Since the Presidential election, as we wonder what this might mean regarding peace and justice, I’ve found some people are sharing poems.

Yesterday, in Poets and Palestine, I wrote about poetry and injustice. And about the Palestinian Poet, Yahya Ashour.

Palestinian poets, in particular, are in focus because of the ongoing atrocities there, and this country’s complicity. The Israeli war was a factor in the decisions of some people when they cast their ballot. Regardless of the election results, the war on civilians continues unabated, with more deaths every day, every hour.

Cultures and civilizations tend to overestimate the stability of their states, only to find themselves regularly discomposed by internal pressures and tensions too great for the system to hold. And yet always in them there are those who harness from the chaos the creative force to imagine, and in the act of imagining to effect, a phase transition to a different state.

We call those people artists — they who never forget it is only what we can imagine that limits or liberates what is possible. “A society must assume that it is stable,” James Baldwin wrote in reckoning with the immense creative process that is humanity, “but the artist must know, and he must let us know, that there is nothing stable under heaven.” In the instability, the possibility; in the chaos, the building blocks of a stronger structure.

A Lighthouse for Dark Times by Maria Popova, The Marginalian, Nov 7, 2024

Gianluca Costantini

The Italian artist, Gianluca Costantini, has shared his powerful images about what is happening in the Middle East.

I am truly excited about this mural that has been created in Atlanta by the Refaat Mobile Library group, especially because it all started from my portrait of Refaat Alareer. Thank you to Fiza Pirani for involving me. Refaat Mobile Library is a volunteer-run traveling library in Atlanta, created in honor of the martyred Palestinian poet and professor Refaat Alareer.

Gianluca Costantini