Morning Open Thread: Oh to Walk My Way With Kindness

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday April 15, 2024 · 4:24 AM PDT

2024/04/15 · 04:24

It is easier to oppose evil from the beginning than at the end. — Leonardo da Vinci

___________________________
“When you tear out a man's tongue,
you are not proving him a liar,
you're only telling the world that
you fear what he might say.”
― George R.R. Martin,
A Clash of Kings
___________________________

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.

______________________________________

So grab your cuppa, and join in.

______________________________________

13 Poets born this week,
witnesses to Nature’s beauty,
the ironies of Life, and
the cruelty of endless Wars

______________________________________

April 14
________________________________

1905 – Inger Hagerup born as Inger Johanne Halsør in Bergen, Norway; Norwegian writer, playwright, and considered one of the greatest Norwegian poets of the 20^th century. Her father died when she was five, and the family moved around until they settled in Volda on Norway’s western coast. In 1931, she married Anders Askevold Hagerup, a teacher and children’s book author. She published her first poetry collection in 1939. Both she and her husband participated in resistance activities during the occupation of Norway by Nazi Germany and in 1943 they fled to Sweden. Among the many anti-Nazi poems she wrote, her best-known is “Aust Vågøy” about Nazi retaliation against locals after a successful 1941 British raid in the Lofoten Islands. Some of her lyric poetry has been set to music. Among her many honors, the Swedish Academy awarded her the Dobloug Prize in 1962. Inger Hagerup died at age 79 in February 1985.

Oh, These Violet Hours of the Morning

by Inger Hagerup
^.
Oh, these violet hours of the morning
when time is still a wakeful dream
and happiness runs large in shining swarms
gleaming in currents of the mind.
^.
With earth and sky a single translucent
proof of your own breathing being,
all is good, and nothing is important
bar shiny things you want to do
^.
with this unborn something resting in you
and calmly longing to be used,
wings of baby birds that carry with them
their summer sky and blissful soaring flight
^.

— translated by May-Britt Akerholt

“Oh, These Violet Hours of the Morning” from Strofe med vinden (Stanza with the Wind), H. Aschehoug & Co, Oslo 1958 edition

________________________________

1914 – Hamo Sahyan born in Lor, Armenia; Armenian poet and translator who graduated from Baku Pedagogical Institute in 1939, and joined the Soviet Navy during WWII. He worked on newspapers, and was an editor of Grakan tert, the Writers Union paper. His first poetry collection was published in 1945. He was awarded the State Prize of Armenia for his 1972 book, Sezam, batsvir. Hamo Sahyan died at age 79 in July 1993.

Oh to walk my way

by Hamo Sahyan
^.
Oh to walk my way with kindness,
And not betray my life to a cloud of suspicions―
How I wish that someone would believe me,
How I wish that I could believe someone.
^.
To triumph in an unequal battle,
To embrace with love both small and big,
How I wish that someone would beIieve me,
How I wish that I could believe someone.
^.
Let the silence burst forth with fury,
And the eternal noise die down for good.
How I wish that someone would believe me,
How I wish that I could believe someone.
^.

– translator not credited

“Oh to walk my way” from K’are patarag (Where are you?) by Hamo Sahyan – Nairi, 1999 edition

________________________________

1935 – James Baker Hall born in Lexington, Kentucky; American poet, novelist, photographer, and academic. His mother committed suicide when he was 8 years old, a scandal which was hushed up. Baker Hall finally wrote about its impact on him in his memoir The Missing Body of the Fox, published posthumously by his wife, writer Mary Ann Taylor-Hall in 2022. At age 11, he learned photography from a cousin who was a commercial photographer. Hall graduated from the University of Kentucky with a B.A. in English, then received a Stegner Fellowship at Stanford University in 1960. Hall was a contributing editor for the quarterly photography magazine Aperture, and taught creative writing at the University of Kentucky from 1973 until he became professor emeritus in 2003. He was Poet Laureate of the Commonwealth of Kentucky (2001-2002). He combined his photographs with poems in Pleasure. Baker Hall died at age 74 in June 2009.

Spring

by James Baker Hall
^.
I was all up in the eyes
when the sun fell upon me
shutting me down in the pupils
Light and dark became my sudden work
I’d been there before
among the names
of several things
I took the closest
new firepole of air
and spun downwards
When I reached stability
again the crocuses
had arrived
Were moving
Some one color
Others another

________________________________

1982 – Rachel Swirsky born in San Jose, California into a Jewish family; prolific American speculative fiction and fantasy writer, poet, essayist, editor, and reviewer. She is a graduate of the University of California, Santa Cruz, and the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In 2008, she was the founding editor of the fantasy fiction podcast PodCastle. Her fiction works have been honored with two Nebula Awards, and nominated several times for Hugo Awards. Swirsky’s poetry has appeared in the Canadian quarterly Ideomancer, the speculative fiction magazine Electric Velocipede, and the fantastical poetry quarterly Goblin Fruit. Her collection Through the Drowsly Dark: Short Fiction and Poetry was published in 2010. Swirsky lives in Portland, Oregon.

Luna

by Rachel Swirsky
^.
Alone
with no one to call
no man, no lady, no rabbit
only footprints of men
who won’t return.
^.

______________________________________

April 15
________________________________

1958 – Benjamin Zephaniah born as Benjamin Obadiah Iqbal Zephaniah to a Barbadian father and a Jamaican mother in Birmingham, West Midlands, UK. He was a British spoken word and print poet, novelist, actor, musician, professor of poetry and creative writing, and an anti-racism activist. He began creating dub poetry, a Jamaican form of oral poetry at age 11, and quickly became known for his poetry in the local Afro-Caribbean and Asian communities of the Handsworth district of Birmingham. He was given an old manual typewriter and began to put his poems on paper. He spent time in borstal (youth detention centre) then in his late teens went to prison for burglary. After his release, at age 22 he went to London, and his first book, Pen Rhythm, was published in 1980. He published 13 poetry collections, many of them for children, six novels, five children’s books, and wrote eight plays. He also acted on television, notably as Jeremiah Jesus, in the period crime drama Peaky Blinders. Benjamin Zephaniah was diagnosed with a brain tumour just weeks before he died at age 65 in December 2023.

Who’s Who

by Benjamin Zephaniah

^.
I used to think nurses
Were women,
I used to think police
Were men,
I used to think poets
Were boring,
Until I became one of them.
^.

________________________________

1931 – Tomas Tranströmer born in Stockholm, Sweden ; acclaimed and influential Swedish poet, psychologist, novelist, and translator. He was honored with the 1990 Neustadt International Prize for Literature, and the 2011 Nobel Prize in Literature. Tranströmer suffered a stroke in 1990 that left him partially paralyzed and unable to speak, but continued to write and publish poetry. One of his last volumes of original poems, Den stora gåtan, published in 2004, was translated into English in 2006 as The Great Enigma. Tranströmer died at age 83 in March 2015. Among his 13 collections of poetry are The Half-Finished Heaven, Seeing in the Dark, The Truthbarrier, and The Sorrow Gondola.

After Someone’s Death

by Tomas Tranströmer

^.
Once there was a shock
that left behind a long, pale, shimmering comet’s tail.
It shelters us. It makes the TV images fuzzy.
It settles in cold droplets on the power lines.
^.
You can still shuffle along on skis in the winter sun
through groves where last year’s leaves hang on.
Like pages torn from old telephone books—
all of the names swallowed up by the cold.
^.
It’s still pleasant to feel the heart beating.
But the shadow often seems more real than the body.
The samurai looks insignificant
beside his armor of black dragon scales.

________________________________

1958 – Anne Michaels born in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Canadian poet and novelist who attended the University of Toronto, where she is an adjunct faculty member in the Department of English. Her first poetry collection, The Weight of Oranges, won the 1986 Commonwealth Poetry Prize for the Americas. Her other poetry collections include: Miner’s Pond; Railtracks; Correspondences; and All We Saw. Michaels’ 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces won 12 awards, including the Orange Prize for Fiction, the Guardian Fiction Prize, the Baileys Women’s Prize for Fiction, and the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction.

Women on a Beach

by Anne Michaels
^.
Light chooses white sails, the bellies of gulls.
^.
Far away in a boat, someone wears a red shirt,
a tiny stab in the pale sky.
^.
Your three bodies form a curving shoreline,
pink and brown sweaters, bare legs.
^.
The beach glows grainy under the sun's copper pressure,
air the colour of tangerines.
One of you is sleeping, the wind's finger
on your cheek like a tendril of hair.
^.
Night exhales its long held breath.
Stars puncture through.
^.
At dusk you are a small soft heap, a kind of moss.
In the moonlight, a boulder of women.
^.

______________________________________

April 16
________________________________

1935 – Sarah Kirsch born as Ingrid Kirsch in Prussian Saxony, but changed her name to Sarah in protest of her father’santi-Semitism; prominent German post-WWII poet and author. After she protestedEast Germany’s expulsion of poet and dissident Wolf Biermann in 1976, she was excluded from the Socialist Unity Party of Germany. In 1977 she moved to West Germany, but remained critical of both East and West Germany. She died at age78 in 2013.

Cat Lives

by Sarah Kirsch
^.
Poets love cats of course
The gentle free who cannot be controlled
Who sleep and dream November rain away
On silk chairs or in rags speak back
Without saying a word shake themselves
And get on with their lives
Behind the hunter’s fence
While his possessed neighbours
Are still noting down licence plates
The one being observed in his four walls
Has long left the borders behind
^.

________________________________

1972 – Tracy K. Smith was born in Falmouth, Massachusetts but raised in Northern California; African American poet and member of the Harvard English and African American studies faculties since 2021. She was the U.S. Poet Laureate from 2017 to 2019. Smith won the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book, Life on Mars. Her other books of poetry include The Body’s Question, Duende, and Wade in the Water. Her 2015 memoir, Ordinary Light, was a finalist for the National Book Award in Nonfiction, and was named as one of the best books of the year by The New York Times and The Washington Post.

[The will to see oneself as fragile]

by Tracy K. Smith
^.
The will to see oneself as
fragile, fallible,
liable to fail.
^.
To consider a stranger and
hear, in the mind’s ear,
one’s true voice
^.
insisting: I must change.
Ordinary people do this
Patient urgent work
^.
alone and together
day upon day upon day.
Like my mother, once,
^.
leading her ailing mother
back through the maze
of our suburban scrawl,
^.
past ache, past haze,
past confusion and rage
toward a neat room
^.
where waited prayer,
fear, forgiveness,
grief, grace. This
^.
is a poem about kin
and neighbors and nations
adrift, in error, under siege.
^.
This is a ceasefire poem.
^.

______________________________________

April 17
________________________________

1586 – John Ford born at Bagtor, his family’s estate in Devonshire; notable English playwright, who also wrote poetry, during the reign of Charles I. There are few details of his life known from 1600, when he first arrived in London, to 1606, when he completed his first literary works Fame’s Memorial and Honour Triumphant. In 1601, he was residing at the Middle Temple, a complex of buildings which is one of the Inns of Court, the four associations of the barristers of England and Wales, but it is not known if Ford was studying for the bar, or was a just gentleman boarder. Financial difficulties got him expelled from the Middle Temple between 1606 and 1608, when he was readmitted. From 1620 onward, he concentrated on writing plays, and is best known for his 1633 tragedy ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore, a family drama with brother-sister incest. Ford’s date of death is unknown, but is believed to have been in 1639.

Dawn

by John Ford
^.
Fly hence, shadows, that do keep
Watchful sorrows charm'd in sleep!
Tho' the eyes be overtaken,
Yet the heart doth ever waken
Thoughts chain'd up in busy snares
Of continual woes and cares;
Love and griefs are so exprest
As they rather sigh than rest.
Fly hence, shadows, that do keep
Watchful sorrows charm'd in sleep!.

