Author: dig

a dirge a lamentation or AG2022_2030921a2

dig

earth works

thick brown mud

clinging pulling

a body down

hear wounded earth cry

bequeath to me

the hoe the hope

ancestral rights

to turn the ground over

to shovel and sift

until history

rewritten resurrected

returns to its rightful owners

a past to claim

yet another stone lifted to

throw against the enemy

making way for new endings

random seeds

spreading over the hillside

wild roses

come by fierce wind and hard rain

unleashed furies

here in this untouched wood

a dirge a lamentation

for earth to live again

earth that is all at once a grave

a resting place a bed of new beginnings

avalanche of splendor

4., bell hooks. Appalachian Elegy: Poetry and Place

AG2022_2030921a2

I protest Mahmoud Khalil’s detainment

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NEW YORK (AP) — Federal immigration authorities arrested a Palestinian activist Saturday who played a prominent role in Columbia University’s protests against Israel, a significant escalation in the Trump administration’s pledge to detain and deport student activists.

Mahmoud Khalil, a graduate student at Columbia until this past December, was inside his university-owned apartment Saturday night when several Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents entered and took him into custody, his attorney, Amy Greer, told The Associated Press.

Greer said she spoke by phone with one of the ICE agents during the arrest, who said they were acting on State Department orders to revoke Khalil’s student visa. Informed by the attorney that Khalil was in the United States as a permanent resident with a green card, the agent said they were revoking that instead, according to the lawyer.

A spokesperson for the Department of Homeland Security, Tricia McLaughlin, confirmed Khalil’s arrest in a statement Sunday, describing it as being “in support of President Trump’s executive orders prohibiting anti-Semitism.”

[…]

The Department of Homeland Security can initiate deportation proceedings against green card holders for a broad range of alleged criminal activity, including supporting a terror group. But the detention of a legal permanent resident who has not been charged with a crime marked an extraordinary move with an uncertain legal foundation, according to immigration experts.

Jake OffenHartz, Associated Press, 031025

There is no going back from this point: President Donald Trump’s administration is trying to deport a man solely for his First Amendment-protected activity, without due process. By all existing legal standards, this is illegal and unconstitutional: a violation of First Amendment protections, and the Fifth Amendment-protected right to due process. If Khalil’s green card is revoked and he is deported, no one can have any confidence in legal and constitutional protections as a line of defense against arbitrary state violence and punishment. Khalil’s arrest marks an extraordinary fascist escalation.

Natasha Lennard, The Intercept, 031025

AG2023_2080754a or a construct of the real

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AG2023_2080754a

When the present seems to have abandoned the future, we need to observe the here and now more closely. These artists’ works are clear and detached, analytically precise and calm to present the state of affairs right now in all its complexity. In doing so, they undermine and refuse to comply with an omnipresent immediacy that manifests itself in the form of accelerated availability, speed, consumability, and instant legibility. Defying powerlessness and paralysis, the works address contemporary wars and their economic and political implications, dealing with climate change and socioeconomic power structures in various societies. Yet they invariably retain an awareness not only of our planetary present being permanently and repeatedly reconfigured from assorted constructions of the Real but also of the extent to which we are part of it all.

UNDERMINING THE IMMEDIACY curated by Susanne Pfeffer and Julia Eichler. MMK Frankfurt.