Or is it newscreens, newswebs or newsnets? I haven’t bought a paper paper in more than a year. One of my fav’s, TOI, isn’t available at my local newsstand. What’s the newsstand guy going to do when we’re all reading digitally?
Today at NYTimes.com…
- …there’s this challenging Op Ed piece on Japan’s attitude towards living by Masaru Tamamoto.
- …and a pic, taken in NYC’s Central Park, of the unrelenting quality of today’s US east coast snowstorm, which reminded me of the fight scene set in a real blizzard in House of Flying Daggers, which I once referenced in a truly bad (but heartfelt) poem called Snow in August: whiteout conditions.
- …and this photo of one of the flour wars in Greece that celebrate the end of Carnival and the start of Lent, which startled me into realizing that Carnival and Holi may be related, going back to before the time when Christianity started. (Clues: the few days of riotousness, the celebratory special clothing, the tossing of colored powders, and the early spring timing.)
Yesterday there was this piece by Brian Stelter on scraping, from which you can deduce why I’m not pasting even one word or pic from any of the articles here.
Where else can you find all this stuff?
Here’s a new poem based on that bad but heartfelt one:
August Snow in March
This early March,
snow fell,
it was like Rani’s in KANK.
The second time, I counted her scenes
so I could talk about the third with snow,
the one where ice and nature
make a woven singularity.
Like House of Flying Dagger’s
blizzard, how it blanketed death,
but wounds showed through,
like that, this me, this now, this snow.
The August before we met,
my love for him was avalanched.
Snow had stolen our river.
“Aur tumse aankhon laser-like hain,
you’ll sear the ice.
…my love for you
will never die
never die never die,”
I wrote.
It never did.
You,
dimensional as a dream,
so rich with meaning,
a thought of you
fills me with
such sweet pain,
I suddenly know I know
the meaning
of every love poem
and every book,
this love that has no name
nor words enough
to give it metaphor,
now, in today’s winter snow,
and before,
surpasses everything
I promised him that August day.
This love does not undo
my word.
It’s sleeping,
cradled in the tree of you.
© 3 March 2009, Heather Quinn, all rights reserved
And thus one value of saving old work: material for new.