______________________________________

April 18
________________________________

1925 – Bob Kaufman born as Robert Garnell Kaufman in New Orleans, Louisiana; American Beat poet, jazz performance artist, and satirist. His father’s family were German Jews, and his mother was from a Black Catholic New Orleans family. Kaufman joined the U.S. Merchant Marine at age 18, then in the early 1940s, he briefly studied literature at New York City's New School for Social Research. He moved to San Francisco's North Beach in 1958 and remained there for most of the rest of his life. In 1959, along with poet Allen Ginsberg and others, he was a co-founder and one of the editors of Beatitude poetry magazine. He was primarily a spoken word poet, and many of his poems would have been lost if his second wife Eileen Singe had not gathered up the scraps of paper he often used, or written them down as he worked them out aloud. After the assassination of John F. Kennedy, Kaufman took a Buddhist vow of silence that lasted until the end of the Vietnam War in 1973. He finally broke his silence by reciting his poem "All Those Ships that Never Sailed." After some of his poetry was published in French translation, he was hailed in France as the Black American Rimbaud. He died of emphysema at age 60 in January 1986. His poetry collections include: Solitudes Crowded with Loneliness; The Ancient Rain: Poems 1956–1978; and two published posthumously – Cranial Guitar: Selected Poems, and Collected Poems of Bob Kaufman.

Lorca

by Bob Kaufman
^.
Split ears of morning earth green now,
Love and death twisted in tree arms,
Come love, throw out your nipple
to the teeth of a passing clown.
^.
Spit olive pits at my Lorca,
Give Harlem’s king one spoon,
At four in the never noon.
Scoop out the croaker eyes
of rose flavored Gypsies
Singing García,
In lost Spain’s
Darkened noon.
^.

______________________________________

April 19
________________________________

1931 – Etheridge Knight born in Corinth Mississippi; African-American poet; after his family moved to Paducah, Kentucky, he became a frequent runaway, and though a bright student, he left school at 16, working as a shoe shiner but hanging out in juke joints, and playing pool and poker. He was exposed to “toasts” a form of oral story-telling poetry. He served as a medical technician during the Korean War (1947-1950), where he was seriously wounded and began using morphine. Discharged from the army, he went to Indianapolis, and became a thief and drug dealer to support his opiate addiction. In 1960, he was arrested for armed robbery, and sent to prison. He began to read, started writing for prison publications, then submitted poetry to Negro Digest in 1965. Broadside Press published his first book, Poems from Prison. In 1968, he was released. Knight was briefly married to poet Sonia Sanchez, and was a writer-in-residence at the University of Pittsburgh, but his ongoing drug addiction caused the marriage to fail. In 1977, he received Methadone treatments which finally broke his addiction. He earned a bachelor’s degree in American poetry and criminal justice from Martin Center University in 1990, and taught the University of Pittsburgh and other schools before his death from lung cancer at age 59 in March 1991. His other poetry collections include: Belly Song and Other Poems, which was nominated was nominated for the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize; Born of a Woman; and The Lost Etheridge, edited by Norman Minnick, and published posthumously in 2022.

Haiku

by Etheridge Knight
^.
Making jazz swing in
Seventeen syllables AIN’T
No square poet’s job.
^.

______________________________________

April 20
________________________________

1950 – Michael Davitt born in Cork, in the province of Munster, Ireland; Irish reporter, a Raidió Teilifís Éireann (RTÉ) presenter-producer-director and poet. A key figure in the Irish language poetry movement, he wrote most of his poems in the Irish language. In 1970, he co-founded Innti, an Irish language literary journal. In 1994, he was awarded the Butler Prize for Literature by the Irish American cultural Institute. Some of his dual-language collections include Selected Poems / Rogha Dánta and The Oomph of Quicksilver. He died unexpectedly at age 55 in June 2005.

O My Two Palestinians

by Michael Davitt

(18/9/82, having watched a news report on the massacre of
Palestinians in Beirut )

^.
I pushed open the door
enough to let light from the landing
on them:
^.
blankets kicked off
they lay askew
as they had fallen:
^.
her nightgown tossed above her buttocks
blood on her lace knickers,
from a gap in the back of her head
^.
her chicken brain retched on the pillow,
intestines slithered from his belly
like seaweed off a rock.
^.
liver-soiled sheets,
one raised bloodsmeared hand.
O my two Palestinians rotting in the central heat.

______________________________________

G’Morning/Afternoon/ Evening MOTlies!

______________________________________

Lion Kings - A Fable

Paul Frea

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Saturday April 13, 2024 · 1:17 PM PDT

2024/04/13 · 13:17

no image description available — Lion on the Watch by artist Jean-Léon Gérôme

Lion Kings

At first, in the animal kingdom of the land
Rules were few –
Individuals solved problems on their own,
But as life became busier and more complicated
And interactions between species more quarrelsome,
A convocation of creatures was called
To choose a leader to make difficult decisions
And enact laws.
But who should it be?

A great eagle was convinced to sail the skies
To inspect different species and judge
Which was best to lead, with his eagle eye.

A tiresome task and many hours passed,
The eagle had just decided to return
And suggest the elephant,
When the bird spied a lion crouched on a promontory
Whose golden mane seemed to shine
As if his hair was a crown
In the rays of the slanting sun.

What a powerful and noble looking beast,
The eagle thought and flew back
To advise the other animals
That a lion should lead them.

Now the lion knew that the lioness
Of the pride
Was a better hunter, organizer and leader,
But when your fellow species ask you to lead
How can you refuse?

And thus lions everywhere became
Lords of the Jungles,
Kings of the Forests
Sultans of the Savannas.

There were good kings, but most were not.
How do I know? Look at the results.

Today, there are fewer lions and elephants
And most all other animals of the land,
And there are fewer savannas, forests
And jungles, too.

The moral is:
Beware, take care
And do not elect leaders
Based solely on hair.

__________________________________________

My latest book of poetry is now available on Amazon. Each page features great cat art and an original poem. You can find it here: The Happy Cat and other Illustrated Poems.

Where Are These Young Voters' Aunties?

BlackGrannyRising

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Thursday April 11, 2024 · 2:12 PM PDT

2024/04/11 · 14:12

SELMA, ALABAMA - MARCH 09: Marchers chant during the Black Voters Matter's 57th Selma to Montgomery march on March 09, 2022 in Selma, Alabama. People gathered alongside organizations: Black Voters Matter, Rainbow PUSH Coalition, and the Transformative Justice Network to march the 11-mile original route that the late U.S. Rep. John Lewis and other civil rights leaders marched on March 7, 1965. In 1965, the march began at the Edmund Pettus Bridge and was met with brutal beatings of civil rights marchers at the hands of law enforcement. The march would later become known as "Bloody Sunday". The televised attacks were seen all over the nation, prompting public support for the civil rights activists in Selma and for the voting rights campaign. (Photo by Brandon Bell/Getty Images) — Damn right!!

So, according to this USA TODAY article, some young voters are “willing to see a trump win, if ‘Dems ‘learn-a-lesson’ from it :

Young voters aren't warming up to Biden. They know it means Trump could win again.

Don’t these young voters have “Aunties” who they could turn to for some well-earned, lived experience and some hard-fought-for wisdom?

I’m one of those ‘women of a certain age’, but I still remember being young, idealistic and sometimes foolish too. Wanted everything “my way,” feeling that I was the smartest person in the room and these “old fogeys” needed to get out of the way and let us young, brilliant minds solve the world’s problems.

Fortunately for me (and for other young people at the time, like the late Representative and Civil Rights icon, John Lewis-who listened to A. Phillip Randolph’s advice during that era), we had “Aunties” and “Uncles”, older, wiser, seasoned warriors to disabuse us of our fanciful notions of our own superior grasps of the situation.

In my view, that is what’s needed today. So young people don’t like their choices of Presidential candidates. So they don’t like having to choose between the lesser of the two evils. So they’re “just not into Joe Biden,” (as one young person in the article was quoted as saying).

NEWS FLASH, darlings: I’m not crazy about the choices either (I wanted Elizabeth Warren in 2020 and if I had gooten what I wanted, she’d be running for re-election right now).

I don’t like choosing between the lesser of two either. Welcome to Black peoples’ world, guys. We have had to choose between the lesser of two evils in every Presidential election-except 2008 and 2012. And you know who was running in those two elections. (And also, too, Joe Biden is not evil. He’s a President who has to, as all Presidents have to, deal with a Congress and a Supreme Court. Learn your civics and learn how the three braches of our government work and stop thinking that Joe Biden or any other President has dictatorial power. That’s NOT the form of government we have here-), at least not yet!!

Oh, and you’re “just not into” President Biden? Good Lord, are you marrying the guy?!!?

So allow me to be a surrogate “Auntie” right here. You cannot allow your “feelings” to cloud your logic in this most important election. The future of our Democracy is at stake and the choice is as stark as it gets. Democracy vs fascism. Reproductive rights vs forced birthing and not being able to exercise our rights to make health decisions for ourselves. Working families- friendly policies vs policies that favor the 1%. The death and chaos of the first trump administration vs the professionalism and concrete accomplishments of the first Biden administration. Let’s help President Biden finish the job.

I could go on, but young people (and truth be told, some of y’all older ones too), please don’t make the mistake of letting your idealism override your common sense. Your vote counts! And if you want a chance to make YOUR vision of the world you want to see a reality, a non-vote or a vote for trump and the rethuglicans will cause that vision to not be realized.

Finally, to Black young people talking this nonsense: I have the last original poll tax receipt from 1965 that my late Mother had to pay just in order to vote. That was the LAW-just 60 short years ago. Fannie Lou Hamer, who was beaten almost to death just for registering Mississippians to vote, was my Mom’s contemporary. How DARE y’all even contemplate not voting!! Or even THINK about voting for that orange menace who called our ancestors’ countries “shithole countries?” What the HELL are y’all thinking!!?

Whew! I’d better end this now, because I feel an even worse rant coming on!! Just vote. When we vote, we win.

Morning Open Thread: Everything That Can't Be Owned

officebss for MOT - Morning Open Thread

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday April 08, 2024 · 4:00 AM PDT

2024/04/08 · 04:00

Poetry has never been the language of barriers, it's always been the language of bridges. – Amanda Gorman

___________________________

“Once a government is committed to
the principle of silencing the voice of
opposition, it has only one way to go,
and that is down the path of increasingly
repressive measures, until it becomes
a source of terror to all its citizens
and creates a country where
everyone lives in fear.”

–Harry S. Truman,
33^rd U.S. President

___________________________

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.

______________________________________

So grab your cuppa, and join in.

______________________________________

13 Poets born this week,
some battled just to live,
some fought for their art —
some lost, some triumphed.
_______________________________

April 7
________________________________

1866 – Annie Vivanti Chartres born Anna Emilia Vivanti in London; British-born Italian novelist, short story writer, and poet. Her parents were an Italian Jewish follower of Mazzini in political exile, and a German mother who was also a writer. In 1890, her poetry collection Lirica appeared. In 1892, she married John Smith Chartres, an Anglo-Irish journalist, lawyer, and Sinn Fein member, and she became a supporter of Irish Independence. They lived in England and the U.S., and she wrote in English. Her novel, The Devourers, was published in 1910, followed by Circe in 1912. After WWI, she supported Mussolini, and began writing in Italian, contributing to Italian nationalist newspapers. After her husband’s death in 1927, she made her home in Turin. But in 1941, with anti-British and anti-Semitic feeling running high, she was placed under house arrest while visiting Arezzo, and her books were banned in Italy. Mussolini’s direct intervention freed her, and she was allowed to return to Turin, where she died at age 75 in February 1942.

