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“Human kindness has never
weakened the stamina or
softened the fiber of a free
people. A nation does not
have to be cruel to be tough.”
― Franklin D. Roosevelt,
U.S. President (1933-1945)
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Welcome to Morning Open Thread, a daily post
with a MOTley crew of hosts who choose the topic
for the day's posting. We support our community,
invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful,
respectful dialogue in an open forum. That’s a
feature, not a bug. Other than that, site rulz rule.
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So grab your cuppa, and join in.
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13 Poets born this week,
light and dark, funny and sad,
urban, rural, or in the wild,
with just a touch of magic.
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May 12
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1812 – Edward Lear born in the Holloway district of London, in Great Britain. He was a sickly child, with very poor eyesight, and suffered from health problems his entire life. But Lear became quite famous as an English artist, illustrator, musician, author, and poet, but now is mostly remembered for his limericks. In 1846, he published A Book of Nonsense, his first collection of limericks, under the pen name “Derry down Derry.” His health worsened in the cold and damp English winters, so he spent his last years in Italy, where he died of a heart attack at age 75 in January 1888.
There was an Old Man on the Border
by Edward Lear
.
There was an old man on the Border,
Who lived in the utmost disorder;
He danced with the cat, and made tea in his hat,
Which vexed all the folks on the Border.
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1947 – Penelope Shuttle born in Staines-upon-Thames, Middlesex, UK; British poet, novelist, short story writer, and non-fiction writer. She and her partner Peter Redgrove, a poet and scientific journalist, co-authored The Wise Wound: menstruation and everywoman, and its self-help sequel, Alchemy for Women. Shuttle was honored as a distinguished poet with the 2007 Cholmondeley Award. Her poetry collections include: Nostalgia Neurosis; The Orchard Upstairs; Adventures with my Horse; and Sandgrain and Hourglass. A founding member of the Falmouth Poetry Group, she lives in Falmouth, Cornwall, with her partner and their daughter Zoe.
The Conceiving
by Penelope Shuttle
.
Now
you are in the ark of my blood
in the river of my bones
in the woodland of my muscles
in the ligaments of my hair
in the wit of my hands
in the smear of my shadow
in the armada of my brain
under the stars of my skull
in the arms of my womb
Now you are here
You worker in the gold of flesh
.
“The Conceiving” from Unsent: New & Selected Poems 1980-2012, © 2012 by Penelope Shuttle – Bloodaxe Books
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1989 – Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello born in Korea; a transracial adoptee, she was raised by non-Korean parents in Ithaca, NY; American poet, radio show producer, professor, and translator. She learned Korean as a teenager. Cancio-Bello earned a BA in English from Carnegie Mellon University in 2011, and an MFA in creative writing from Florida International University in 2014. Her poetry collection, Hour of the Ox, won the AWP Donald Hall Prize for Poetry. Cofounding editor of Print-Oriented Bastards, Cancio-Bello is a founding member of the Starlings Collective, and has been program coordinator for the Miami Book Fair, and a producer for The Working Poet Radio Show. She lives in Miami.
Bonsai
by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello
.
As a bent man with insubstantial hands
wires the skin of a miniature myrtle,
.
waiting a year to break the bark,
and another to undo the trunk’s mistakes,
.
so my father was neither kind
nor strong in his bruising, only patient.
.
“Bonsai” from Hour of the Ox, © 2016 by Marci Calabretta Cancio-Bello – University of Pittsburgh Press
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May 13
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1885 –Nagata Hideo born in Tokyo, the son of a Shinto priest; Japanese Shōwa period poet, playwright, and scriptwriter. He developed his own style of modern poetry and the influential literary magazine Myōjō (Bright Star) ranked him among the most important poets in modern Japan. He also wrote plays and screenplays for the newer medium of cinema. He died just a few days before his 54th birthday in May 1949.
Autumn Night
by Hideo Nagata
.
Silently illumined In the moonlight
The sorrowful crying Sound of insects
Silently darkening The autumn night
Inviting loneliness Sound of insects
.
