Palestine
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Understanding P@l€st1ne
As Trump and Netenyahu plot the harvest of their fruits from the Palestinian genocide, I want you to help you understand the Palestinian point of view. Forget what any God said; the gods of indigenous Americans promised them the North American continent. This was a purely geo-political transaction to plant the West’s flag in the… Continue reading
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Another Police Riot
This poem was published in Unlikely Stories Version Six, and is this sort of writing I spoke about in the last post. Another Police Riot“The children are always ours, every single one of them, all over the globe; and I am beginning to suspect that whoever is incapable of recognizing this may be incapable of… Continue reading
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The West has gone to die in Palestine
The West has gone to die in Palestine as God-certain as the Crusaders and just his doomed, for what they do desecrates the lands where spirits walked as it contorts their frozen souls beyondrecognition, into a crooked cross or star. Continue reading
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Carry a Lantern
If poetry does not carry a lantern from house to house,if the poor do not know what it ‘means’we had better discard it!It is better that we seek immortal silence. —Mahmoud Darwish▪︎ Palestinian poet ▪︎ (Trans. by John Mikhail Asfour) Continue reading
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The sound of an oud
“I resolve to see anew, to take sight into my hand to spill the blood of the sacred wounds of witness…” “Fill your pen with love or don’t bother picking it up.” From Piedra by Luis Alberto Urrea It is difficult to bear witness to this world without anger. There are worlds of oppression that… Continue reading
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[ALL THOSE SHIPS THAT NEVER LANDED]
After Bob Kaufman‘s All Those Ships That Never Sailed All those ships that never landed in the Port of Gaza, their cargoes of bread and of medicine for the hospitals reduced to rubble, are now stranded in other ports, empty, bleeding rust. Trapped in a racist nightmare land with no hope of escape by sea… Continue reading
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Lebensraum
Do all men kill the things they do not love? -Bassanio, Act IV, Scene 1 Continue reading
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Why I did not grow more conservative with age
More on this after I finish organizing my thoughts. Writers are among the most sensitive, most intellectually anarchic, most representative, most probing of artists. The writer’s ability to imagine what is not the self, to familiarize the strange, & to mystify the familiar—all this is the test of her or his power. — Toni Morrison Continue reading
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Reading Lorca While Thinking Of Palestine
From the “Ballad of the Civil Guard, by Garcia-Lorca. The gypsies gatherat Bethlehem’s portal.Full of wounds, Saint Josephshrouds a young maiden.Sudden sharp riflesring through the night.The Virgin heals childrenwith spittle from stars.But the Civil Guard advances,sowing bonfires.where imagination burnsyoung and naked.Rosa of Camboriosmoans on her doorstep,with her two severed breastslying on a platter.And other girls… Continue reading
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The Whole World Is Watching
Once we were inured to horror by the smallness of our televisions, war a crackling black and white firefight a world away, until the cartoon television generation became their own Justice League and rose up singing, Love, children it’s just a kiss away it’s just a kiss away. They kept the cameras out next time,… Continue reading
About Me
Mark Folse is a provincial diarist and aspiring minor poet from New Orleans. His past blogging adventures included the Katina/Federal Flood blog wetbankguide on blogspot.com which David Simon told NY Magazine was one of three blogs that helped inform Treme, and Toulouse Street–Odd Bits of Life in New Orleans, which once outranked the Doobie Brothers on Google Search. His work has appeared in The Dead Mule School of Southern Literature, The New Delta Review, Metazen, New Laurel Review, Ellipsis, What We Know: New Orleans as Home, Please Forward, The Maple Leaf Rag IV, and A Howling in the Wires (which he co-edited).
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Well Bottom Blues 