^{This is a “found Poem” – a passage from a prose work or other source that reads like a poem.}

In the arms of an instrument

by Annie Viviante Chartres
^.
Now she is at rest,
her coffin shut solemnly
like her old violin-case,
hidden by flowers
as magnificent as the variations
she could play;
she was the violin
holding the key of the strings
holding the key to locked doors
that opened as you listened,
beckoned you in
and lifted you up to die in this
single
treasured
moment.

The finder of this poem is Irish poet Jennifer Liston – from the novel Maria Tarnowska, by Annie Viviante Chartres, originally published in 1915

________________________________

1889 – Gabriela Mistral, pen name of Lucila Godoy Alcayaga, who was born in Vicuña, Chile, but grew up in the Andean village of Montegrande; Chilean poet, journalist, diplomat, and teacher. She was a schoolteacher for many years. Her poems were first published in local newspapers. Her first lover committed suicide in 1909, and her second lover married someone else, so her first poetry collections, Sonnets de la muerte (Sonnets on Death – 1914), and Desolación (Desolation – 1922) reflected these losses. Because of a shortage of teachers in Chile, she advanced to teaching secondary school, even though her formal education ended very early, and she was tutored by her sister after that. She became an advocate for greater access to education, and was invited to Mexico in 1922 by its Minister of Education to contribute to a national plan to reform libraries and establish a national education system. She addressed the Pan American Union at a conference in Washington DC in 1924. Beginning in 1932, she was appointed as a consul, serving in many Chilean consulates, including Naples, Madrid, Lisbon, and Los Angeles. Her collection Nubes Blancas (White Clouds) came out in 1934, followed by Tala (Harvesting) in 1938, and Antología: Selección de Gabriela Mistral (Anthology: Selected Poems of Gabriela Mistral) in 1941. In 1945, Mistral became the first Latin American author to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Suffering from diabetes and related heart problems, she traveled very little in her last years, and died of pancreatic cancer at age 67 in January 1957.

If You’ll Just Go To Sleep

by Gabriela Mistral
^.
The blood red rose
I gathered yesterday,
And the fire and cinnamon
Of the carnation,
^.
Bread baked with
Anise seed and honey,
And a fish in a bowl
That makes a glow:
^.
All this is yours,
Baby born of woman,
If you’ll just
Go to sleep.
^.
A rose, I say!
I say a carnation!
Fruit, I say!
And I say honey!

^.
A fish that glitters!
And more, I say –
If you will only
Sleep till day.
^.

_______________________________

April 8
________________________________

1955 – Barbara Kingsolver born in Annapolis, Maryland, but raised in rural Kentucky; American novelist, essayist, and poet; known for The Poisonwood Bible, The Bean Trees, and Pigs in Heaven; awarded a National Humanities Medal in 2000, and the 2010 Orange Prize for Fiction for The Lacuna. Kingsolver began her full-time writing career in the mid-1980s as a science writer for the University of Arizona at Tucson, then branched out into articles and cover stories for the Tucson Weekly. She started publishing fiction after winning a short story contest in a Phoenix newspaper. In the late 1990s Kingsolver, who had considered a career as a pianist, became a founding member of the Rock Bottom Remainders, a rock and roll band made up of writers, including. Amy Tan, Matt Groening, Dave Barry and Stephen King. They played together for one week during the year. She now lives in the Appalachian region of the U.S. Kingsolver published her first book of poetry, Another America, in 1992, followed by How to Fly (In Ten Thousand Easy Lessons) in 2020.

Possession

by Barbara Kingsolver
^.
The things I wish for are:
A color. A forest.
The devil and ice in my mouth.
Everything
that can't be owned.
A leopard, a life, a kiss.
You
Never let me down.
To know that you have wanted me too
is as good as the deed
of trust.
^.

_______________________________

April 9
________________________________

1891 – Lesbia Harford bon as Lesbia Venner Keogh in Brighton, Victoria, Australia; Australian poet, novelist and political activist. Her health was fragile because she was born with defective heart valves. Her family was well-off until her father’s real estate business failed, and he left the family around 1900. Her mother took in boarders, sometimes begging for handouts from Keogh relations. Lesbia Keogh was one of the first women to study law at the University of Melbourne, and graduated LL.B. in 1916. She opposed Australia taking part in WWI, and campaigned against conscription. An agitator for workers’ rights, she supported some jailed union workers, and worked in factories to gain first-hand knowledge of the harsh conditions, joined the Industrial Workers of the World, and became state vice-president of the Federated Clothing and Allied Trades Union. Harford, an advocate for free love, had sexual relationships with both men and women. One of her lovers was Guido Baracchi, a founding member of the Communist Party of Australia, but she never joined the party. In 1920, she married artist Patrick John O'Flaghartie Fingal Harford, a fellow I.W.W. member. Already suffering from her heart condition, she also contracted tuberculosis. Harford wrote poetry in notebooks, and included poems in letters to friends. Her poems were first published in the May 1921 issue of Birth, the Melbourne Literary Club’s journal. The entire issue was devoted to her poetry. Her poems provoked much interest, but she mistrusted publishers, explaining that she was 'in no hurry to be read'. Lesbia Harford died at age 36 in July 1927. Some poems featured in Birth were included posthumously in 1927’s An Australasian Anthology. In 1941, a Harford poetry collection, edited by Nettie Palmer, was published with Commonwealth Literary Fund assistance. No complete collection exists. On her death, her father took custody of her notebooks, but they were lost when his shack was destroyed by fire.

Closing Time: Public Library

by Lesbia Harford
^.
At ten o'clock the great gong sounds its dread
Prelude to splendour. I push back my chair,
And all the people leave their books. We flock,
Still acquiescent, down the marble stair
Into the dark where we can't read. And thought
Swoops down insatiate through the starry air.
^.

“Closing Time: Public Library” from Collected Poems: Lesbia Harford, edited by Oliver Dennis in August 2014, published by UWA Publishing

________________________________

1955 – Joolz Denby born as Julianne Mumford in Colchester, England; British spoken-word artist, poet, novelist and tattoo artist; former punk scene bouncer; she organized Poetry in Motion, a local poetry out loud group, and originally gained attention as a touring punk performance poet. Among her published collections are Emotional Terrorism, The Pride of Lions, and Errors of the Spirit.

Free

by Joolz Denby
^.
The herd of mares broke their hobbles
And bolted through the open field gate
Of the common ground, frayed manes
Whipping the cold and their colts stilting
Leggy on the ice iron turf, the steam of
Their racing blood as they wheeled onto
The main road a frost spume, and the
White bolus of the wild winter moon
Shone in their round, black, rolling eyes
As they wove through the braking slew of
Cars and ran for freedom and the distant moorland;
City horses shaggy as Christmas tinsel
Crazy with the thin, cold air and hope.
^.
© 2020 by Joolz Denby

_______________________________

April 10
________________________________

1937 – Bella Akhmadulina born in Moscow, USSR; Russian New Wave poet, author, short story writer, and translator. She was called the “voice of the epoch”. In 1977, she became an honorary member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. The Russian Academy of Sciences honored her with the 1994 Pushkin Prize. She is known for Samya Moi Stikhi (My Own Verses), Izbrannoye (Selected Verse), and Larets i Kliutch (Casket and Key). She died at age 73 in November 2010 in Peredelkino near Moscow.

Something Else

by Bella Akhmadulina
^.
“What’s happened? For the past year I haven’t been able
to write a poem―no longer seem to know how―
have lost the knack―possess nothing tangible
but a heavy dumbness that fills my mouth.”
^.
You’ll say, “But look, now you have a stanza,
Four lines, a quatrain, part of a whole prepared―”
“That’s not what I’m talking about. It’s second nature
For me to slap lines together, word after word.”
^.
No, that’s not what I’m talking about at all.
I menat, before, when it wasn’t just verse that happened
But something else. What was it? I can’t recall.
^.
“I wonder if it felt a sense of fear
Back when it had my voice boldly misbehaving
And it laughed like laughter on my open lips
And wept like weeping anytime it wanted?”
^.

_______________________________

April 11
________________________________

1722 – Christopher Smart born in Shipbourne, Kent, England; English actor, editor, poet, playwright, and translator. He was a frequent contributor to the popular magazines The Midwife and The Student, and sometimes used the pen names ‘Mrs Mary Midnight’ and ‘Ebenezer Pentweazle’. In 1757, he was locked away at St Luke’s Hospital for Lunatics in London at the instigation of his wife’s stepfather, John Newbery, who was also his publisher, for ‘religious mania’ and a compulsion to pray in public places like the middle of a road. He spent the next six years confined to mental asylums, which greatly damaged his reputation. Arrested for debt in 1770, he was sent to King’s Bench Prison, where he died at age 49 in May 1771. He is now best known for his poems A Song to David and Jubilate Agno.

On a Lady Throwing Snow-Balls at Her Lover

by Christopher Smart
^.
When, wanton fair, the snowy orb you throw,
I feel a fire before unknown in snow.
E'en coldest snow I find has pow'r to warm
My breast, when flung by Julia's lovely arm.
T'elude love's pow'rful arts I strive in vain,
If ice and snow can latent fires contain.
These frolics leave: the force of beauty prove,
With equal passion cool my ardent love.
^.

“On a Lady Throwing Snow-Balls at Her Lover” from The Collected Poems of Christopher Smart – edited by Norman Callan and published in 1949 by Routledge and Kegan Paul LTD

________________________________

1903 – Misuzu Kaneko born as Teru in Nagato on Honshu Island; Japanese children’s poet and songwriter; her widowed mother ran a bookstore and insisted on her daughter continuing her education even though most girls at that time left school after sixth grade. Five of Mizusu’s poems were published in a children’s magazine in 1923, which continued to publish her poems over the next 5 years. Her marriage to a clerk in her mother’s store was a disaster. He was unfaithful, contracted venereal disease which he passed on to her, and he forced her to stop writing. When she finally divorced him, Japanese law automatically gave indisputable custody of their daughter to the father. Misuzu sank into despair. After writing a letter to her former husband begging him to let her mother raise the daughter, she committed suicide just before her 27th birthday in 1930. Ultimately, Misuzu’s mother did raise Misuzu’s daughter. Her work fell into obscurity. In 1966, Setsuo Yazaki, an aspiring poet, found her poem ‘Big Catch’ in an out-of-print book, and spent the next 16 years trying to track down the poet. In 1982, he finally got in touch with Misuzu’s younger brother, who still had the diaries in which she had written her poems. The entire collection was published in a six volume anthology. In 2016, an English-language translation of selected poems, Are You an Echo? The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko, was published.

Wonder

by Misuzu Kaneko
^.
I wonder why
the rain that falls from black clouds
shines like silver.
^.
I wonder why
the silkworm that eats green mulberry leaves
is so white.
^.
I wonder why
the moonflower that no one tends
blooms on its own.
^.
I wonder why
everyone I ask
about these things
laughs and says, “That’s just how it is.”
^.

