Poem for Thursday

I Heard Him Say (His Mouth Was a Stone)
By Adonis (Ali Ahmad Said)

1

I heard him say
(his mouth was a stone):
"I no longer want
those heavy steps of mine.
And these chains in whose ringing I die.
God is the iron in my chains."

And he said, his eyelids
laden with dust, and invitation in his voice:
"The hour that was to come, has not."

2

My window is closed --
my window to whose light
I thread my eyes, my sight embalmed
with a shroud.
My present: blood --
destinies held hostage
in a homeland skirted by death.
As for the others -- the world is theirs.
God is lavishly served on a platter of brains.

3

I changed life: the form
of its motion, a fellow human
chained to his bread, choking for air --
God remains suspended in his throat
and still his voice overwhelms me
(his mouth a stone):
"I no longer want
these heavy steps of mine."

4

Could it be
salvation is fulfilled
only through my body, my death
a cause for resurrection? This is how we live:
singers in a chorus who arrange
their mirages into song
while caverns are sanctified
and monuments raised in their name.

Before me numerous others --
Christ and those who came after
among them -- have died; could it be
that salvation is fulfilled
only through my body.

5

I heard him say
(his mouth was a stone):
"We cannot see, not yet,
and the hour that will come
as they said, has stopped."
And it was said: yesterday he
disappeared, his voice vanished --
it was said that he had died.
He whose eyes were a horizon
and new windows, his voice
an invitation, his arms two streams
of red geraniums.

And it was said that those
who rushed to mourn him, mumbled together
and whispered among themselves;
is it only
            through blood then
                               that blood shall find its end?

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Barbara Ehrenreich in this morning's New York Times:

The New Macho: Feminism
By Barbara Ehrenreich

The Dems couldn't be more butch if they took to wearing codpieces. Every daily convention theme contains the words "strength" or "strong," and even Hillary has been relegated to the role of wife. The idea, according to the pundits, is that with more than half of the voters still favoring Bush as the guy to beat bin Laden, Kerry needs to show that he's macho enough to whup the terrorists. Of course, everyone knows that the macho approach is notably less effective than pixie dust - otherwise, we wouldn't be holding our political conventions under total lockdowns.

Well, I've been reading bin Ladin - Carmen, that is, not her brother-in-law Osama (she spells the last name with an "i") - and I'd like to present a brand-new approach to terrorism, one that turns out to be a lot more consistent with traditional Democratic values. First, let's stop calling the enemy "terrorism," which is like saying we're fighting "bombings." Terrorism is only a method; the enemy is an extremist Islamic insurgency whose appeal lies in its claim to represent the Muslim masses against a bullying superpower.

But as Carmen bin Ladin urgently reminds us in "Inside the Kingdom," one glaring moral flaw in this insurgency, quite apart from its methods, is that it aims to push one-half of those masses down to a status only slightly above that of domestic animals. While Osama was getting pumped up for jihad, Carmen was getting up her nerve to walk across the street in a residential neighborhood in Jeddah - fully veiled but unescorted by a male, something that is illegal for a woman in Saudi Arabia. Eventually she left the kingdom and got a divorce because she didn't want her daughters to grow up in a place where women are kept "locked in and breeding."

So here in one word is my new counterterrorism strategy for Kerry: feminism. Or, if that's too incendiary, try the phrase "human rights for women." I don't mean just a few opportunistic references to women, like those that accompanied the war on the Taliban and were quietly dropped by the Bush administration when that war was abandoned and Afghan women were locked back into their burkas. I'm talking about a sustained and serious effort.

So John and John: Announce plans to pour dollars into girls' education in places like Pakistan, where the high-end estimate for female literacy is 26 percent, and scholarships for women seeking higher education in nations that typically discourage it. (Secular education for the boys wouldn't hurt either.) Expand the grounds for asylum to all women fleeing gender totalitarianism, wherever it springs up. Reverse the Bush policies on global family planning, which condemn 78,000 women yearly to death in makeshift abortions. Lead the global battle against the traffic in women.

I'm not expecting these measures alone to incite a feminist insurgency within the Islamist one. Carmen bin Ladin found her rich Saudi sisters-in-law sunk in bovine passivity, and some of the more spirited young women in the Muslim world have been adopting the head scarf as a gesture of defiance toward American imperialism. We're going to need a thorough foreign policy makeover - from Afghanistan to Israel - before we have the credibility to stand up for anyone's human rights. You can't play the gender card with dirty hands.

If Kerry were to embrace a feminist strategy against the insurgency, he'd have to start by addressing our own dismal record on women's rights. He'd be pushing for the immediate ratification of the U.N. Convention on the Elimination of All Forms of Discrimination Against Women, which has been ratified by 169 countries but remains stalled in the Senate. He'd be threatening to break off relations with Saudi Arabia until it acknowledges the humanity of women. And he'd be thundering about the shortage of women in the U.S. Senate and the House, an internationally embarrassing 14 percent. We should be aiming for at least 25 percent representation, the same target the Transitional Administrative Law of Iraq has set for the federal assembly there.

In my dreams, you say, and you're probably right. Maybe Kerry will surprise me in his speech tonight, but it looks as if the Democrats are too frightened of being labeled "girlie men" by the party of Schwarzenegger to do what has to be done. If you want to beat Osama, you've got to start by listening to Carmen.

© The New York Times

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GIP courtesy , because Jack Aubrey got it drunk. *giggling* I had do that LiveJournal sex quiz, and got better results than I could have made up: apparently Kira will be sleeping with me (my Mary Sue fantasy fulfilled!), and (preferably at the same time...another Mary Sue fantasy of sorts, as I write one of them and a friend writes the other), and who was already on top of Kira's to do list. Damn but sometimes these memes are fun.

Today am having lunch with and , neither of whom have I seen in weeks! (And probably won't see for more weeks since we are going out of town.) Yay Indian food!