trying to fashion a better way

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AG2020-Document-SistrunkAlley-fold103020sla-page013-014s

For my people walking blindly spreading joy, losing time

     being lazy, sleeping when hungry, shouting when

     burdened, drinking when hopeless, tied, and shackled

     and tangled among ourselves by the unseen creatures

     who tower over us omnisciently and laugh;

[…]

For my people standing staring trying to fashion a better way

    from confusion, from hypocrisy and misunderstanding,

    trying to fashion a world that will hold all the people,

all the faces, all the adams and eves and their countless generations;

Let a new earth rise. Let another world be born.

Margaret Walker, “For My People”

slightly greater things

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limited utopias uphold the practice of artmaking as a performance of non-fulfillment

… deputize for political thought the collection of formal, rhetorical, and tropological maneuvers

Paulò majora canamus—let us sing, of slightly greater things.

-AN


ICE’s War on Home, (LRB). “… at once an autonomous phenomenon and a continuation of the George Floyd rebellion of 2020 and the student-led campaign against the war on Gaza.”

AG_1020129ac or time to sit quiet, face to face with thee


I ask for a moment’s indulgence to sit by thy side. The works that I have in hand I will finish afterwards.

Away from the sight of thy face my heart knows no rest nor respite, and my work becomes an endless toil in a shoreless sea of toil.

To-day the summer has come at my window with its sighs and murmurs; and the bees are plying their minstrelsy at the court of the flowering grove.

Now it is time to sit quiet, face to face with thee, and to sing dedication of life in this silent and overflowing leisure.

Gitanjali 5, Rabindranath Tagore