“Wonder” from Are You an Echo? The Lost Poetry of Misuzu Kaneko – Chin Music Press, 2016 edition

________________________________

1949 – Dorothy Allison born in Greenville, South Carolina; American novelist, poet, short story writer, editor, essayist, and teacher. She is also feminist, a lesbian, and writes about class struggle, sexual abuse, and child abuse. She was sexually abused by her stepfather until she told a family member, who told her mother. Though her mother confronted her husband, she did not divorce him. The abuse continued, and Allison contracted gonorrhea, which wasn’t diagnosed and treated until she was in her 20s, leaving her sterile. After the family moved to Florida, she concentrated on school, and became the first person in her family to graduate from high school, and the first to go to college – on a National Merit scholarship. She went on to earn an MA in urban anthropology in 1981 from the New School for Social Research in New York. She then worked in Tallahassee as the editor of the feminist magazine Amazing Grace, and was a founding member of Herstore Feminist Bookstore, but also worked jobs as a maid, a nanny, a substitute teacher, at a child-care center, and at a rape crisis center. At night, she wrote on yellow legal pads about her life experiences and her lust for women. Her first book of poetry, The Women Who Hate Me, originally published in 1983, was followed in 1988 by her short story collection, Trash. In 1992, her first novel, Bastard Out of Carolina, became a controversial best-seller because of its graphic content. It was a finalist for the 1992 Nation Book Award for fiction, but in 1997, the Maine Supreme Judicial Court affirmed a State Board of Education decision to ban the book in public high schools. In 2007, Allison was honored with the Robert Penn Warren Award for Fiction. Her other work includes the essay collection Skin; the novel Cavedweller; the story Jason Who will be Famous; and the memoir Two or Three Things I Know for Sure.

To The Bone

by Dorothy Allison
^.
That summer I did not go crazy,
spoke instead to my mama who insisted
our people do not go crazy.
We make instead that sudden evening
silence that follows the shotgun blast.
We stand up alone twenty years after
like a scarecrow in a field
pie-eyed, toothless, naming
our enemies and outliving them.
That summer I talked to death
like an old friend, a husky voice
whispering up from my cunt, echoing
around my knees, laughing.
That summer I did not go crazy
but I wore
very close
very close
to the bone.

_______________________________

April 12
________________________________

1907 – Zawgyi (also spelled Zawgee) born as Thein Han in Pyapon, Burma (Myanmar); leading Burmese poet, author, playwright and literary historian. With Theippan Maung Wa, Nwe Soe and Min Thu Wun, he was a leader of the Hkit san (Testing the Times) literary movement in Burma, which searched for new style and content in the years before the WWII. Best remembered for his play Maha hsan gyinthu, an adaptation of Molière’s Le bourgeois gentilhomme, and the poem Beida Lan (The Hyacinth’s Way). Zawgyi died at age 83 in September 1990.

The Way of the Hyacinth

by Zawgyi
^.
Bobbing on the breeze blown waves
Bowing to the tide
Hyacinth rises and falls
^.
Falling but not felled
By flotsam, twigs, leaves
She ducks, bobs and weaves.
^.
Ducks, ducks by the score
Jolting, quacking and more
She spins through—
^.
Spinning, swamped, slimed, sunk
She rises, resolute
Still crowned by petals.

________________________________

1941 – Toi Derricotte born as Toinette Webster in Hamtramck, Michigan, near Detroit; American poet and literary memoirist who taught writing at the University of Pittsburgh. Her first poetry collection, The Empress of the Death House, was published in 1978, and five more collections have been published, including: Natural Birth; Captivity; The Undertaker’s Daughter, which won the Pen/Voelker Award ; and “I”: New and Selected Poems. In 2020, she was honored with the Frost Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Poetry. Her literary memoir, The Black Notebooks, An Interior Journey, is a record of her family’s experiences as one of the first Black families to move into Upper Montclair, New Jersey. In 1996, Derricotte was a co-founder of the Cave Canem Foundation, which supports the professional growth of African-American poets.

The blue nightgown

by Toi Derricotte

Can a simple dress become a coping mechanism?
—NPR August 18, 2020
^.
So many years of misguided self-reflection,
examining every curve in the mirror! Alone,
locked down, I buy online three ice blue
nightgowns I discover I can live in. I glide
through living room, dining room, hall, off the floor
slightly; like the great opera stars of the 20th century,
I’m dressed for singing! My kitchen becomes the stage
of the Met. Cutting the garlic, my hand floats, my
large self floats; I breathe in & out, completely;
the blue nightgown floating around my ankles.
^.

_______________________________

April 13
________________________________

1903 – Lincoln Fitzell born in San Francisco; American poet and short story writer. He graduated from Harvard and UC Berkeley. Fitzell joined the Poetry Guild, and became friends with Robert Penn Warren, but made his living as a longshoreman. In 1938, he won the Shelley Memorial Award given by the Poetry Society of America. His poetry collections include: In Plato’s Garden 1929-1939; Morning Rise; and Selected Poems. Fitzell died at age 55 in September 1958.

Fragment

by Lincoln Fitzell
^.
He nodded stonily a-drowse,
Until the coal grew old and thin,
There seemed no one within the house
But sleep that flickered over him.
^.
Seen, relaxed, an endless drift
Of clothing drooped upon a chair,
Or breath, that barely stooped to lift
Deep Weariness into the air.
^.

________________________________

1939 – Seamus Heaney born in Northern Ireland, but lived much of his life in Dublin; prolific and influential major Irish poet, playwright, and translator, notably of Beowolf. Considered one of the major poets of the 20^th century, Heaney won the 1995 Nobel Prize for Literature. He taught at Harvard University (1985-2006) and served as Oxford Professor of Poetry (1989-1994). He published over 20 poetry collections which include Death of a Naturalist; North; Wintering Out; Seeing Things; Electric Light; and Human Chain. Seamus Heaney died at age 74 in August 2013.

Fosterling

by Seamus Heaney
^.
‘That heavy greenness fostered by water’
(John Montague)
^.
At school I loved one picture’s heavy greenness –
Horizons rigged with windmills’ arms and sails.
The millhouses’ still outlines. Their in-placeness
Still more in place when mirrored in canals.
I can’t remember never having known
The immanent hydraulics of a land
Of glar and glit and floods at dailigone.
My silting hope. My lowlands of the mind.
^.
Heaviness of being. And poetry
Sluggish in the doldrums of what happens.
Me waiting until I was nearly fifty
To credit marvels. Like the tree-clock of tin cans
The tinkers made. So long for air to brighten,
Time to be dazzled and the heart to lighten.
^.

________________________________________________

G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

________________________________________________

Morning Open Thread: Choose Your Bread and Your Company

officebss for MOT - Morning Open Thread

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday April 01, 2024 · 4:09 AM PDT

2024/04/01 · 04:09

______________________________________

“For if Men are to be precluded from
offering their Sentiments on a matter,
which may involve the most serious
and alarming consequences, that
can invite the consideration of
Mankind, reason is of no use to us;
the freedom of Speech may be taken
away, and, dumb and silent we may
be led, like sheep, to the Slaughter.”

— George Washington,
Address to the Officers of the Army,
March 15, 1783

______________________________________

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.

______________________________________

So grab your cuppa, and join in.

_______________________________

13 Poets born this week,
three in March, but
none of them April Fools

_______________________________

March 31
________________________________

1914 – Octavio Paz born near Mexico City into a prominent liberal political family; Mexican poet, writer, and diplomat. He wrote many volumes of poetry, as well as a prolific body of remarkable works of nonfiction on subjects as varied as poetics, literary and art criticism, politics, culture, and Mexican history. Paz was awarded the 1977 Jerusalem Prize, the 1981 Miguel de Cervantes Prize, and the 1990 Nobel Prize in Literature. In the 1960s, he was Mexico’s Ambassador to India, then became Simón Bolívar Professor at Cambridge University (1969-1970). Among his many poetry books is his best known collection Piedra del Sol (Sunstone). He died of cancer at age 84 in 1988.

The Street

by Octavio Paz
^.
Here is a long and silent street.
I walk in blackness and I stumble and fall
and rise, and I walk blind, my feet
trampling the silent stones and the dry leaves.
Someone behind me also tramples, stones, leaves:
if I slow down, he slows;
if I run, he runs I turn : nobody.
^.
Everything dark and doorless,
only my steps aware of me,
I turning and turning among these corners
which lead forever to the street
where nobody waits for, nobody follows me,
where I pursue a man who stumbles
and rises and says when he sees me : nobody.
^.

________________________________

1934 – Kamala Das born as Kamala Madhavikutty in what was the Malabar district in British India. She was an Indian author, short story writer, and columnist who published poetry in English. She was married off at age 15 to a bank official who was blatantly unfaithful. Das escaped into writing, much of it for magazines and newspapers. In 1948, she became a major figure in launching the national liberal and secular political party Lok Seva Party, which promoted social reform. Her autobiography, My Story, was published in 1976. Her books in English include Summer in Calcutta, The Descendants, and Only the Soul Knows How to Sing. She died of pneumonia at age 75 in May 2009.

Words

by Kamala Das
^.
All round me are words, and words and words,
They grow on me like leaves, they never
Seem to stop their slow growing
From within... But I tell my self, words
Are a nuisance, beware of them, they
Can be so many things, a
Chasm where running feet must pause, to
Look, a sea with paralyzing waves,
A blast of burning air or,
A knife most willing to cut your best
Friend's throat... Words are a nuisance, but
They grow on me like leaves on a tree,
They never seem to stop their coming,
From a silence, somewhere deep within ...

“Words” from Kamala Das: Selected Poems, edited by Devinda Kohli – 2014 – India Penguin Modern Classics

________________________________

1936 – Marge Piercy born in Detroit, Michigan; prolific American poet, novelist, playwright, anthologist, editor, and social activist. Her working-class parents were Jewish, and they lived in a predominately black neighborhood, where the Great Depression hit hard. She became the first in her family to go to college, on a scholarship to the University of Michigan, where she joined and became an organizer for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and was active in Anti-Vietnam War/Pro-Peace groups. Piercy is a feminist, a Marxist, and an environmentalist. She has published almost 20 novels and over 20 books of poetry, as well as plays, several volumes of nonfiction, a memoir, and she edited the anthology Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now. Piercy also explores Jewish issues, and was poetry editor of Tikkun Magazine.

The Cats of Greece

by Marge Piercy

^.
The cats of Greece have
eyes grey as the plague.
Their voices are limpid,
all hunger.
As they dodge in the gutters
their bones clack.
Dogs run from them.
In tavernas they sit
at tableside and
watch you eat.
Their moonpale cries
hurl themselves
against your full spoon.
If you touch one gently
it goes crazy.
Its eyes turn up.
It wraps itself around your ankle
and purrs a rusty millenium,
you liar,
you tourist.
^.

_______________________________

April 1
________________________________

1902 – Maria Polydouri born in Kalamata, Greece; Neo-Hellene poet whose first notable poem “O Ponos tis Manas” (“The Pain of the Mother”) was published when she was 14. When she was 20, both her parents died within 40 days of each other, then she fell in love with poet Kostas Karyotakis, but he found out he had syphilis, incurable at the time, and they parted. The poems which are regarded as her most important were written during the last four years of her life while she was suffering from consumption (tuberculosis). Polydouri was devastated when Karyotakis committed suicide in July 1928. She died in a sanatorium at age 28 in April 1930. Her two collections of poetry are The Trills That Die Out, and Echo in Chaos.

Near you (Konta sou)

by Maria Polydouri

^.
The winds are not wild near you.
Near you is peace and light.
In our mind the golden rod
there’s a wrapped meditation.
^.
Near you silence looks like laughter
watering eyes tenderly
and if we ever talk, it rages,
somewhere beside us the unemployed joy.
^.
Near you sadness blooms like a flower
and passes unsuspectingly into life.
Near you all is sweet and everything is like fluff,
like a caress, like a dew, like a breath.
^.

