Amanda

“My scars remind me that I did indeed survive my deepest wounds. That in itself is an accomplishment. And they bring to mind something else, too. They remind me that the damage life has inflicted on me has, in many places, left me stronger and more resilient. What hurt me in the past has actually made me better equipped to face the present.”
― Steve Goodier

“If our goal is perfection rather than growth, it is unlikely that we are willing to go back, because it requires a level of self-empathy—the ability to look at our own actions with understanding and compassion; to understand our experiences in the context in which they happened and to do all this without judgment. I call this ability to reflect on our own actions with empathy “grounding.”
― Brené Brown, I Thought It Was Just Me: Women Reclaiming Power and Courage in a Culture of Shame

“If we want to do more than just end mass incarceration—if we want to put an end to the history of racial caste in America—we must lay down our racial bribes, join hands with people of all colors who are not content to wait for change to trickle down, and say to those who would stand in our way: Accept all of us or none.”
― Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

“They say the world will end soon.
They say that the nuclear weapons made,
Due to fearing 'the other',
Has become a curse, a plague, a scourge
On those who made them
Even more than those they were made to scare...
And I wonder:
Will the nuclear weapons be the cause of world’s end?
Or will world’s end be caused by humanity’s fear, complicity, and submission?

And if what they say is true,
Before the world ends and before I die,
I wish to drink one last cup of cardamom-flavored tea
Taste one last fig, peach, or apricot,
Smell a quince,
Dip one last piece of bread
In Palestinian thyme and olive oil…

Before the world ends,
I wish to smell a few pine needles,
To breathe the smell of the first rain shower
After a long, hot, and dry summer…

Before the world ends and before I die,
I wish to read one more book
Out of the thousands of books that I still want to read…

Before the world ends and before I die,
I ask for one more spring
To smell bunches of Iraqi narcissus flowers.
I want to live one more autumn,
To enjoy the magical colors
Of the dying leaves on the trees
As they challenge death with beauty
Right before falling on the grounds of indifference…

But my biggest wish before I die is
For my death not to be the end of the world…

[Original poem published in Arabic on October 13 at ahewar.org]”
― Louis Yako