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 Okay, I'm not a ninja. But I am now a first degree black belt in Haidong Gumdo, a Korean martial art with swords that is non-combative. Using swords, we learn different forms, but we don't fight each other. We begin with a wooden sword (mokgum), and then we move to using an aluminium sword (gokgum) which is not sharp. Eventually we do use sharp swords for specific skills, like cutting bamboo (see video below). Why do I do this? When we moved to Moncton mid-pandemic, it was one of the only physical activities I was doing. My yoga practice suffered greatly — I was at home practicing by myself and sometimes following a video or online class, but it lacked the both the vigour and the calming effects it often has had. My cousin (centre in the photo above) has practiced Gumdo for years, and she and her friend Jessica (left, above) invited me to join them. Three times a week we went to class, moved vigorously and joyfully, often letting off steam, frustration, anger through movement. The added load of the sword has helped stabilise my wonky shoulder (there's nothing really wrong with it, it just feels, well, wonky). When I'm in Gumdo I feel strong and resilient. And my brain enjoys the challenge of learning the forms. It's felt good to achieve something so outside of my normal box. I'm glad that restrictions have lifted, that COVID is doing so much better where we live, that our renovations are getting "close" to finished, and that I'll be able to teach yoga classes here in my new community soon. But there won't be classes Tuesday or Thursday evening, or Saturdays at noon. That's when you'll find me upstairs at the Chung Won Institute, with Grand Master Chung, swinging my sword.
"Cats are a wonderful waste of time." |
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In a field, after everything, a streetlamp
shining on a patch of grass. Having just come back to life, I lay down under its warmth & waited for a way. That’s when the boy appeared, lying next to me. He was wearing a Ninja Turtles t-shirt from another era, the colors faraway. I recognized his eyes: black buttons salvaged from the coat I used to cover my mother’s face, at the end. Why do you exist? I wanted to know. I felt the crickets around us but couldn’t hear them. A chapel on the last day of war. That’s how quiet he was. The town I had walked from was small & American. If I stayed on my knees, it would keep all my secrets. When we heard the woodcutters coming closer, destroying the past to build the future, the boy started to cry. But the voice, the voice that came out was an old man’s. I reached into my pocket but the gun was gone. I must’ve dropped it while burying my language farther up the road. It’s okay, the boy said at last. I forgive you. Then he kissed me as if returning a porcelain shard to my cheek. Shaking, I turned to him. I turned & found, crumpled on the grass, the faded red shirt. I put it over my face & stayed very still—like my mother at the end. Then it came to me, my life. I remembered my life the way an ax handle, mid-swing, remembers the tree. & I was free. __________________________ Excerpt From Time Is a Mother |
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Photo by Abby Savage on Unsplash
| You may write me down in history With your bitter, twisted lies, You may trod me in the very dirt But still, like dust, I'll rise. Does my sassiness upset you? Why are you beset with gloom? ’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells Pumping in my living room. Just like moons and like suns, With the certainty of tides, Just like hopes springing high, Still I'll rise. Did you want to see me broken? Bowed head and lowered eyes? Shoulders falling down like teardrops, Weakened by my soulful cries? Does my haughtiness offend you? Don't you take it awful hard ’Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines Diggin’ in my own backyard. You may shoot me with your words, You may cut me with your eyes, You may kill me with your hatefulness, But still, like air, I’ll rise. Does my sexiness upset you? Does it come as a surprise That I dance like I've got diamonds At the meeting of my thighs? Out of the huts of history’s shame I rise Up from a past that’s rooted in pain I rise I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide, Welling and swelling I bear in the tide. Leaving behind nights of terror and fear I rise Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear I rise Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave, I am the dream and the hope of the slave. I rise I rise I rise. |  Photo by Kunj Parekh on Unsplash  |
Is Osama bin Laden your cousin?
No. But I have a cousin named Osama. You should get to know him — he loves Americans and their questions.
You're from Iran right? Or is it Iraq? I always get them mixed up.
Let me make it easier for you.
Think weapons of mass destruction. Think George Bush.