________________________________

1949 – Gil Scott-Heron born in Chicago, Illinois, American jazz and spoken word poet, singer, and musician – the son of an African-American opera singer and a Jamaican father who was the first Black player recruited by the Celtic Football Club in Glasgow, Scotland. Scott-Heron’s collaborative efforts with musician Brian Jackson fused jazz, blues, and soul with lyrics about social and political issues of the time, delivered in both rapping and melisamatic vocal styles. He referred to himself as a "bluesologist." Scott-Heron's music, most notably on the albums Pieces of a Man and Winter in America during the early 1970s, influenced and foreshadowed later African-American music genres, including hip hop and neo soul. His poem "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is considered a major influence on hip hop music. Gil Scott-Heron served two prison terms for cocaine-related charges, and told New York magazine in 2008 that he had contracted HIV. He died at age 62 in May 2011. His poetry collections are So Far, So Good and Now and Then: The Poems of Gil Scott-Heron. His memoir, The Last Holiday, was published in 2012.

I Think I’ll Call It Morning

by Gil Scott-Heron
.
I'm gonna take myself a piece of sunshine
and paint it all over my sky.
Be no rain. Be no rain.
I'm gonna take the song from every bird
and make them sing it just for me.
Be no rain.
And I think I'll call it morning from now on.
Why should I survive on sadness
convince myself I've got to be alone?
Why should I subscribe to this world's
madness
knowing that I've got to live on?
^.
I think I'll call it morning from now on.
I'm gonna take myself a piece of sunshine
and paint it all over my sky.
Be no rain. Be no rain.
I'm gonna take the song from every bird
and make them sing it just for me.
Why should I hang my head?
Why should I let tears fall from my eyes
when I've seen everything that there is to see
and I know that there ain't no sense in crying!
I know that there ain't no sense in crying!
I think I'll call it morning from now on.
^.

Song by Brian Jackson and Gil Scott-Heron – ‘I Think I’ll Call It Morning’ lyrics © Carlin America Inc

_______________________________

April 2
________________________________

1884 – J. C. Squire born in Plymouth in southwest England as John Collings Squire; British writer, editor, literary critic, journalist, poet, historian, and captain of the Invalids, a literary cricket team. Though as a young man, he joined the Social Democratic Federation, and then identified as a “Fabian liberal,” by the time he was in his 40s, he had joined the January Club, a discussion group connected with the British Union of Fascists, but fortunately he was quickly disillusioned. He was knighted in 1933. Squire was known to be a heavy drinker, and Virginia Woolf described him as "more repulsive than words can express, and malignant into the bargain." However, he wielded a lot of power as founder and editor of the London Mercury, a major literary magazine of the interwar period, which promoted many new writers. His copious published works include: Poems and Baudelaire Flowers; Imaginary Speeches And Other Parodies in Prose And Verse; The Three Hills; The Survival of the Fittest; Collected Parodies; and Water-Music: Or a Fortnight of Bliss. J.C. Squire died at age 74 in December 1958.

A Dog’s Death

by J. C. Squire
^.
The loose earth falls in the grave like a peaceful regular breathing;
Too like, for I was deceived a moment by the sound:
It has covered the heap of bracken that the gardener laid above him;
Quiet the spade swings: there we have now his mound.
^.
A patch of fresh earth on the floor of the wood's renewing chamber:
All around is grass and moss and the hyacinth's dark green sprouts:
And oaks are above that were old when his fiftieth sire was a puppy:
And far away in the garden I hear the children's shouts.
^.
Their joy is remote as a dream. It is strange how we buy our sorrow
For the touch of perishing things, idly, with open eyes;
How we give our hearts to brutes that will die in a few seasons,
Nor trouble what we do when we do it; nor would have it otherwise.
^.

“A Dog’s Death” from Poems: Second Series, by J.C. Squire – published by William Heineman Limited in 1922

________________________________

1945 – Anne Waldman born in Millville, New Jersey; American poet, performer, scholar, and cultural/political activist. In 1965 she attended the Berkeley Poetry Conference, where the Outrider voices she encountered inspired her to commit to poetry and she co-founded Angel Hair, a small press that briefly published a magazine by the same name and numerous books into the 1970s. In 1974, Waldman and Allen Ginsberg founded the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at the Naropa Institute in Boulder, Colorado. In 1996, she was honored with the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Award.

To the Censorious Ones

by Anne Waldman

(Jesse Helms & others...)

I'm coming up out of the tomb, Men of War
Just when you thought you had me down, in place, hidden
I'm coming up now
Can you feel the ground rumble under your feet?
It's breaking apart, it's turning over, it's pushing up
It's thrusting into your point of view, your private property
O Men of War, Censorious Ones!
get ready big boys get ready
I'm coming up now
I'm coming up with all that was hidden
Get ready, Big Boys, get ready
I'm coming up with all you wanted buried,
All the hermetic texts with stories in them of hot &
dangerous women
Women with lascivious tongues, sharp eyes & claws
I've been working out, my muscles are strong
I'm pushing up the earth with all you try to censor
All the iconoclasm & bravado you scorn
All the taunts against your banner & salute
I'm coming up from Hell with all you ever suppressed
All the dark fantasies, all the dregs are coming back
I'm leading them back up now
They're going to bark & scoff & rage & bite
I'm opening the box
BOO!

_______________________________

April 3
________________________________

1946 – Lil Milagro Ramírez born Lil Milagro de la Esperanza Ramírez Huezo Córdoba in San Salvador, El Salvador; Salvadorian poet, writer, and a founding member of the Resistencia Nacional. Her poetry was being published when she was 19. She earned a law degree from the University of El Salvador, but was appalled by the corruption throughout the judicial system, and helped start the resistance. By 1971, she had gone completely underground. She was also writing poetry, but only about 20 of her poems which she had sent to her mother survived. Ramírez was captured in 1976, but it was kept secret, so she was listed as one of “the disappeared.” She spent three years in brutal conditions in a clandestine jail. Others imprisoned with her who survived said she was an inspiration even in the harshest of circumstances, developing a form of Morse code so she could communicate with other detainees and reciting poems from memory. She was killed by the Salvadoran National Guard in October 1979 at age 33.

Awakening

by Lil Milagro Ramírez
^.
I was gentle and peaceful,
A flower.
But gentleness isn’t a wall
That hides misery –
And I saw injustice,
And strikes and rebellions
By ordinary people
Exploded before my astonished eyes.
^.
And instead of absurd pity
And sympathetic hypocrisy
My indignation burst forth
And I felt myself united with my sisters
and brothers,
And every strike hurt me,
And every cry struck me
Not only in my head or ears
But in my heart.
My white gentleness fell,
Dead at the feet of hunger,
I undressed myself, weeping at its veils
And new clothing clung to my flesh.
My arms now in the springtime of struggle,
My red-hot blood protesting,
My body olive-green,
An incendiary passion consumes me
… and nevertheless
I keep feeling as before,
A lover of Peace,
I want to fight for it – desperately –
Because from the beginning
I have dreamt of Peace.

“Awakening” by Lil Milagro Ramírez appeared in Volcan: Poems from Central America, edited and translated by Alejando Murgía and Barbara Paschke – City Lights Publishers

________________________________

1954 – Sarah Arvio born – her birthplace was undisclosed; American poet, essayist, and translator. She has lived in Caracas, Mexico City, Paris, Rome, and New York. Arvio works as a translator for the United Nations in New York and Switzerland. She has also taught poetry at Princeton. Her work appears in many journals, magazines, and anthologies. She won the 2003-2004 Rome Prize in Literature from the American Academy of Arts & Letters. Her translation of Poet in Spain, by Federico García Lorca, was published in 2017. Her own poetry collections include: Visits from the Seventh; Sono: Cantos; and Cry Back My Sea.

olivia de havilland

by Sarah Arvio
^.
I tell olivia I would rather die
than let them throw my suitcase overboard
while the boat rocks & the spray splashes up
everyone’s suitcase must go overboard
but my case is more dire more desperate
because I have nothing left in the world
only my suitcase & the drenching deck
she says she will help me I weep & wail
if I lose my suitcase I’ll go overboard
her last name is havilland which means
have a land meaning will you have some land
& land is what I need to do & have
I’m far out to sea on the lurching deck
I need a remedy to suit the case
^.

_______________________________

April 4
________________________________

1661 – Uejima Onitsura born in Itami, Honshu Island, Japan, to a family of brewers. He showed exceptional talent for poetry from an early age. When he was 25, he moved to Osaka, and began to make his mark in haiku and other poetic forms. Though he had few disciples, he nevertheless was a major poet of the Danrin school of haiku, founded by Niahiyama Sōin, which opposed the more formal “bookishness” prevailing in haiku at the time. Danrin translates as ‘talkative forrest’ and adherents preferred plain language, everyday subjects, and the use of humor. Matsuo Bashō would become the most famous poet of this school. Later in life, Onitsura worked as a masseur before becoming a priest. He considered makoto (sincerity) the key to writing poetry. Uejima Onitsura died at age 77 in August 1738.

Believed to be Uejima Onitsura’s first poem – composed at age 8:

^.
come here! come here!
I cry, but the fireflies
just fly away

________________________________

1928 – Maya Angelou born in St. Louis, Missouri; American poet, writer, memoirist, and civil rights activist; known for her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In 2000, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton. In 2010, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her poetry collections include: Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diie; And Still I Rise; and I Shall Not Be Moved. Maya Angelou died after a long illness at age 86 in May 2014.

Refusal

by Maya Angelou
^.
Beloved,
In what other lives or lands
Have I known your lips
Your Hands
Your Laughter brave
Irreverent.
Those sweet excesses that
I do adore.
What surety is there
That we will meet again,
On other worlds some
Future time undated.
I defy my body's haste.
Without the promise
Of one more sweet encounter
I will not deign to die.
^.

_______________________________

April 5
________________________________

1977 – Charles Jenson born in Eagle, Wisconsin; American poet, editor, and podcast host. He earned an MFA from Arizona State University, and published his poetry collection, Little Burning Edens, in 2005. Former director of the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland, he is the founding editor of LOCUSPOINT, an online journal of poetry. His other poetry collections include The Strange Case of Maribel Dixon; Living Things, winner of the Frank O’Hara Chapbook Award; and First Risk. Charles Jensen currently lives in Los Angeles, where he directs the Writers’ Program and hosts the Write Process podcast for UCLA Extension.

Between Division and Future Streets

by Charles Jenson
^.
— for Julie Perkins and Chip Phillips
^.
I move into a one bedroom
overlooking Glassell Park and
^.
the Los Angeles River and
the 5 and the hills of Echo Park
^.
between Division and Future
Streets. Division runs drunk
^.
through the neighborhood,
splitting Mount Washington
^.
into two separate lives. Future
Street rises straight up the face,
^.
turns sharply and then goes down
to just one lane, makes a 90 degree
^.
curve and, from time to time,
gets lost in the spaghetti of streets
^.
only to reappear suddenly on the
far side of the hill, shunning
^.
drivers with its abrupt end
in a one-way alley. The apartment
^.
gets a lot of light, and at night
the yellow glow of porch lamps
^.
and street lamps dot the dark
landscape like a pattern for the
^.
Lite Brite I played with as a child,
plugging in plastic pegs to make
^.
something beautiful appear,
something I could turn on when
^.
the night set in, something to
give comfort when the future
^.
was an unknowable beast beneath
the bed and when sleep divided me
^.
from the world I knew, replaced with
a world I could not fathom.
^.

