiful once, said the poet. Of that I'm not so sure.
The wisdom of the East: there is no wisdom and no East.
Wales, my whore.
---Dylan Thomas(?)
what could be more beautiful than seeing England trounced, trashed, thrashed? Defeat always leads to speechlessness or lyricism but sometimes victory is permitted a word or two. The Palestinians, for example, or the Red Man. If This is Man, then sometimes what you have can prevent you from understanding. The outcasts, the outsiders, the lost and forgotten..all will have their day in the sun when the world is turned upside down. Of that much you're sure, except the sun's light will be black...
~~~
Walking in the sun, in mid-afternoon, your skin burning, your eyes slightly dazed, unfocused. The southern sun reduces the number of words we have for different types of light, it eliminates "glimmer," for example. It has none of the deep clarity of coastal cities, none of the calm intensity of evening blue; none of the desert's monotheistic light that can isolate an object or person. The high afternoon, the sunken hour, the coarseness of our insights, my old voice returns when it thinks of home. Shadows had stained the afternoon, or held it together. There must have been a thousand days like this before. The perfect stillness of a man walking without reason, light glinting off long windows, flowers wilting, children dreaming in the verandas, marriages continuing somehow...
1981, summer cricket in Victoria Park, tennis in the dying days of the season; the grass worn down to a scrub light as hay. T-shirts off, Robinson's, deck chairs in the shade, the end of an era. My star is fading, yours just emerging. An Irish woman looks at me with kind eyes, drunkenly, wondering what I'll be when I'm older. We were beautiful once, said the poet. Of that I'm not so sure.
The wisdom of the East: there is no wisdom and no East.
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