I hate the word Beautiful. It’s always the first word to come to mind, but I try to fight it often and use others. I discovered Laura Marling and her music recently, thanks to poetician Nigel Holt, and I have been addicted. If you dont know her, check out “My manic and I”, an excellent song.
I am happy that reviews/blurbs/ and a forward for my book are in the works. I should have all the material collected from various kind writers and sources…I wont reveal who is writing about the book, you need to see the actual book to find out! But I am super grateful for this wonderful community of Arab and American authors and editors.
I still dont have a title for the new book. It’s been called “The new book” for months now. Dammit. Its bordering on disaster, since the cover cannot be finished without it, nor can we get an ISBN number. Suffering.
To stop rambling about nothing, Im gonna go back to my coffee (with soya, hmmm) and leave you with amazing poems from Stephen Dunn. If you dont know him, google his name now! now! He is brilliant. I love his work and wish that one day I could squeeze tons of meaning into simple short lines.
Enjoy. April is such a GREAT month!

Landscape At The End Of The Century

by Stephen Dunn

The sky in the trees, the trees mixed up
with what’s left of heaven, nearby a patch
of daffodils rooted down
where dirt and stones comprise a kind
of night, unmetaphysical, cool as a skeptic’s
final sentence. What this scene needs
is a nude absentmindedly sunning herself
on a large rock, thinks the man fed up
with nature, or perhaps a lost tiger,
the maximum amount of wildness a landscape
can bear, but the man knows and fears
his history of tampering with everything,
and besides to anyone who might see him
he’s just a figure in a clearing
in a forest in a universe
that is as random as desire itself,
his desire in particular, so much going on
with and without him, moles humping up
the ground near the daffodils, a mockingbird
publishing its cacaphonous anthology,
and those little Calvinists, the ants,
making it all the more difficult
for a person in America
to close his office, skip to the beach.
But what this scene needs are wisteria
and persimmons, thinks the woman
sunning herself absentmindedly on the rock,
a few magnificent words that one
might want to eat if one were a lover
of words, the hell with first principles,
the noon sun on my body, tempered
by a breeze that cannot be doubted.
And as she thinks, she who exists
only in the man’s mind, a deer grazes
beyond their knowing, a deer tick riding
its back, and in the gifted air
mosquitos, dragonflies, and tattered
mute angels no one has called upon in years.

I will post some more of his more accessible work tomorrow. He is so good. This last line was amazing, no?