Poems, Pandemics, and Preservation

POETRY FORMAT, 13 Jul 2020

Richard Falk | Global Justice in the 21st Century – TRANSCEND Media Service

3 Jul 2020 – With the help of a friend I taught myself to write poems in a haiku form following classic Japanese guidance. Poetry has long been a place of sanctuary for me, and in recent months it has also offered me the pleasures of ‘lockdown therapy.’ I hope I am not abusing readers by posting a sample, and hoping others will be drawn to join an invisible community of haiku lovers.

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Lonely despair wilts
Colorful blooming flowers
Can’t hide fragrance

Joy is a heart wave
Complacency vanishes
Blue replaces gray

black while jogging
Ahmaud Arbery
Then dead like King

By choice blue birds fly
Above the prisoners below
Singing their freedom songs

Enough of dreaming
The scent of this rose is real
Holding the stem I bleed

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Richard Falk is a member of the TRANSCEND Network, an international relations scholar, professor emeritus of international law at Princeton University, Distinguished Research Fellow, Orfalea Center of Global Studies, UCSB, author, co-author or editor of 60 books, and a speaker and activist on world affairs. In 2008, the United Nations Human Rights Council (UNHRC) appointed Falk to two three-year terms as a United Nations Special Rapporteur on “the situation of human rights in the Palestinian territories occupied since 1967.” Since 2002 he has lived in Santa Barbara, California, and associated with the local campus of the University of California, and for several years chaired the Board of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation. His most recent book is On Nuclear Weapons, Denuclearization, Demilitarization, and Disarmament (2019).

Go to Original – richardfalk.wordpress.com


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