Think lies.
Think war on terror.
Sorry.
War of terror.
How did you survive the war? It must have been so hard for you and your family, living under such a brutal dictator.
Sometimes I forget who was brutal. I forget whose side brutal was on. Brutal kept showing his face on the news, so I assumed he had friends on both sides.
You must have so many stories! Did you talk about any of them in your college essay? Oh my God, you would get in everywhere!
Actually, you know the Common Application, where you go to apply for college? You can attach files to your submission. I tried to upload some weapons of mass destruction, but for some reason I just couldn't find any.
Do you consider yourself Iraqi-American?
It's a label I struggle with. Some days I wake up not knowing whether I'm the conquered or the conquerer. In 2003, a rifle was pointed at me. In 2008, we moved to American, and suddenly I was the one holding it.
This time I was pointing the rifle at my old identity, asking it why it always mispronounced English, why it thought there was a difference between freedom and democracy, asking it whether it thought Arabic was written from right to left to confuse the West, and asking it if the Mississippi had ever heard of the Euphrates.
In an interview with CBS News on September 12, 1996, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked the following question:
"We have heard that half a million children have died [in Iraq]. . . . Is the price worth it?"
She replied, "We think the price is worth it."
I recently found out that Secretary Albright teaches at Georgetown. I was rejected from Georgetown. My application essay was 500 words long, but I wanted to write 500,000.
Growing up Mama always told me, el maerof yergos iegol al gaa oja. "Those who can't dance always say the ground is crooked."
Mama, it's hard to dance because the ground has 500,000 cracks whispering under my feet.
They're telling me their names, ages, stories, and asking just how many cracks a medal is worth.
No. But I have a cousin named Osama. You should get to know him — he loves Americans and their questions.
You're from Iran right? Or is it Iraq? I always get them mixed up.
Let me make it easier for you.
Think weapons of mass destruction. Think George Bush.
Think lies.
Think war on terror.
Sorry.
War of terror.
How did you survive the war? It must have been so hard for you and your family, living under such a brutal dictator.
Sometimes I forget who was brutal. I forget whose side brutal was on. Brutal kept showing his face on the news, so I assumed he had friends on both sides.
You must have so many stories! Did you talk about any of them in your college essay? Oh my God, you would get in everywhere!
Actually, you know the Common Application, where you go to apply for college? You can attach files to your submission. I tried to upload some weapons of mass destruction, but for some reason I just couldn't find any.
Do you consider yourself Iraqi-American?
It's a label I struggle with. Some days I wake up not knowing whether I'm the conquered or the conquerer. In 2003, a rifle was pointed at me. In 2008, we moved to American, and suddenly I was the one holding it.
This time I was pointing the rifle at my old identity, asking it why it always mispronounced English, why it thought there was a difference between freedom and democracy, asking it whether it thought Arabic was written from right to left to confuse the West, and asking it if the Mississippi had ever heard of the Euphrates.
In an interview with CBS News on September 12, 1996, Secretary of State Madeleine Albright was asked the following question:
"We have heard that half a million children have died [in Iraq]. . . . Is the price worth it?"
She replied, "We think the price is worth it."
I recently found out that Secretary Albright teaches at Georgetown. I was rejected from Georgetown. My application essay was 500 words long, but I wanted to write 500,000.
Growing up Mama always told me, el maerof yergos iegol al gaa oja. "Those who can't dance always say the ground is crooked."
Mama, it's hard to dance because the ground has 500,000 cracks whispering under my feet.
They're telling me their names, ages, stories, and asking just how many cracks a medal is worth.
