To a girl without a name

What is your name; Sophia, Aishe, Julia or Katarina;
I do not know.
What I do know though is that I’ve seen your face, I’ve heard your voice,
Distinctive as a joyful howl.
I’ve seen you in the streets of Tunis asking for democracy
And in the Cairo squares looking for freedom from tyranny.
I have heard your voice, yelling at me: Wake up!
-From Syria’s imperial ruins
From Iran’s theocratic prison cells-
Wake up!
I’ve seen you bleeding into Africa’s oilfields
And the deadly mines of South America
I’ve seen you dying while traversing the roads of the silk
And coming back to life, crying out loud: Enough!
Enough, you cried; enough;
Before raising your weak, your feeble banners
Of dreams and of the current European desperation.
You armed yourself with your youth and a smile,
With two open arms and three friends of the heart,
With a neighborhood, with your entire little world,
And you set out to speak your mind to the vultures
Of the socio-economic-political order.
But your voice carried no strength.
It could not be heard over the horns of the cars
And the ridiculous cries of joy of the TV personas.
Your presence was too small, your tears of no importance,
You could not draw on you the looks of
The modern day robots passing restlessly by.
But you didn’t give up:
Here I shall remain, you said.
And here you stayed. There.
There, in the middle of a street of the city; a city.
There, where the enforcers of the laws of the few met you:
In Athens and in Lisbon, in London and in Dublin, in Barcelona.
There, where they hit you and they gassed you and they made you bleed.
Your blood and your tears travelled the world over
Through YouTube and plasma TV screens,
Through mobile phones and Facebook pages;
They were tweeted now and again.
A lot of people saw them; a few felt them; a handful got upset.
But most, the big crowd, just chose to look somewhere else
And forget.
One way or another though, you’ve managed to achieve your goal;
To give a helping hand to the building of the Temple of New Hope.
And you have pointed the way to a different path,
Old at the same time and new,
Ordinary and unique,
A path that’s hard to follow,
Which as such before too long it will once again become
A phantom trail of a long lost world.

They want to ban them; we should read them

Every year the American Library Association releases a list of the Most Frequently Challenged Books. This just proves that the land of the free and the home of the brave is not such an open-minded society as Hollywood likes us to think. Requests to ban books just seem to fly all over the American skies, and these acts against the collective psyche of the human race, are not likely to come to an end any time soon. It's at times like these that I come to thank my good fortune for living in a truly democratic, though somewhat problematic, society where no-one is bound to crucify you for a work of art. Unless of course our priests think otherwise.
Anyway, here's the list:

1. "And Tango Makes Three" by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson
2. "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian" by Sherman Alexie
3. "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley
4. "Crank" by Ellen Hopkins
5. "The Hunger Games" by Suzanne Collins
6. "Lush" by Natasha Friend
7. "What My Mother Doesn’t Know" by Sonya Sones
8. "Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By In America" by Barbara Ehrenreich
9. "Revolutionary Voices" edited by Amy Sonnie
10. "Twilight" by  Stephenie Meyer