dharma arts
The Libyan Sybil
The Libyan Sybil is another of my photo haiga, created using found text. I was resting my feet on a bench in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, quietly studying Sybil’s beautiful marble foot. The image I made included the title and author card, “William Wetmore Story (1819-1895)/ The Libyan Sybil/1860: this carving,1861/Marble”. I constructed the haiku-like verse from the text on the card.
The Libyan Sybil sits contemplating the terrible fate of her people, the African people, guarding what she has written on the scroll that foretells their future. She looks out of her black eyes and sees the “coming of the day when that which is hidden … shall be revealed.” She was intended to be a symbolic condemnation of African American slavery.
a winter abstraction
Today I watched the NFB documentary, Duncan Campbell Scott: The Poet and the Indians, about a man who was on one hand a fine and respected poet, and on the other hand a powerful and determined repressor of native peoples in Canada. In the brief history presented, it seemed to have been noted, but not questioned, that the Indigenous parties to Canada’s treaties were attentive to but not curious about the white people’s ways. We are learning that they did not see European culture, education, governance or justice as better than their own. Though D.C. Scott wrote evocatively of the Canadian north, he did not see its people’s deep connection to land, water, life seen and unseen.
Winter does not submit to reason. It is mythical, a story of faith. Perhaps the world would be a better place if we put down the whip of reason and listened to the season.
c’est l’hiver she sang the one who knew this country is not reason is myth mia burrus 2020
November
November
November is the Somme of the year – cold, wet, futile. The clouds always seem to arrive,
never to leave. I surrender to the browbeating wind, and walk down the road, unseeing.
Slate sky / wept for all souls / things went south
mia burrus 2012
Visitor Parking
I like the lonely look of this place … the last-person-on-earth
solitude of it … it evokes a sharp, cool wind and clear
sky … grit underfoot …the mawking of distant shitting
shorebirds