— translator not credited
“Autumn Night” was put to music as a song by composer Yamada Kosaku
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1962 – Kathleen Jamie born in Edinburgh and raised in nearby Currie; Scottish poet, essayist, and travel writer. In 2021, she was appointed as Makar (National Poet for Scotland) for a three-year term. Her poetry collections include: Black Spiders; The Queen of Sheba; The Tree House (2004 winner of the Scottish Book of the Year Award and the Forward Poetry Prize); Waterlight; and The Overhaul.
The Tradition
by Kathleen Jamie
.
For years I wandered hill and moor
Half looking for the road
Winding into fairyland
Where that blacksmith kept a forge
.
Who’d heat red hot the dragging links
That bound me to the past,
Then, with one almighty hammer-blow
Unfetter me at last.
.
Older now, I know nor fee
Nor anvil breaks those chains
And the wild ways we think we walk
Just bring us here again.
.
“The Tradition” from The Bonniest Companie, © 2015 by Kathleen Jamie – Picador
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May 14
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1974 – Mary Biddinger born in Fremont California American poet, flash fiction author, and essayist. She has published six collections of poetry, including: Prairie Fever; Saint Monica; Small Enterprise; Partial Genius: Prose Poems; and Department of Elegy. She is a professor in the English department of the University of Akron. As senior editor of the Akron Series in Poetry, she oversees preparation of three collections of poetry each year, published by the University of Akron Press. Biddinger also founded the Barn Owl Review.
Everyone Believes a Nightmare Only Lasts
as Long as the Night
by Mary Biddinger
.
I startled awake and stepped outside, dragging my nightmare like a sled. Our neighborhood’s corner granny was already on her stoop with a radio the size of an envelope, potato peeler in hand. My cheeks smacked by sleep, sloppy remnants of braids in my hair, cheap rayon pajamas in princess pattern. The radio broadcasted a strings concert into the alley, followed by several minutes of applause. Corner granny pointed at a stone bench for me to sit. Then the doorway ate her the way a cartoon cat closes its mouth around a bird. Morning noises curled through the block. In the front room window, corner granny’s mutts gazed out like twin cloistered nuns, drapes around pointy faces. Three workers crossed the alley with Marlboros and metal thermoses the shape of bombs. Corner granny returned with a paper plate of fried bologna, peppers so sour they made my eyebrows twitch, sliced bread soft as a motel coverlet. She pulled a comb from her apron pocket. It resembled an animal bone carved into a set of dull teeth. I drew my nightmare for her in the dirt: cliffs, snowbanks, sky a bottomless pond.
.
“Everyone Believes a Nightmare Only Lasts as Long as the Night” from Partial Genius: Prose Poems, © 2019 by Mary Biddinger – Black Lawrence Press
.
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1976 – C.L. Bledsoe born in Wynne, Arkansas as Cortney Lance Bledsoe, and was raised on a rice and catfish farm in eastern Arkansas; American poet, novelist, short story writer, and blogger. His blog is Not Another TV Dad, and he also cowrites a blog, How to Even, with Michael Gushue. He has published several poetry collections, including: Goodbye to Noise; Anthem; Leap Year; Trashcans in Love; and Having a Baby to Save a Marriage.
Skinning Catfish
by C.L. Bledsoe
.
A mass of writhing life in the stained white basin,
each struggling to die the slowest. My father hung
.
one from a dull hook dangling over the basin
and whittled it down to meat in seconds. Starting
.
with the gray cap of skin, then fins placed where ears
should be; talking about the Crop Report, the bastards
.
in Washington, the lack of rain, while the customers
watched, mostly women, mostly black, mostly poorer
.
than us, somewhere in between Roman spectacle
and grocer. Hear tell they taught a monkey to talk
.
up at the University of Arkansas, but all it wanted
to talk about was the price of bananas. Even the lemon-
.
suckers would laugh eventually; they were there to listen
to him lie just as much as watch his knife dance through flesh.
.
