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I baked a pie for the holiday and it turned out pretty well.
This is what I’ve been thinking about lately (while I should be thinking about papers, of course). I tend to see hip-hop/rap music as poetry, and I’ve become fascinated and maybe even fixated by what it has to say about community, national identity, and of course, the narration of survival. I’ll qualify that, because obviously “Blame it on the al-al-al-al-al-alcholol” isn’t exactly poetic.
I don’t think I have any awesome analysis yet, but it’s worth checking out these songs and thinking about them a little, even if you disagree with the politics.
Unfortunately, this is the censored version, but I can’t seem to find the original:
You may, like my husband, think I’m digging too deep into something that is meant to be “entertainment,” but I’m not quite there isn’t something to be grasped here about us, the community of people who calls themselves Americans.
I often wonder what the point of having so much grass every where could possibly be when no one ever seems to use it. I suppose it helps to suppress erosion, or something, at the expense of lakes and rivers. I’m seated on a grassy rise somewhere near the middle of campus and the people who pass by give me odd looks. I’m drinking sweet, sweet coffee. In the past week I’ve learned something about myself: I like black coffee and sickeningly sweet coffee (sickeningly features English adverb, verb, and adjective markers), but nothing in between. I have a little canister of decaf, too, because my subconscious beats my husband when I sleep caffeinated. You learn things about your repressed self when you get married.
Obviously, it is the end of the quarter and I am crashing quickly. We, by which I mean my husband and I, talk often about how much we need a vacation and the corresponding money to finance such a vacation– I’d probably settle for a night out. I’ve been reading a lot of poetry lately, and it’s affected my narative voice, if you haven’t already noticed. A fabulously kind scholarship recommendation temperarily rallied my spirits this week, but I’ve slipped back into a mixture of senior, end of the quarter, and I-work-too-much “itis,” which I offer as a means of explaining why I’m on the grassy rise and not in class discussing the predominant features of post-modern literature.
and because that baby
is getting so big that when
I picked her up my back
gave out in homage
to her vastness.
Joshua read this poem at Lamar and my wedding.
Who gets up early to discover the moment light begins?
Who finds us here circling, bewildered, like atoms?
Who comes to a spring thirsty
and sees the moon reflected in it?
Who, like Jacob blind with grief and age,
smells the shirt of his lost son
and can see again?
Who lets a bucket down and brings up
a flowing prophet? Or like Moses goes for fire
and finds what burns inside the sunrise?Jesus slips into a house to escape enemies,
and opens a door to the other world.
Soloman cuts open a fish, and there’s a gold ring.
Omar storms in to kill the prophet
and leaves with blessings.
Chase a deer and end up everywhere!
An oyster opens his mouth to swallow on drop.
Now there’s a pearl.
A vagrant wanders empty ruins.
Suddenly he’s wealthy.But don’t be satisfied with stories, how things
have gone with others. Unfold
your own myth, without complicated explanation,
so everyone will understand the passage,
We have opened you.Start walking toward Shams. Your legs will get heavy
and tired. Then comes a moment
of feeling the wings you’ve grown,
lifting.
