Poem for Tuesday

Song To Counter Time
By Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said)

If I dared, I'd say:
the planets, heaven and its genealogy,
men and their language as ordained,
are floating corpses.

If I dared, I'd inquire:
who is, now, being tried by fire?
What does he insinuate, what does he
relate? has he confessed? and was he? he was?

If I dared, I'd chant
for the cities crashing into ashes
and blood, and to the devouring machine
I'd declare:

It is this time's
article of faith, that earth should breed
inside a corpse, and a god be suspended
as a sort of charm above
its arches, by crime.

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Pretty dark poem and I can't even blame millennial anxiety anymore, but I'm sure my mood with turn with the year. Also when I can get out of the house, as I still have a child who doesn't feel well and is very droopy and I am stuck at home with chores to do everywhere and regular demands for toast.

Thoughts from my poll yesterday:
  1) Wow, there are a lot of Boromir/Faramir fans! Though A/B is still coming out on top. And either no one prefers A/F or no one will admit to it. Whether this is a reflection of people's taste in general or just what they prefer in my writing, however, is unknown.
  2) If you don't make Aragorn/Legolas an option, no one can nag you to write it. *g*
  3) Many of my friends who love Harry Potter haven't seen M&C and vice versa.
  4) Lupin/Black is more popular than all other Lupin options put together. This is not a surprise but it warms my heart anyway.
  5) Either a lot of people really love bad men, or a lot of people just love Jason Isaacs. But The Lucius Who Lives In My Head is not really a bad man at all -- selfish and warped but ultimately redeemable, which I suspect means that he is not Rowling's Lucius at all.
  6) Absolutely no one is here for the Star Trek.
  7) To the ten of you waiting for me to get over Russell Crowe: Sorry, but that is so not happening. Last night I had a dream about Jeffrey Wigand and Lowell Bergman -- Russell and Al Pacino's characters from The Insider. (Even finds this frightening.) My point being if you know where there is Insider fanfic please tell that if I'm going to obsess over an actor, it might as well be Crowe, who at least was in movies like L.A. Confidential and A Beautiful Mind and Gladiator rather than some of the stuff I've sat through in the name of Viggo Mortensen.
  8) Either people who read poetry don't do silly fannish polls, or no one is reading the poetry except me. But that's okay: the poetry's mostly for myself anyway.
  9) Wow, a lot of people read RPS. *g*
  10) Wow, a lot of people like cats. On which note, one cat-gerbil picture, and I promise that any future cat pictures will be behind a cut tag!


Aragorn and Boromir are menaced by Cinnamon, the Dark Cat, who fortunately is being restrained by the Red Wizard.