Category Archives: Poetry

Poetry, Security

Long Time

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by The Roots

Struck by the luck of the draw
Real life preservation
What I’m hustling for
My name black thought
The definition of raw
I was born in South Philly
On a cement floor
I had nothing at all
Had to knuckle and brawl
They swore I’d fall
Be another brick in the wall
Another life
Full of love
That lost
That’s silly
This Philly
Y’all really ain’t stopping
The boy with the pen
Like Willie
On top of the hall
Pure soul is what the city
Most popular for
Hear the tones
That will ease you
Smooth
As Bunny Sigler’s soundtrack
Keeping your head bopping and all
It’s something in the water
Where I come from
They used to sing it on the corner
Where I come from
Making something outta nothing
Because everybody fifty cents
From a quarter
Where I come from
Yeah
The streets ain’t timid
But I feel at home in it
Gotta see a couple people
I ain’t got at
In a minute
Yeah
You can take a brother outta South Philly
Can’t take it outta him really
I forever represent it
And it’s

It’s been a long time
Since I been back around the way
It’s been a long time
Let it spin let spin let it spin
Since I been back around your way
It’s been a long time
Long time long time

Live and dirvet
I don’t need no mic check
Remember mommy told me
You ain’t write that
It started in the bathroom taking a dump
Listening to Ultramagnetic
Ego tripping you won’t
Pressure my word
I’m the urban vision
Of you chump
Stomped on a different ground
Sound second to none
Synthesizers tweet
To improvise your feet
I calculated every lyric to arrive on a beat
It’s free
Come get high on me
Before a nine millimeter shell
Hit my pelle pelle
In the p
Yeah
It’s something in the water
Where I come from
They used to sing it on the corner
Where I come from
Making something outta nothing
Because everybody
Fifty cents from a quarter
Yo
Where I come from
It’s just a natural reaction
For crack to make it happen
Let the pen ink sink
Into the paper of the pad
Think back
When I was younger
Ghetto could have took me under
Young Peedi can’t mess with North Philly
Never had
You don’t know about me
You ain’t stroll my streets
Look familiar
I feel ya
Longtime no see

It’s been a long time
Since I been back around the way
It’s been a long time
Let it spin let spin let it spin
Since I been back around your way
It’s been a long time
Long time long time

Clap something
But whatever you clap
Clap to the record spinning
While I’m taking you back
To the top paper era
Baby big on that
Picture the pool room
Where the money getters was at
And street people
With feather in the cap
Or their bossolino pulling paper
As if it’s a small casino
I was a young boy
Sweeping the floors
And running to stores
But all those old heads
Would talk to me About the way
To clutch the eagle
On a buck and truck
And if I’m down
How to get back up
Just survival kid
And it’s a struggle worldwide
I’m positive
Shit the ghetto might as well
Be the Gaza Strip
You know where all the monsters is
Street walkers
You don’t see no consciousness
I’m coming back to where
The core of the problem is
We on the job again
Y’all know what time it is

It’s been a long time
Since I been back around the way
It’s been a long time
Let it spin let spin let it spin
Since I been back around your way
It’s been a long time
Long time long time

History, Poetry, Security

Joseph Roth

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The Krakow Post paints a detailed portrait of the great writer from Galicia. He passed away seventy years ago today, May 27th, 1939 at the age of 45, only months before the start of WWII:

Some have called Roth a poet of “Austroslavism,” owing to his longing for a peaceful coexistence of a multitude of nations under the formal roof of monarchy. “I loved the virtues and merits of this fatherland,” he wrote of the Habsburg Empire, “and today, when it is dead and gone, I even love its flaws and shortcomings.”

History, Poetry, Security

Encounter

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by Czeslaw Milosz (Translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Lillian Vallee)

We were riding through frozen fields in a wagon at dawn.
A red wing rose in the darkness.

And suddenly a hare ran across the road.
One of us pointed to it with his hand.

That was long ago. Today neither of them is alive,
Not the hare, nor the man who made the gesture.

O my love, where are they, where are they going
The flash of a hand, streak of movement, rustle of pebbles.
I ask not out of sorrow, but in wonder.

His Nobel Lecture is worth reading (english | polish)

…by choosing solitude and giving myself to a strange occupation, that is, to writing poems in Polish while living in France or America, I tried to maintain a certain ideal image of a poet, who, if he wants fame, he wants to be famous only in the village or the town of his birth. (…wybieraj±c samotno¶æ i oddaj±c siê dziwacznemu zajêciu jakim jest pisanie wierszy po polsku, choæ mieszka siê we Francji czy w Ameryce, podtrzymywa³em pewien idealny obraz poety, który je¿eli chce byæ s³awny, to tylko w swojej wiosce czy w swoim mie¶cie.)

[…]

Simone Weil, to whose writings I am profoundly indebted, says: “Distance is the soul of beauty.” Yet sometimes keeping distance is nearly impossible. (Simone Weil, której pismom wiele zawdziêczam, powiada: “Dystans jest dusz± piêkna”. Bywa jednak, ¿e jego uzyskanie jest niemal niemo¿liwo¶ci±.)

His poem “So Little” takes an even darker turn from Encounter:

I said so little.
Days were short.

Short days.
Short nights.
Short years.

I said so little.
I couldn’t keep up.

My heart grew weary
From joy,
Despair,
Ardor,
Hope.

The jaws of Leviathan
Were closing upon me.

Naked, I lay on the shores
Of desert islands.

The white whale of the world
Hauled me down to its pit.

And now I don’t know
What in all that was real.

Milosz passed away in August of 2004 in Krakow, Poland. His writing during postwar Europe is said to have influenced many generations by tackling difficult and inherent contradictions in life.