VQR’s connection to the inaugural poem. It’s complicated.
What if it were not such a tragedy to outlive one’s nation,
If poets and their art provide us with tools necessary for living, then Mahmoud Darwish may be the hammer and chisel in poetry’s chest, feared by some for his capacity to tear down the walls of comfortable myths, and lauded by others for...
Autumn and its thousand adjectives have come to this, a swither in the trees, their limbs bronchial and backlit in the gloam.
Heavenly earth flutters in the mind, word-borne.
Here it does not rest, a past I summoned with a bell so that things awaken
This is the age of ashes. Ashes of burned children, of cold trials of hell,