“Skinning Catfish” from Riceland, © 2013 by C. L. Bledsoe – Unbound Content LLC
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May 15
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1887 – Edwin Muir born in Deerness, a parish of Orkney, Scotland; Scottish poet, literary critic, and translator. When he was 14, his family lost their farm, and moved to Glasgow, but his father, two brothers, and his mother died within just a few years, and he had to take a series of dead-end jobs, including working in a factory that turned bones into charcoal. Then in 1919, he married Willa Anderson, a novelist who was his collaborator on translations of Franz Kafka that did much to bring attention to Kafka in English-speaking countries. Muir wrote, “My marriage was the most fortunate event in my life.” They moved to London. The Muirs traveled in Europe from 1921 to 1924. Between 1927 and 1932, Edwin Muir published three novels. In the post-war years, he was Director of the British Council (1946-1949) in Prague and Rome; then Warden of Newbattle Abbey College (1950-1954), a college for working-class men in Midlothian; and Norton Professor of English (1955-1956) at Harvard University. After they returned to the UK, he died at age 71 in 1959 in the village of Swaffham Prior near Newmarket.
The Late Swallow
by Edwin Muir
.
Leave, leave your well-loved nest,
Late swallow, and fly away.
Here is no rest
For hollowing heart and wearying wing.
Your comrades all have flown
To seek their southern paradise
Across the great earth’s downward sloping side,
And you are alone.
Why should you cling
Still to the swiftly ageing narrowing day?
Prepare;
Shake your pinions long untried
That now must bear you there where you would be
Through all the heavens of ice;
Till falling down the homing air
You light and perch upon the radiant tree.
.
“The Late Shallow” from One Foot in Eden, © 1956 by Edwin Muir - Faber
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1949 – Alice Major born in Scotland, but came to Canada at age 8; Canadian poet, young readers novelist, and essayist who grew up in Toronto before working as a weekly newspaper reporter in central British Columbia. She has lived in Edmonton, Alberta, since 1981. Her first book, The Chinese Mirror, a fantasy novel for young readers, appeared in 1988. Major has also written an essay collection Intersecting Sets: A Poet Looks at Science. She is a past-president of both the Writers’ Guild of Alberta and the League of Canadian Poets. Major was the City of Edmonton’s first poet laureate (2005-2007). Her many poetry collections include Time Travels Light; Lattice of the Years; Welcome to the Anthropocene; Memory’s Daughter; and Knife on Snow.
The Moon of Magpies Quarrelling
by Alice Major
.
shimmers in the pale sky of early morning
like a court reporter's screen. It records
the magpies' proceedings - litigious birds
with ermine draped across their glossy shoulders,
their bellies drooped in prosperous curves.
They introduce their offspring to the court's
attention in harsh, good-natured voices.
They teach their fledglings legalese, the value
of bright shiny objects and their importance
in the scheme of branches.
They do not mean to be
so handsome, so much bigger than the other
birds, or to have such clever eyes. It's just
the way things are, they tell
judiciously brightening skies.
.
“The Moon of Magpies Quarrelling” from Tales for an Urban Sky, © 2001 by Alice Major – Broken Jaw Press
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May 16
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1929 – Adrienne Rich born in Baltimore, Maryland; American poet, essayist, and a radical American feminist icon, one of the most widely read and influential poets of the late 20th century. An irony of the 1940s-early 1950s era in which she attended Radcliffe College is that none of her teachers were women. In 1951, Rich’s last year at college, her first collection of poetry, A Change of World, was selected for the Yale Series of Younger Poets Award by W.H. Auden. He also wrote the introduction to the book when it was published. Rich received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study at Oxford for a year in 1952, but after a visit to Florence, she spent the rest of her time exploring Italy. Through the following decades, she struggled with the 1950s version of marriage and motherhood, became a ‘60s anti-war, civil rights, and feminist activist, then ended her marriage, acknowledged her lesbianism, and became a leading voice in the campaigns for sexual equality and gay rights. When she shared the 1974 National Book Award for Poetry with Allen Ginsberg, she insisted on Alice Walker and Audre Lorde, the two other feminist nominees, accepting with her, on behalf of all women “whose voices have gone and still go unheard in a patriarchal world.”
In Those Years
by Adrienne Rich
.
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to
.
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I
.
“In Those Years” from Dark Fields of the Republic, © 1995 by Adrienne Rich – W.W. Norton & Company
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May 17
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1936 – Lars Gustafsson born in Västerås, Sweden; Swedish poet, novelist, and scholar. His first novel was published in 1959, and his first poetry collection the following year. Some of his poetry collections have been published in English translation the U.S, including: The Stillness of the World Before Bach; Elegies and Other Poems; and A Time in Xanadu. Gustafsson was a professor at the University of Texas at Austin from 1983 until 2006, when he retired and returned to Sweden. He died in Stockholm at age 79 in 2016.
