Poetry

Garlands of trinitarias shade an artist’s studio,
plainer than their synagogue halfway down the hill,
its ceiling painted with stars, a glass chandelier.

[...]

The ten most common titles of submissions that we’ve received in the past two years.

Don’t bother a bit, you are only a dream you are having,
And if when you wake your symptoms are not relieved,
That is only because you harbor a morbid craving
For belief in the old delusion in which you have always believed.

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 his ability to carve a crystalline beauty from the Alhambraic stones of the amorphous present.