Photo by Ramin Khatibi on Unsplash
| to be alone when you have at the very least yourself but i didn’t. but i didn’t. i’d never even spoken to that girl. |  |
| the eyes are not reliable. not windows. not mirrors. my ears have eroded, leaving two broken telephones. my hands have embraced what they always have been; two grasping panics, two torches to everything i love. feet - nothing more than two rocks some days. & my heart has developed a kind of amnesia, where it remembers everything but itself. |  Photo by Stefano Pollio on Unsplash |
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I meant to do my work today,
But a brown bird sang in the apple tree, And a butterfly flitted across the field, And all the leaves were calling me. And the wind went sighing over the land, Tossing the grasses to and fro, And a rainbow held out its shining hand-- So what could I do, but laugh and go? |
Photo by Ryk Naves on Unsplash
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| Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove. O no! it is an ever-fixed mark That looks on tempests and is never shaken; It is the star to every wand'ring bark, Whose worth's unknown, although his height be taken. Love's not Time's fool, though rosy lips and cheeks Within his bending sickle's compass come; Love alters not with his brief hours and weeks, But bears it out even to the edge of doom. If this be error and upon me prov'd, I never writ, nor no man ever lov'd. |  Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash |
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
A world of dew,
And within every dewdrop
A world of struggle.
~Kobayashi Issa
A world of dew,
And within every dewdrop
A world of struggle.
~Kobayashi Issa
Photo by Rostyslav Kondrat on Unsplash The origin of the word trauma
Is not just "wound," but "piercing" or "turning,"
As blades do when finding home.
Grief commands its own grammar,
Structured by intimacy & imagination.
We often say:
We are beside ourselves with grief.
We can't even imagine.
This means anguish can call us to envision
More than what we believed was carriable
Or even survivable.
That is to say, there does exist
A good grief.
The hurt is how we know
We are alive & awake;
It clears for us all the exquisite,
Excruciating enormities to come.
We are pierced new by the turning
Forward.
All that is grave need
Not be a burden, an anguish.
Call it instead, an anchor,
Grief grounding us in the sea.
Despair exits us the same way it enters--
Turning through the mouth.
Even now conviction works
Strange magic on our tongues.
We are built up again
By what we
Build/find/see/say/remember/know.
What we carry means we survive,
It is what survives us.
We have survived us.
Where once we were alone,
Now we are beside ourselves.
Where once we were barbed & brutal as blades,
Now we can only imagine.
Is not just "wound," but "piercing" or "turning,"
As blades do when finding home.
Grief commands its own grammar,
Structured by intimacy & imagination.
We often say:
We are beside ourselves with grief.
We can't even imagine.
This means anguish can call us to envision
More than what we believed was carriable
Or even survivable.
That is to say, there does exist
A good grief.
The hurt is how we know
We are alive & awake;
It clears for us all the exquisite,
Excruciating enormities to come.
We are pierced new by the turning
Forward.
All that is grave need
Not be a burden, an anguish.
Call it instead, an anchor,
Grief grounding us in the sea.
Despair exits us the same way it enters--
Turning through the mouth.
Even now conviction works
Strange magic on our tongues.
We are built up again
By what we
Build/find/see/say/remember/know.
What we carry means we survive,
It is what survives us.
We have survived us.
Where once we were alone,
Now we are beside ourselves.
Where once we were barbed & brutal as blades,
Now we can only imagine.
Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection:
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action--
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection:
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever-widening thought and action--
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.
Photo by Alexander Schimmeck on Unsplash
Photo by Nick Fewings on Unsplash Caminante, son tus huellas
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.
Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship's wake on the sea.
translated by Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney
el camino y nada más;
Caminante, no hay camino,
se hace camino al andar.
Al andar se hace el camino,
y al volver la vista atrás
se ve la senda que nunca
se ha de volver a pisar.
Caminante, no hay camino
sino estelas en la mar.
Traveler, your footprints
are the only road, nothing else.
Traveler, there is no road;
you make your own path as you walk.
As you walk, you make your own road,
and when you look back
you see the path
you will never travel again.
Traveler, there is no road;
only a ship's wake on the sea.
translated by Mary G. Berg and Dennis Maloney
This is a play for voices, and is really mean to be heard more than read. The sound of the language at times is as important, more so, than what it means. Listen below.
New Quay, Ceredigion. One of the models for Under Milk Wood's Llareggub, and a home for Dylan Thomas for a time during the second world war.
To begin at the beginning:
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'–and–rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see find to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.
Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkared, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or flide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glowworms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite states of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.