Smoothness
by Lars Gustafsson
.
Here the calm smoothness ruled
which could be disturbed by a single oarstroke.
The season slowly cooling.
The sound of a chain being taken off
and laid in the bottom of a rowboat.
And, afraid to disturb this
surface’s rare great calm
I held my oar hovering in the air.
.
“Smoothness” © 1993 by Lars Gustafsson and translated Susan W. Howard
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1961 – Han Dōng born in Nanjing, China, but his parents were “sent down” during the Cultural Revolution, and he went with them at age 8 to a farming village in northern Jiangsu province; Chinese novelist, poet, and short story writer. When the Cultural Revolution ended, he studied philosophy at Shandong University, graduating in 1982, and worked as a teacher. He resigned from teaching in 1992 to concentrate on writing. In 1995, he was awarded the Liu Li'an Poetry Prize. His first novel, Banished!, which draws on his own childhood experiences, was published in 2003, and translated into English by Nicky Harman in 2009. He wrote A Tabby-cat’s Tale and A Phone Call from Dalian: Selected Poems of Han Dong, both translated into English by Nicky Harman, but copies seem hard to find in the U.S. His other poetry collections are Baise de shitou (The white stone) and Baba zai tianshang kan wo (Daddy's watching me in heaven).
Foggy
by Han Dong
.
It’s foggy, or smoky
Perhaps it’s smog
No one’s surprised by that
.
You can look straight into the sun, floating
Like the moon in ashen clouds
No one’s surprised by that
.
This morning is no different from other mornings
Yesterday and tomorrow are pretty much the same
No one’s surprised by that
.
Even on a clear day I can't see roadside trees and flowers clearly
Even if I see them I don’t remember them
Even if I remember them I can’t write about them
.
If I’m not surprised by that, then
No one else’ll be surprised by that
.
Easier to muddle through life than to muddle through one thing
Easier to cope with the world than with one person
More knee-jerk reactions, fewer far-sighted actions
.
I cut through this fog-blanketed city
Cannily avoiding traffic
.
— October 30th, 2009 — © by Han Dong and translated by Nicky Harman
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May 18
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1890 – Zora Cross born as Zora Bernice May Cross in Eagle Farm, Queensland, Australia; Australian poet, best-selling novelist, journalist, and teacher, who sometimes used the pen name Bernice May. She was best known for her serialized novels, poetry collections, and children’s verse. She attended Sydney Teachers’ College, and taught for several years, often acting with a touring theatre company when school was not in session. Her first marriage to a fellow actor failed, but she gave birth to a son. She then became a journalist for Brisbane’s weekly newspaper, The Boomerang, where she did a series of significant interviews with contemporary Australian women authors before becoming a freelance writer. She married writer David McKee Wright in 1923, and they lived in the Blue Mountains village of Glenbrook, and had two daughters. She published six novels, an instruction book on the study of Australian literature, and five poetry collections, including: Songs of Love and Life; The City of Riddle-Me-Ree, a book of children’s verse; and Elegy on an Australian Schoolboy. She died at age 73 in January of 1964.
The Fairies’ Fair
by Zora Cross
.
Who’s that dancing on the moonlight air,
Heel tapping, Toe-heel rapping?
Oberon opening the fairies’ fair
To jig away sorrow on the grave of Care.
Come along, old folk, cold fork, bold folk,
Drop your shears at the midnight stroke.
Elves are crying: "Who’ll come buying
Jugs of Joy from a fairy’s cloak?"
Mab is sitting on a silver shoe,
Bright eyes laughing, Light lips quaffing
Airy bubbles from a cup of dew,
Her bracelets tinkle with delights for you.
Come along tall folk, small folk, all folk,
Race the stream where the fat frogs croak,
Buy a bobbin! There goes Robin
Tying Time to a daisy’s yoke!
.
“The Fairies’ Fair” from The Lilt of Life, by Zora Cross, originally published in 1918
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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