#207: Map poems, Justicemakers & October Music
Hi!
Last week was HECTIC but full of milestones and life lessons. I spent the first half frantically making zines, and the second half at Bombay Zine Fest with my friends from Loofa, meeting a whole lot of you and putting faces to names :) I also met Jasmine from the wholesome Dear Jasmine column on this newsletter (YAY)
Here’s a little throwback to the madness:
I’ll be setting up the online shop for all these zines and merch sometime in the coming days. Stay tuned.
In the meantime, I’ve got some interesting reads, map poems (which I’ve been hoarding for a while now), an October playlist and a book I art directed for you…
Introducing…Justicemakers
Justicemakers is a collection of 10 stories of young people solving justice issues differently. Created by Agami x The Alipore Post.
The idea that justice can be made, that it is an experience that each of us can shape for ourselves and those around us, is what we set out to explore. 10 stories, 20 writers and artists, and over 30 justicemakers later, we can honestly say justice is not a word easily defined. The idea of it seems to shape-shift, evolve, and take on new meanings depending on who we are and where we come from.
So proud to have worked on this over the past year and watched it come to life.
With this cover by @copycatdesign, we invite you to find your nearest playground and try out a see-saw to see what a re-balancing of the scales of justice might feel like for yourself.
Poetry Corner
1. Map by Linda Hogan
This is the world
so vast and lonely
without end, with mountains
named for men
who brought hunger
from other lands,
and fear
of the thick, dark forest of trees
that held each other up,
knowing fire dreamed of swallowing them
and spoke an older tongue,
and the tongue of the nation of wolves
was the wind around them.
Even ice was not silent.
It cried its broken self
back to warmth.
But they called it
ice, wolf, forest of sticks,
as if words would make it something
they could hold in gloved hands,
open, plot a way
and follow.
This is the map of the forsaken world.
This is the world without end
where forests have been cut away from their trees.
These are the lines wolf could not pass over.
This is what I know from science:
that a grain of dust dwells at the center
of every flake of snow,
that ice can have its way with land,
that wolves live inside a circle
of their own beginning.
This is what I know from blood:
the first language is not our own.
There are names each thing has for itself,
and beneath us the other order already moves.
It is burning.
It is dreaming.
It is waking up.
2. Map by Wislawa Szymborska
Translated from the Polish by Clare Cavanagh
Flat as the table
it’s placed on.
Nothing moves beneath it
and it seeks no outlet.
Above—my human breath
creates no stirring air
and leaves its total surface
undisturbed.
Its plains, valleys are always green,
uplands, mountains are yellow and brown,
while seas, oceans remain a kindly blue
beside the tattered shores.
Everything here is small, near, accessible.
I can press volcanoes with my fingertip,
stroke the poles without thick mittens,
I can with a single glance
encompass every desert
with the river lying just beside it.
A few trees stand for ancient forests,
you couldn’t lose your way among them.
In the east and west,
above and below the equator—
quiet like pins dropping,
and in every black pinprick
people keep on living.
Mass graves and sudden ruins
are out of the picture.
Nations’ borders are barely visible
as if they wavered—to be or not.
I like maps, because they lie.
Because they give no access to the vicious truth.
Because great-heartedly, good-naturedly
they spread before me a world
not of this world.
3. A Map, With Love by Kartikay Agarwal
If syllables could map my thoughts,
jumping continents/crossing oceans.
If I could draw concentric parallels,
to explain the contours of my emotions,
which you see as a haphazard palette of
an abstract painting in myriad shades.
If with a code of dashes and dots
I could pen down borders demarcating
good and bad days placed adjacent,
but still in different worlds.
If there was a colored portrayal
of the lands that constitute me–
with my heart in the centre.(an inland sea brimming with salt-water)
If the lighthouse that guides me,
forging my paths of reason,
could be marked with an “X”,
and word-footsteps showed the trail.
If somehow on that map,
my conscience could stretch
to the very limit—where it endsand
the oceans I am yet to explore, begin.
Even if that map,
drawn with great pain,
complete with a legend & key,
fell into to your hands, my love.
I fear, the night would be
too dark to read a map right
and if we were to wait till tomorrow,
it would turn to ashes in the sunlight.
4. Torn Map by Naomi Shihab Nye
Once, by mistake,
she tore a map in half.
She taped it back, but crookedly.
Now all the roads ended in water.
There were mountains
right next to her hometown.
Wouldn’t that be nice
if it were true?
I’d tear a map
and be right next to you.
5. Cartographer by DéLana R.A. Dameron (Excerpt)
You believe my body a map. It is
an island to which you flock only to lose yourself,
to find solace or right angles to answer
the simple question: how do you get
from where you are, to here—the heart.
Read the full poem here.
Recommended Listening
I’ve not been listening to too much new music this month. But I’ve started compiling the October playlist on Spotify:
Links of the Week
“Everything is gestation and then bringing forth.” - Rilke on the Lonely Patience of Creative Work
This interview with pianist Ludovico Einaudi, where he said, “I also have a notebook where I write some notes, color-coordinated, almost like a map to help me put together my songs based on those weekly recordings.”
A new concept I came across in marlee grace’s latest newsletter: “Believing Mirrors, a concept Julia Cameron uses to name the people in our lives who reflect our potent god given creativity back to us.”
Collate: Write a letter to the world and have the world write back.
time spent offline, a newsletter on spending less time online and (re)discovering the pleasures of the offline world
A quote I’ve been pondering
It is beautiful to talk about beautiful things and even more beautiful to silently gaze at them.
– Dejan Stojanovic
Take care, friends! Make sure to live a little.
See you same place next week,
Rohini
You can also head on over to The Alipore Post Journal, spend time with the Newsletter Archives, or follow the page on Instagram.
Map by Wislawa Szymborska is such a gem.
Have always been into the visual language of maps.....perhaps because they make everything seem within reach.
Thanks for sharing this lovely poem.