Kurdish Fragment

Looking yesterday at these images of Syrian Kurds attempting to flee the ongoing catastrophe in that country I recalled the late Christopher Hitchens’ advocacy of Kurdish liberty. As he never tired of repeating, the Kurds are the largest ethnic group in the world to have no state of their own. I also remembered an anonymous fragment of Kurdish poetry that I translated many years ago, via an Italian intermediary. Apart from its approximate age I have no further details of the poem nor of its Italian translator. It was written in the 7th or 8th century and shows that persecution is far from being a new experience for the Kurdish people.

The places of prayer are destroyed
The fires spent
The greatest men hidden
Cruel Arabs raze
the peasant villages as far as Sharazar
Enslaved are wives and daughters
Brave men are rolled in blood
The rites of Zarathustra are no more
The Wise Lord has no pity on us

Ray Nance

To Nam June Paik

The Sky Tonight

Light Painting IV: Night Walk

Poppies

Song Thrush

Messiaen on the song thrush

Light Painting III

Listening to Shells

I had not begun to see you you were AUBE

Nothing was unveiled
All the boats rocked at the shore
Unknotting the favours (you know) of these pink and white boxes of sweets between which a silver shuttle runs
And trembling I named you Aube

Ten years after
I find you again in the tropical flower
A single snow crystal that overflowed the cup of your two hands
In Martinique they call it the fleur du bal
She and you share the mystery of existence
The first grain of dew far ahead of all the others madly iridescent containing all

I see what is forever hidden from me
When you sleep in the clearing of your arm beneath the butterflies of your hair
And when you are reborn from the phoenix of your spring
In the mint of memory
Of the enigmatic moiré of the likeness in a bottomless mirror
Pulling the pin of that which one will see only once

In my heart all the wings of the milkweed
Lease what you tell me

You wear a summer dress unknown to yourself
It is constellated in every sense with horseshoe magnets of a handsome lead red with blue feet

Sur mer, 1946

–André Breton, translation DTH

Let It Snow