_______________________________

April 6
________________________________

1921 – Marie Ponsot born in Brooklyn, New York, as Marie Birmingham; American poet, essayist, critic, and translator of Chinese and Russian fairy tales and works by Jean de La Fontaine and Hans Christian Anderson. In 1956, her first poetry collection, True Minds, was released by Lawrence Ferlinghetti as part of the same pocket-size series that featured Allen Ginsberg’s Howl. Then Marie Ponsot set aside her career to raise her seven children. After a divorce, she supported her children as a translator, writer for radio and television, and college professor who mentored young poets, but carved out at least 10 minutes each day to write, scribbling lines of poetry on notebooks, napkins, and the backs of envelopes, which filled her desk drawers. Then 25 years after her first book, she turned these scraps into Admit Impediment, published in 1981. Her other poetry books include: The Green Dark; The Bird Catcher, which won the 1998 National Book Critics Circle Award; and Collected Poems. Among many other awards, she was honored by the Poetry Foundation with the 2013 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, awarded to a U.S. poet whose “lifetime accomplishments warrant extraordinary recognition.” Marie Ponsot suffered a stroke at age 89, and lost all her words, but was determined to recapture them. The first words she got back were the Pater Noster – in Latin, learned by heart as a child. Over the next several months, she was able to recover her skills in both English and French. Marie Ponsot died in July 2019 at age 98.

Among Women

by Marie Ponsot
^.
What women wander?
Not many. All. A few.
Most would, now & then,
& no wonder.
Some, and I’m one,
Wander sitting still.
My small grandmother
Bought from every peddler
Less for the ribbons and lace
Than for their scent
Of sleep where you will,
Walk out when you want, choose
Your bread and your company.
She warned me, “Have nothing to lose.”
She looked fragile but had
High blood, runner’s ankles,
Could endure, endure.
She loved her rooted garden, her
Grand children, her once
Wild once young man.
Women wander
As best they can.
^.

________________________________________________________

G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

________________________________________________________

PWB Peeps Open Thread: Poetry of Strobel

strawbale for PWB Peeps

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday March 29, 2024 · 8:53 PM PDT

2024/03/29 · 20:53

Little Things

Marion Strobel (1895-1967)

Little things I’ll give to you—

Till your fingers learn to press

a chick, cupped in two hands of a person wearing a teal t-shirt with printing.

Gently
On a loveliness;

CuteCatGIFGentlebluecatslowlypettingalittlebird.Awwsocutepets.gif

Little things and new—

Till your fingers learn to hold

Love that’s fragile,
Love that’s old.

_{This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on March 24, 2024, by the Academy of American Poets.}

A gentle reminder of how we do things: 🐱🐶🐦

Do not troll the diary. If you hate pootie diaries, leave now. No harm, no foul.
Please do share pics of your fur kids! If you have health/behavior issues with your pets, feel free to bring it to the community.
Pooties are cats; Woozles are dogs. Birds... are birds! Peeps are people.
Whatever happens in the outer blog STAYS in the outer blog. If you’re having “issues” with another Kossack, keep it “out there.” This is a place to relax and play; please treat it accordingly.

There are some pics we never post: snakes, creepy crawlies, any and all photos that depict or encourage human cruelty toward animals. These are considered “out of bounds” and will not be tolerated. If we alert you to it, please remember that we do have phobic peeps who react strongly to them. If you keep posting banned pics...well then...the Tigress will have to take matters in hand. Or, paw.

Morning Open Thread: Anything Could Be Real … All the Frontiers End With a Question

officebss for MOT - Morning Open Thread

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday March 25, 2024 · 4:08 AM PDT

2024/03/25 · 04:08

“People have only as much liberty as they have the intelligence to want and the courage to take.” ― Emma Goldman

______________________________________

“Are we to have a censor whose imprimatur shall say what
books may be sold, and what we may buy? And who is
thus to dogmatize religious opinions for our citizens?
Whose foot is to be the measure to which ours are all to be
cut or stretched? Is a priest to be our inquisitor, or shall a
layman, simple as ourselves, set up his reason as the rule
of what we are to read, and what we must believe?”

– Thomas Jefferson,
‘Founding Father’ and Third U.S. President

______________________________________

______________________________________

So grab your cuppa, and join in.

_______________________________

Thirteen Poets born this week,
Barrier Breakers, Activists,
Rebels, and Iconoclasts

_______________________________

March 24
________________________________

1914 – Krystyna Krahelska born in Mazurki, Russian Empire (now Belarus); Polish poet, ethnographer, and member of the Home Army (Polish resistance against the Nazis). In 1932, she began studies in geography, history, and ethnography at the University of Warsaw, passing her final exams in May 1939. She was also an artist’s model for Ludwika Nirschowa for a Warsaw Mermaid sculpture. In September 1939, Warsaw was overrun by the Nazi invaders. During the occupation, Krahelska worked at the National Institute of Agricultural Cultivation. She was also a resistance messenger and courier. From 1943 to 1944 she transported weapons, trained in medicine, worked as a nurse and trained girls for medical service, and wrote lyrics for a song which became very popular in the Polish underground, "Hej chłopcy, bagnet na broń" ("Hey Boys, Bayonet on the Gun"). On August 1, 1943, during the Warsaw Uprising, she was rescuing a wounded resistance fighter when she was shot three times in the chest. Surgery was attempted, but she died on the morning of August 2 at age 30. After the war, two collections of her poems and song lyrics were published, "Smutna rzeka" ("Sad River") and "Wiersze: ("Poems").

Sad River

by Krystyna Krahelska
^.
A lonely river, the moon floats on her,
Above her a maple bows its dark palms,
Sleep, little child, nothing’s calling out,
Weapons are sleeping, buried in tombs.
^.
A sad river, the thorned forest fell asleep,
Silver stars fell into silver depths.
Somewhere in the meadow, somewhere in foggy woods,
Dozing fitfully, buried weapons rest
^.
A sad river, the moon floated down her,
On the leaves, a dark night lays its hands
Sleep little child, sleep, soldier son,
Soon we’ll wake the weapons

– translation by Sławomir Borkowski

“Sad River” appeared in the Word Press post “Detroiter in Poland” in May 2016

________________________________

1931 – Maxim Ghilan born in Lille, France, but his family went to Spain in the 1940s. Israeli poet, journalist, editor, and activist; he and his mother moved to Mandatory Palestine in 1944 after his father was “disappeared” by Franco’s fascists. Ghilan joined Lehi, a Zionist paramilitary group trying to drive the British out. After the establishment of Israel, he was imprisoned, and witnessing mistreatment of Arab prisoners led to his speaking out for Arab rights after he was released. In the 1960s, he was deputy editor of Bul, a tabloid which published a story accusing the Mossad of being involved in the disappearance of Moroccan dissent Mehdi Ben Barka. His editor and Ghilan were charged with espionage, and jailed for 135 days. Ghilan moved to Paris in 1969, and in the 1980s was a leader in the International Jewish Peace Union, the first Jewish organization to recognize the Palestine Liberation Organziation (PLO). He returned to Israel after the signing of the Oslo Accords in 1993. Ghilan was awarded the Prime Minister Levi Eshkol Prize for Literary Excellence in 2004, but I could not find any published collections of his poems. There was a 1963 limited edition of his poem “Matach” printed in Hebrew on a cardboard sheet folded into quarters, now considered a rare collectible. He is best known outside of Israel for his non-fiction book, How Israel Lost Its Soul. Ghilan died at age 74 in April 2005.

Leaving

by Maxim Ghilan
^.
She is leaving. She is thieving
away and he has not been told yet
But the cat is awake, the cat watches
the threshold. Bold
songs draw her away
to the shadows.
Her drive is the need to survive.
No star, no lord alive
will keep her from running away.
Yet her old master still holds mighty sway.
She runs to her savior.
^.
Behold
the hammering in her head
Instead of haven, fearful clouds.
Yet isles say yes, grey rocks
stand out from troubled seas of pain.
Look at her nipple sticking out
Under thin cloth. It is plain
to see she's on her way
at the very last moment, on the very last day.
^.
She leaves behind a life and packs
slowly a cheap canvas bag. Her hand
mindlessly strokes the small beast's fur. She courts
her future. Yet her thoughts
are for him, who owned her in days past,
She runs away and leaves. At last.
Yes, but the cat blue-eyed and sad stares at the Mistress
as she steps over her doorstep walking fast.
^.

This English translation of “Leaving” appeared in the Fall 2005 issue of Fidelio

________________________________

1953 – Jo Shapcott born in London; English poet, editor, and lecturer. She won the National Poetry Competition in 1985 and 1991. Her collections include: Electroplating the Baby; Phrase Book; My Life Asleep, which won the 1999 Forward Poetry Prize (Best Collection); Her Book: Poems 1988-1998; and Tender Taxes. She was honored in 2011 with the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. Then, though she continued to publish other work, she stopped publishing collections of her poetry until Of Mutability appeared in 2019.

Era

by Jo Shapcott
^.
The twenty-second day of March two thousand and three
I left home shortly after eight thirty
on foot towards the City. I said goodbye
to the outside of my body: I was going in.
The magpies were squabbling in the park.
The little fountain splashed chemical bubbles
over its lip. Traffic swarmed and swam
round Vauxhall Cross, like crazy fish, with teeth.
^.
And anything could be real in a country
where Red Kites were spreading east and now
we had February swallows. Planes for Heathrow
roared not far enough overhead, shedding
jet trails which pointed over there: those other
places where all the frontiers end with a question.
^.

________________________________

1954 – Ofelia Zepeda born and grew up in the tiny town of Stanfield, in southern Arizona; she earned an MA and a PhD in linguistics from the University of Arizona, and is the author of a grammar of the Tohono O’odham language, A Papago Grammar (1983). Zepeda’s poetry collections include Ocean Power: Poems from the Desert and Jewed’l-hoi/Earth Movements, O’Odham Poems). Zepeda was director of the American Indian Language Development Institute. She edits Sun Tracks, a book series which publishes work by Native American artists and writers, at the University of Arizona Press.

Carrying Our Words

by Ofelia Zepeda
^.
We travel carrying our words.
We arrive at the ocean.
With our words we are able to speak
of the sounds of thunderous waves.
We speak of how majestic it is,
of the ocean power that gifts us songs.
We sing of our respect
and call it our relative.
^.

– translation from O’odham by the poet

_______________________________

March 25
________________________________

1881 – Mary Webb born in Leighton, Shropshire; English novelist and poet; most of her work is set in Shropshire, where she grew up. Best known for her novels Gone to Earth; The Golden Arrow; Precious Bane, which won the 1926 Prix Femina Vie Heureuse; and Armour Wherein He Trusted. Her poetry collections include Poems and the Spring of Joy and Fifty-One Poems. She suffered from Graves disease and died at age 46 in 1927.

The Night Sky

by Mary Webb
^.
The moon, beyond her violet bars,
From towering heights of thunder-cloud,
Sheds calm upon our scarlet wars,
To soothe a world so small, so loud.
And little clouds like feathered spray,
Like rounded waves on summer seas,
Or frosted panes on a winter day,
Float in the dark blue silences.
Within their foam, transparent, white,
Like flashing fish the stars go by
Without a sound across the night.
In quietude and secrecy
The white, soft lightnings feel their way
To the boundless dark and back again,
With less stir than a gnat makes
In its little joy, its little pain.

________________________________

1942 – Ana Blandiana born as Otilia Valeria Coman in Timișoara, Romania; Romanian poet, novelist, essayist, and translator. She took her pen name from Blandiana, a commune near her mother’s home village, Vințu de Jos. Her mother was an accountant, but her father was an orthodox priest and former member of the fascist Iron Guard, who spent years in Communist prisons and died soon after his release. In 1967, she settled in Bucharest, and worked as an editor, mainly for the literary journal Amfiteatru. Then she was a librarian (1875-1977) at the Institute of Fine Arts in Bucharest. In 1984, her poem 'Totul' ('Everything'), which contrasted everyday life in Bucharest with the official view of Romanian life, was published in Amfiteatru. The issue was withdrawn within hours of publication, and the editors were dismissed, but the poem had some underground circulation, and a translation of it appeared in Western media. After the 1989 Romanian Revolution, she campaigned for an open society. Her poetry has appeared in English-language anthologies, and in Five Books, an English translation of poems from her original Romanian collections, and The Hour of Sand: Selected Poems 1969-1989. In 2017, she was honored with the Griffin Trust for Excellence in Poetry’s Lifetime Achievement Award.