You can hear the dew falling and the hushed town breathing. Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep. and you alone can here the invisible starfall, the darkest-beforedawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.
Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llaregyb Hill, dewfall, startfall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.
It is spring, moonless night in the small town, starless and bible-black, the cobblestreets silent and the hunched, courters'–and–rabbits' wood limping invisible down to the sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea. The houses are blind as moles (though moles see find to-night in the snouting, velvet dingles) or blind as Captain Cat there in the muffled middle by the pump and the town clock, the shops in mourning, the Welfare Hall in widows' weeds. And all the people of the lulled and dumbfound town are sleeping now.
Hush, the babies are sleeping, the farmers, the fishers, the tradesmen and pensioners, cobbler, schoolteacher, postman and publican, the undertaker and the fancy woman, drunkared, dressmaker, preacher, policeman, the webfoot cocklewomen and the tidy wives. Young girls lie bedded soft or flide in their dreams, with rings and trousseaux, bridesmaided by glowworms down the aisles of the organplaying wood. The boys are dreaming wicked or of the bucking ranches of the night and the jollyrodgered sea. And the anthracite states of the horses sleep in the fields, and the cows in the byres, and the dogs in the wetnosed yards; and the cats nap in the slant corners or lope sly, streaking and needling, on the one cloud of the roofs.
You can hear the dew falling and the hushed town breathing. Only your eyes are unclosed to see the black and folded town fast, and slow, asleep. and you alone can here the invisible starfall, the darkest-beforedawn minutely dewgrazed stir of the black, dab-filled sea where the Arethusa, the Curlew and the Skylark, Zanzibar, Rhiannon, the Rover, the Cormorant, and the Star of Wales tilt and ride.
Listen. It is night moving in the streets, the processional salt slow musical wind in Coronation Street and Cockle Row, it is the grass growing on Llaregyb Hill, dewfall, startfall, the sleep of birds in Milk Wood.
For BP Nichol
___________________
Nowadays I listen only to duets.
Johnny Hodges and The Bean, a thin slip
of piano behind them
on this page on this stage
craft a breeze in a horn.
One friends sits back and listens
to the other. Nowadays
I want only the wild and tender
phrasing of "NightHawk,"
its air groaned out
like the breath of a lover.
Rashomon by Saxophone.
So brother and sister woke, miles apart,
in those 19th century novels you loved,
with the same wound or desire.
We sit down to clean and sharpen
the other's most personal lines
—a proposal of more, a waving dismissal
of whole stanzas — in Lethbridge in Edmonton
you stood with the breeze
in an uncomfortable Chinese restaurant
in Camrose, getting a second cup
at The Second Cup near Spadina.
I almost called you this morning
for a phone number.
Records I haven't yet returned.
Tapes you were supposed to make for me.
And across the country
tears about your death.
I always thought, someone says,
he was very good for you.
Though I still like, Barrie,
the friends who are not good for me.
Along the highway
only the duets and wind fill up my car.
I saw the scar of the jet that Sunday
trying to get you out of the sky.
Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkings.
An A and an H, a bean and a breeze.
All these twin truths
There is bright sumac, once more,
this September, along the Bayview Extension.
From now on
no more solos
I tie you to me
___________________
Nowadays I listen only to duets.
Johnny Hodges and The Bean, a thin slip
of piano behind them
on this page on this stage
craft a breeze in a horn.
One friends sits back and listens
to the other. Nowadays
I want only the wild and tender
phrasing of "NightHawk,"
its air groaned out
like the breath of a lover.
Rashomon by Saxophone.
So brother and sister woke, miles apart,
in those 19th century novels you loved,
with the same wound or desire.
We sit down to clean and sharpen
the other's most personal lines
—a proposal of more, a waving dismissal
of whole stanzas — in Lethbridge in Edmonton
you stood with the breeze
in an uncomfortable Chinese restaurant
in Camrose, getting a second cup
at The Second Cup near Spadina.
I almost called you this morning
for a phone number.
Records I haven't yet returned.
Tapes you were supposed to make for me.
