Black Postcards

The calendar all booked up, the future unknown. The cable silently hums some folk song but lacks a country. Snow falls in the grey sea. Shadows fight out on the dock.

Halfway through my life, death turns up and takes your pertinent measurements. We forget the visit. Life goes on. But someone is sewing the suit in the silence.

I hear my country in your voice

From Romeo Oriogun:

Yesterday at the hospital, a man said to me, ~I hear my country in your voice~. I have been thinking about it ever since. He didn’t say, like a typical American, you have an accent. He placed an entire country in my being & in so doing walked both of us into this communal space.

I think exile awakens us to the many possibilities of language, we are always listening for sounds that will either exclude us or include us. We are always listening, searching for sounds that can become home.

You were once wild here.

You were once wild here. Don’t let them tame you. – Isadora Duncan

Cavafy

How different is history from an Englishman’s. Athens and Sparta, so drubbed into us at school, are to him two quarrelsome little slave states, ephemeral beside the Hellenistic kingdoms that followed, as these empheral beside Constantinpole.

– E.M.Forster on Cavafy

Black Postcards#

I hear my country in your voice#

You were once wild here.#

Cavafy#

Black Postcards

I hear my country in your voice

You were once wild here.

Cavafy