As If

by Ana Blandiana
^.
As if the light itself
Were merely a plant, as if the stars
Sent down their thin rays
Like capillary roots
Sucking at me, to extract
Their mysterious nutrient.
Astral blooms flock to the scalpel
Like crows to the plough.
^.
The size of this field of light scares me.
With so many flowers to feed, I’m worn
To the bone, fulfilled and woozy with love.
And whom can I call for assistance?
Will nobody rid me, root, stem and branch,
Of this star-sprouting garden,
Burst the galactic, numinous dykes
And make way for the ocean of darkness?

________________________________

1944 – Jack Mapanje born in Kadango Village, Malawi, to Myanja and Yao parents; Malawian poet, editor, and human rights activist. After getting a BA from the University of Malawi, he earned advanced degrees at universities in the UK before becoming head of the University of Malawi’s Chancellor College English Department. He was arrested in 1987 after his first book of poems, Of Chameleons and Gods, was banned in Malawi. Imprisoned without trial or charge, he was released in 1991 following an international outcry against his treatment. While in prison, he wrote two more poetry collections, The Chattering Wagtails of Mikuyu Prison and Skipping without Ropes. His other works include the memoir And Crocodiles Are Hungry at Night; an anthology he edited, Gathering Seaweed: African Prison Writing; and Beasts of Nalunga, a poetry collection. He lives in exile in the UK with his family, and is currently a visiting professor in the faculty of art at York St John University.

After Celebrating our Asylum Stories at West Yorkshire Playhouse, Leeds

by Jack Mapanje
^.
So, define her separately,
She is not just another
Castaway washed up your
Rough seas like driftwood,
It’s the nameless battles
Your sages burdened on her
People that broke her back;
Define him differently,
He is not another squirrel
Ousted from your poplars,
It’s the endless cyclones,
Earthquakes, volcanoes,
Floods, mud and dust that
Drafted him here; define
Them warmly, how could
Your economic émigré queue
At your job centres day after
Day? If you must define us
Gently, how do you hope
To see the tales we bear
When you refuse to hear
The whispers we share?

_______________________________

March 26
________________________________

1930 – Gregory Corso born in New York City; prolific American ‘Beat’ poet; son of Italian-Americans. His mother abandoned him as an infant, and his father put him in a foster home. By 1941, he was a homeless street child, but kept it a secret so he could continue going to school, running errands for street stall merchants in exchange for food. He was arrested for a series of petty crimes committed to survive until at 18, he was tried as an adult, and sent to Clinton, New York’s toughest prison. In 1951, he met Alan Ginsberg, and became the youngest member of the inner circle of Beat Generation writers. In 1954, he hitchhiked to San Francisco, then spent some time in Paris, but returned to New York in 1958. In the 1960s, he struggled with drugs and alcohol, but continued to write. He died at age 70 in Minneapolis in 2001. He wrote a novel, several plays, and over a dozen poetry collections, including The Vestal Lady and Other Poems; Gasoline; Bomb; The Happy Birthday of Death; and Earth Egg.

Humanity

by Gregory Corso
^.
What simple profundities
What profound simplicities
To sit down among the trees
and breathe with them
in murmur brool and breeze —
^.
And how can I trust them
who pollute the sky
with heavens
the below with hells
^.
Well, humankind,
I’m part of you
and so my son
^.
but neither of us
will believe
your big sad lie
^.

________________________________

1954 – Dorothy Porter born as Dorothy Featherstone Porter in Sydney, Australia; Australian poet best known for her noir private eye novel in verse, The Monkey’s Mask, which was a surprise international hit and revitalized Australian poetry publishing – after being rejected by publishers for years. It won Australia’s National Book Council Turnbull Fox Phillips Poetry Prize (the Banjo) in 1995. In 2004, she was diagnosed with breast cancer, and died in 2008. She was survived by her partner, novelist Andrea Goldsmith, her parents, her two sisters, and her cat, Wystan, named after W. H. Auden.

Silence

by Dorothy Porter

^.
It is rare for me
to write a poem
in absolute silence.
^.
No music.
No throttling heart.
^.
Just faint early birds
and a grey early
sky.
^.
I’ve given up
this serpentine fight.
^.
No one won.
And I’m flooded
with peace and
gratitude
for that.
^.

This poem, handwritten by Dorothy Porter, was found by Andrea Goldsmith on July 27, 2022, in the back of A Book of Luminous Things: An International Anthology, which was edited by Czeslaw Milosz.

_______________________________

March 27
________________________________

1910 – Ai Qing born in Fantianjiang, a village in Zhejiang province, China; Chinese poet using the pen names Linbi, Ke'a, and Ejia. After studying at Hangzhou Xihu Art School, he went to Paris (1929-1932). On his return, he joined the China Left wing Artist Association in Shanghai, and was arrested for opposing the Kuomintang (Chinese Nationalist Party). During his time in prison, Ai Qing wrote his first book Dayanhe (My Nanny). He was released in October 1935. During the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, Ai Qing went to Wuhan to support the war effort. In 1938, he became editor of the Guixi Daily newspaper. In 1942, he joined the Chinese Communist Party. But in 1957, during the Anti-Rightist Movement, he defended author Ding Ling and was exiled to rural farming villages in 1958. During the Cultural Revolution, he cleaned communal toilets. He wasn’t allowed to publish his works Return Song and Ode to Light until he was reinstated in 1979, and became vice-chair of the Chinese Writers Association. In 1985, French president François Mitterrand made him a Commander of the Order of Arts and Letters. Ai Qing died at age 86 in May, 1996.

The Lamp

by Ai Qing
^.
Hope that looked toward the horizon
Now lies in this oil lamp—
For the sky’s farther than hope can reach!
Arrows of light obliterate the distance
into blank nothingness;
then what makes my trembling fingers
gently stroke the brilliant forehead
of this oil lamp?
^.

(written in prison)

_______________________________

March 28
________________________________

1976 – Ada Limón born in Sonoma, California; American poet of Mexican heritage, and 24^th U.S. Poet Laureate. She has published six collections of poetry, including Bright Dead Things, a finalist for the National Book Award for Poetry; The Carrying, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Poetry; and most recently The Hurting Kind. Prior to becoming Poet Laureate, she was the host of American Public Media’s weekday poetry podcast The Slowdown. When Limón isn’t on the road, she lives in Lexington, Kentucky.

The Visitor

by Ada Limón
^.
A neighborhood tuxedo cat’s walking the fence line
and the dogs are going bonkers in the early morning.
The louder they bark, the more their vexation grows,
the less the cat seems to care. She’s behind my raised
beds now, no doubt looking for the family of field mice
I’ve been leaving be because, why not? The cat’s
dressed up for this occasion of trespass, black tie
attire for the canine taunting, but the whole clamor
is making me uneasy. This might be what growing
older is. My problem: I see all the angles of what
could go wrong so I never know what side to be on.
Save the mice, shoo the cat, quiet the dogs? Let
the cat have at it? Let the dogs have at it? Instead,
I do what I do best: nothing. I watch the cat
leap into the drainage ditch, dew-wet fur against
the day lilies, and disappear. The dogs go quiet
again, and the mice are safe in their caves, and
I’m here waiting for something to happen to me.
^.

_______________________________

March 29
________________________________

1978 – J. Michael Martinez born in Greeley, Colorado; American poet and editor; his first poetry collection, Heredities, was honored with a Walt Whiteman Award from the Academy of American Poets. His other poetry collections are In the Garden of the Bridehouse and Museum of the Americas. He also wrote the libretto for The Autumn Orchard, an opera composed by Daniel Kellogg. In 2016, Martinez was a coeditor and cofounder of Breach Press.

Heredities (1) Etymology

by J. Michael Martinez
^.
When she was seven, my grandmother suffered from fever and swollen glands. The doctors believed her tonsils were inflamed, that she needed surgery. Instead, she went to a curandera. The curandera divined that a jealous relative had cast a curse on her and, now, her language of kindness was bound to her throat, the unspoken swelling her glands.
^.
As a child my grandmother spoke to santitos with a voice like a chestnut: ruddy and warm, seeds dropping from her mouth. The santitos would take her words into themselves, her voice growing within them like grapevines.
^.
During the tonsillitis, when the words no longer fell like seeds from her lips, the santito's vineyards of accent and voice grew vapid, dry as a parched mouth. They went to her tongue and asked why silence imprisoned the words of the child, why lumps were present under her chin, why tears drew channels down her cheeks.
^.
I asked my grandmother how her tongue replied. After touching my cheek, she told me she had a dream that night: She was within her lungs and she rose like breath through the moist of her throat. She remembered her tonsils swinging before her like fleshy apples, then a hand taking them into a fist, harvesting their sound. She told me her throat opened in two spots like insect eyes and the names of her children came flying through her wounds like peacocks.
^.
Patting my thigh, she said, "That is why the name of your mother is Maria, because she is a prayer, a song of praise to the Holy Mother." She told me this, then showed me two scars on her throat—tiny scars, like two eyelids stitched closed.
^.

_______________________________

March 30
________________________________

1886 – Frances Crofts Darwin Cornford was brought up in Cambridge, England; English poet, granddaughter of Charles Darwin, and daughter of botanist Francis Darwin and Newnham College English literature lecturer Ellen Crofts Darwin, who had to resign her post when she married. Frances was educated privately, and called “FCD” by her family to avoid confusion with her father, and later with her husband, who was another Francis who was also a poet. They had five children. Frances published the first of her poetry collections, The Holtbury Idyll, at age 22 as “F.C.D.” Her other books are: Poems; Spring Morning; Autumn Midnight; Different Days; and Mountains and Molehills. Frances Darwin Cornford died of heart failure at age 74 in August 1960.

The Guitarist Tunes Up

by Frances Darwin Cornford
^.
With what attentive courtesy he bent
Over his instrument;
Not as a lordly conquerer who could
Command both wire and wood,
But as a man with a loved woman might,
Inquiring with delight
What slight essential things she had to say
Before they started, he and she, to play.
^.

___________________________________________

G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

___________________________________________

^{Illustration by Max Guther}

This Particular Instant's Healing Music

gmoke

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday March 25, 2024 · 3:16 AM PDT

2024/03/25 · 03:16

The Late Show with Stephen Colbert is doing some deep healing through music:

Andre Benjamin
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9X_UTqWYHM

Paul Simon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kj9gCGl53xs

Two examples of expanding our musical horizons, at least on TV.

Both musicians, according to what they’ve said publicly, were impelled to produce this music, these musics outside of their previous practices. This isn’t the music they wanted to make, in terms of money and prestige and accomplishment, or even in terms of their usual styles. This is the music they had to make to follow their paths wherever they lead. It just may be that Something is trying to tell us Something about these times we are living through.

Extended interview with Paul Simon
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vmP3rzBeXkw

Interview with Andre Benjamin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zV9K_M1qKW

Poll

16 votes Show Results

More such musics?

16 votes Vote Now!

More such musics?

yes

12 votes

2 votes

not yes

0 votes

not no

0 votes

neither yes nor no

1 vote

both yes and no

1 vote

don't understand the question?