And across the country
tears about your death.
I always thought, someone says,
he was very good for you.
Though I still like, Barrie,
the friends who are not good for me.
Along the highway
only the duets and wind fill up my car.
I saw the scar of the jet that Sunday
trying to get you out of the sky.
Ben Webster, Coleman Hawkings.
An A and an H, a bean and a breeze.
All these twin truths
There is bright sumac, once more,
this September, along the Bayview Extension.
From now on
no more solos
I tie you to me
Photo by Aaron Burden on Unsplash
I read it hear in your very word,
in the story of the gestures
with which your hands cupped themselves
around our becoming — limiting, warm.
You said live out loud, and die you said lightly,
and over and over again you said be.
But before the first death came murder.
A fracture broke across the rings you'd ripened.
A screaming shattered the voices
that had just come together to speak you,
to make of you a bridge
over the chasm of everything.
And what they have stammered ever since
are fragments
of your ancient name.
in the story of the gestures
with which your hands cupped themselves
around our becoming — limiting, warm.
You said live out loud, and die you said lightly,
and over and over again you said be.
But before the first death came murder.
A fracture broke across the rings you'd ripened.
A screaming shattered the voices
that had just come together to speak you,
to make of you a bridge
over the chasm of everything.
And what they have stammered ever since
are fragments
of your ancient name.
Photo by Josè Maria Sava on Unsplash If there were no emptiness, there would be no life.
Think about it.
All those electrons, particles, and whatnot
crammed in next to each other like junk in an attic,
like trash in a compactor
smashed together in a flat block
so there’s nothing but plasma:
no you no me.
Therefore I praise vacancy.
Vacant lots with their blowing plastics and teasels,
vacant houses, their furze of dust,
vacant stares, blue as the sky through windows.
Motels with the word Vacancy
flashing outside, a red neon arrow pointing,
pointing at the path to be taken
to the bored front desk, to the key-shaped key
on the dangling brown leather key holder,
the key that opens the vacant room
with its scored linoleum floor a blear-eyed yellow
its flowery couch and wilted cushions
its swaybacked bed, smelling of bleach and mildew
its stuttering radio
its ashtray that was here
seventy years ago.
That room has been static for me so long:
an emptiness a void a silence
containing an unheard story
ready for me to unlock.
Let there be plot.
Think about it.
All those electrons, particles, and whatnot
crammed in next to each other like junk in an attic,
like trash in a compactor
smashed together in a flat block
so there’s nothing but plasma:
no you no me.
Therefore I praise vacancy.
Vacant lots with their blowing plastics and teasels,
vacant houses, their furze of dust,
vacant stares, blue as the sky through windows.
Motels with the word Vacancy
flashing outside, a red neon arrow pointing,
pointing at the path to be taken
to the bored front desk, to the key-shaped key
on the dangling brown leather key holder,
the key that opens the vacant room
with its scored linoleum floor a blear-eyed yellow
its flowery couch and wilted cushions
its swaybacked bed, smelling of bleach and mildew
its stuttering radio
its ashtray that was here
seventy years ago.
That room has been static for me so long:
an emptiness a void a silence
containing an unheard story
ready for me to unlock.
Let there be plot.
 Photo by Chris Knight on Unsplash | Slide whiste and shit bucket. We'll do our own rendition. Convictions, like haircuts, hold true until the morning they don't. I'll be proved wrong down the road -- not far down the road, mind you; likely just past the next gum coin, before that streetlight retrofitted to look more lampish. Why are disarticulated feet washing ashore in their Nike carapaces like hermit crabs adjusting to habitat loss? The North Pacific Gyre spits out basketballs, pen caps, rat-tail combs for the well-behaved and habitually cagey. Kids, eh? I could have taken prisoners but lack administrative skills, all those numbers followed by letters followed by answering to Amnesty and ghosts bringing in ghosts that exit as corpses. I have my suspicions. It's just I doubt their validity. I take my legs off above the knee, lean both against the armoire, and slide in Chopin while tomorrow balls up its tinfoil and begins to chew. |
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