"Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise . . . but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us - for good and for ill. It is our stories that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, that represents us at our best, and at our most creative." --Doris Lessing (via Silliman's Blog)


    "The Fixed Place Where the Wall Was Broken Through"

mahogany chimeras
waiting for the crush

at the bottom of a thin cistern
yclept peace

all the nonreturning echoes i sent out
quartz cylindrical idol

false call after call
'strip me of ev'rything · including my pride'

invisible foghorn scintillant
years too late


"Besides hard science, there is soft science, the science of shadow areas and story areas, and you do wrong to deny it the name." --R A Lafferty, Strange Doings (1972)

Inshallah.