Adrienne Rich refused the National Medal for the Arts.

” I could not accept such an award from president Clinton or this White House because the very meaning of art, as I understand it, is incompatible with the cynical politics of this administration.
I believe in art’s social presence – as a breaker of official silence, as a voice for those whose voices are disregarded, and as a human birthright…I do not know that art – in any case, the art of Poetry – means nothing if it simple decorate the dinner table of power which holds it hostage.
The radical disparity of wealth and power in America are widening at a devastating rate…”

I used to sit
squatted
over the end of a current’s stream
of foreign water
in a school of dark-skinned children
with mud-painted faces
waiting
to collect tadpoles

Poets’ Hall Press, Chapbook, 2015.

down by the river
and the ghosts of tens and the trading fair
a friend is there
and we walk and talk to the train tracks
with our stonetaps, till over the water
we drink painfully the white reflecting
of streetlamps
all along the calligraphy and we pulled
down the gravel slope to the home of the wraiths
that once frightened me, and i clung to the rocks
but here there there is only decayed bedding cut
by the splinters of moonbeams between
the clenching fingers of the trees
and we are quiet
as we cast the hooftracks of brave children
in the wake of the dinosaurs that stand on their graves
and blot the stars
aligned to the phases of the moon in mazes of water
and the fossil pipes we climb to the brow of the giant
that creaks and sway and we look down
and it is a thousand feet to the rocks
and to the day.

From original – Please visit Paintednote.net

” In order to turn a man into a subservient, obedient, and trusting creature, we must strip his personality away. Because as long as he has a character he can not be a servant. And in order to get a good ride from a nation, human feelings must be taken away from them, or at least weakened. As long as the Easterner feels he is independent, noble, and worthy, he will never fawn and wag his tail for a Western morsel to be thrown to him.”

Consider reprogramming your self, Western thinkers do not represent the entire human civilization. In searching for a writer and thinker, we must look for those individuals whose pain, history, condition, and fate are similar to ours.

Suggestions: Omar Mawloud, Kateb Yassin, Omar Ozgan, Frantz Fanon, and Aim Cesaire.
Send comment and suggestions to H.A. 801-413-4061; poethector.com; poethector@Gmail.com

Paintednote this week DADA short films Poetry Open Mic thrusday 8 PM

The UN ruled that Assange has been arbitrarily detained.
Now we wait for the words of the Empire.