0 votes

none of the above

0 votes

Morning Open Thread: The World of the Knowing

officebss for MOT - Morning Open Thread

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday March 18, 2024 · 4:26 AM PDT

2024/03/18 · 04:26

______________________________________

“Few people have to watch their country die. I have had that
dubious privilege, and I can tell you that it comes not as a
rebel shout but as a sly whisper. The cracks creep in, insidious
as anything I've ever seen. It can start as rumblings about an
unreliable press and rumors about political enemies that will
threaten your family, your children. It can deepen with each
disdainful remark about science and art and literature in a pub
on a Friday night. It comes cloaked in patriotism and love
of country, and uses that as armor against any criticism.”
― Brianna Labuskes, from The Librarian of Burned Books

______________________________________

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.

______________________________________

So grab your cuppa, and join in.

_______________________________

Thirteen Poets born this week,
covering the unexpected trials
of life, the ordinary joys of a
bright day, and everything
in between

_______________________________
March 17 🍀

There are no strangers here;
Only friends you haven't yet met.
— William Butler Yeats

________________________________

1925 – Ennis Rees born as Ennis Samuel Rees, Jr. in Newport News, Virginia; American poet, academic, and translator. He earned a BA from the College of William & Mary, and an MA and PhD from Harward. He taught at Duke University (1949-1952), Princeton (1952-1954) and then at the University of South Carolina (1954-1988). Rees became South Carolina’s third Poet Laureate in 1984. Most of his poetry was written for children, including: Riddles, Riddles Everywhere; Tiny Tall Tales; Gillygaloos and Gollywhoppers; and Fast Freddie Frog and other tongue-twister rhymes. He also published poetry collections for children which were retellings of fables by Aesop, Brer Rabbit stories, and the Paul Bunyan legend. His poetry for adults was published in Selected Poems. In the 1960s, he translated The Illiad and The Odyssey by Homer. Ennis Rees died at age 84 in March 2009.

The Cat and the Fox

by Ennis Rees
^.
A fox was bragging one day to a cat
About how smart he was and all that,
Especially at getting out of a fix.
He said, "Why I know a thousand tricks
For escaping the dogs, while you, poor kitty,
Know only one, and that's a pity.
A very smart fox with the dogs - that's me,
But all you can do is climb a tree."
Just then came the hounds with barking and yelping,
And the poor cat truly needed no helping
To climb a tree all the way to the top,
And none of the dogs decided to stop
As after the fox they swiftly ran.
But though he knew a thousand tricks,
None of them got him out of that fix.
They caught the smart fellow where none was his friend,
And that, I'm afraid, of him was the end.
But the cat's one simple tree-climbing plan
Worked as well as any plan can.
^.

_______________________________

March 18
________________________________

1893 – Wilfred Owen born in Shropshire, near the Welsh border; English poet and WWI soldier. He suffered shell shock after being caught in the blast of a trench mortar shell, lying unconscious on an embankment among the grisly remains of a fellow officer for days. He was sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh for treatment. While there, Owen met poet Siegfried Sassoon, who became his friend and mentor as a poet. After further recuperation on light duty in North Yorkshire, he returned to active service in France in July, 1918, and was awarded the Military Cross for his bravery and leadership during an attack in October. He was killed in action at age 25, on November 4, 1918, just one week before the Armistice. Only five of his poems were published before his death. The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Siegfried Sassoon and Edith Sitwell, contained 23 poems, but Edmund Blunden edited an edition in 1931 with 19 more poems. In 1963, The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by C. Day Lewis, contained 80 poems.

Happiness

by Wilfred Owen
^.
Ever again to breathe pure happiness,
So happy that we gave away our toy?
We smiled at nothings, needing no caress?
Have we not laughed too often since with Joy?
Have we not stolen too strange and sorrowful wrongs
For her hands' pardoning? The sun may cleanse,
And time, and starlight. Life will sing great songs,
And gods will show us pleasures more than men's.
^.
Yet heaven looks smaller than the old doll's-home,
No nestling place is left in bluebell bloom,
And the wide arms of trees have lost their scope.
The former happiness is unreturning:
Boys' griefs are not so grievous as our yearning,
Boys have no sadness sadder than our hope.

“Happiness” from The Collected Poems of Wilfred Owen – New Directions 1965 edition

________________________________

1921 – Claire Pratt born as Mildred Claire Pratt in Toronto, Ontario, Canada; Canadian artist, printmaker, poet, and editor. She contracted polio when she was four years old, and later developed osteomyelitis, an inflammatory bone disease. Pratt earned degrees in English and Philosophy from Victoria College, University of Toronto, then studied international relations at Columbia University, and art at the Boston Museum of Fine Art. She was an editor for Macmillan Canada, the University of Toronto Press, then a senior editor at McClelland & Stewart (1956-1965), but retired because of her increasing health problems. As an artist, she made woodcuts, and her interest in Japanese graphics led to her writing haiku, which she often illustrated with her artwork. Claire Pratt died at age 74 in 1995.

Kitchen all aglow

by Claire Pratt

^.Kitchen all aglow
not yet, not yet—frosty stars,
angels in the snow.

_______________________________

March 19
________________________________

1868 – Gretchen Osgood Warren born into the prominent Osgood family of Boston; American singer and poet (she was also listed as an actress, but I could find no evidence of her performing). She had perfect pitch as a singer, and was a writer from an early age. She studied at Oxford, where women were allowed to attend lectures and sit for examinations, but were not awarded degrees until 1920. She married Frederick Fiske Warren, a successful manufacturer and patron of the arts, in 1891. A portrait of Mrs. Fiske Warren with her daughter Rachel was painted by John Singer Sargent in 1903. Her poems appeared Poetry magazine, the quarterly magazine Poet Lore, and The New Poetry anthology. She died at age 93 in September 1961.

The Wild Bird

by Gretchen Osgood Warren
^.
Like silence of a starlit sky,
Like wild birds rising into night,
Such was her dying, such her flight
Into eternity.
But I, who dwell with memory,
Dream in my grief that she may soar
Too high, and needing love no more
Come nevermore to me.

“The Wild Bird” by Gretchen Osgood Warren from The New Poetry: An Anthology, edited by Harriet Monroe – 1917 edition

________________________________

1809 – Gogol born Nikolai Vasilyevich Gogol-Ianovskii in the village of Sorochyntsi, Poltava Governorate, Russian Empire, now Ukraine, into a “petty gentry” Ukrainian family; Ukrainian-Russian short story writer, playwright, novelist, poet, and essayist. The family spoke Ukrainian, Polish, and Russian. His father was an amateur poet and playwright who wrote in both Ukrainian and Russian, whose plays were performed in a home theatre. Gogol attended a school of higher art from 1820 to 1828. His father died in 1824, when Gogol was 15 years old. Gogol was painfully self-conscious and secretive. His fellow students dubbed him a “mysterious dwarf.” When he left school, he went to Saint Petersburg, where he simplified his name to Gogol. He published short stories in Russian, but often used Ukrainian idioms when the stories were about Ukraine. In 1936, his satiric play, The Government Inspector, was a success after Tsar Nicholas I said that “there is nothing sinister in the comedy, as it is only a cheerful mockery of bad provincial officials.” Gogol traveled (1836-1837) through Germany and Switzerland, then spent time in Paris, before settling in Rome until 1848, where he wrote Dead Souls, The Portrait, Marriage, and his most famous short story, “The Overcoat.” After a pilgrimage to Jerusalem, he returned to Russia. By February 1852, he fell into a deep depression, burned some of his manuscripts on February 24, then took to his bed, refusing all food, and died at age 42, just nine days later. His play The Gamblers premiered after his death.

Stop Loving You

by Nikolai Gogol
^.
You will hurt me
and I will hurt you,
this way our life will continue.
When everything will be forgotten
I will stop loving you.
^.
The sun will still rise in the east
and the people will admire its view.
The day when the winds will change their path,
I will stop loving you.
^.
With all these stupid fights
between us two.
When the heart will not accept what’s true,
I will stop loving you.
^.
The rainbow in a sunny sky.
Oh! It’s beautiful ‘cause of its hue.
The day when I will wake up with a teary eye,
Yes, I will stop loving you.
^.

― translator not credited

________________________________

1894 – Lilith Lorraine born as Mary Maude Dunn in Corpus Christi, Texas; American science fiction and pulp fiction author, poet, journalist, editor, and teacher. The daughter of a Texas Ranger, she earned a teaching certificate at age 16, and taught in a rural Texas school. Her feminist socialist utopia novelette, The Brain of the Planet, was published as a chapbook in 1929. Her science fiction stories appeared in magazines like Astounding Stories, but she often wrote under male pen-names, so the list of her stories is incomplete. Lorraine was an editor for poetry magazines and fan zines from the 1930s through the 1950s. She wrote a textbook for writers, Character against Chaos, and Wine of Wonder, published in 1952, which may have been the first science fiction poetry collection. She died at age 73 in November 1967.

If These Endure

by Lilith Lorraine
^.
If these endure when all the old world crashes,
If these stars shine above the last gun's roll:
Strength to raise brave new towers on sacred ashes,
Courage to build new mansions for the soul;
Faith to point loftier spires to kindlier heavens,
Wisdom to soar above the fear of fear;
Beauty to feed the earth with nobler leavens,
And rear the Holy City now and here;
Peace that shall yield no more to greed's dictation,
Freedom from want and loneliness and pain,
Love like a white flag over every nation —
If these endure we have not fought in vain.
^.

________________________________

1947 – Kate Braid born in Calgary, Alberta, Canada; Canadian poet, non-fiction writer, and construction worker, who grew up in Montreal, Quebec, and graduated from Mount Allison University. In 1977, Braid got her first job in construction as a labourer on an island off the coast of British Columbia. She hadn’t planned to be a construction worker, but was desperate to stay on the island and had run out of money. Turning Left to the Ladies, a mix of prose and poetry, is about the 15 years she worked as a labourer, then apprentice and journey carpenter. She was the first woman member of the Vancouver union local of the Carpenters, and the first full-time woman teaching trades at the BC Institute of Technology. In 1992, she won the Pat Lowther Memorial Award, presented by the League of Canadian Poets, for her collection, Covering Rough Ground. Her other poetry books include: To This Cedar Fountain; Small Songs; and A Woman’s Fingerprint. She has also written poetry about an imagined friendship between artists Georgia O’Keefe and Emily Carr, and a collection of short stories, The Fish Come in Dancing.

Spy

by Kate Braid
^.
I parachute into man’s country,
hoist my beer in the bar as if native.
^.
Cool, I talk shop, stand as they stand,
not quite sure
of the cocky swing of hips,
lift of the glass in a loud bass,
confidence laughing.
^.
This is the world of the knowing.
It’s only a small slip into a minor key
when I turn left to go to the Ladies.
^.

________________________________

1955 – John Burnside born in Dunfermline, Fife, Scotland; Scottish poet, writer, and memoirist. Burnside is one of only three poets (with Ted Hughes and Sean O’Brien) to win both the T.S. Eliot Prize and the Forward Poetry Prize for the same book – his collection Black Cat Bone. He studied English and European thought and literature at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology before working as a computer software engineer. He has been a freelance writer since 1996, and is now a Professor of creative writing at St. Andrews University. His first poetry collection, The Hoop (1988), won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. He has since published over two dozen poetry collections, including Feast Days (1992), winner of the Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize, and The Asylum Dance (2000), which won the Whitbread Poetry Award. He has also written several novels, two short stories collections, several biographies, and Aurochs and Auks: Essays on morality and extinction. In 2023, he was honored with the David Cohen Prize for his body of work.

Wild

by John Burnside
^.
Today,
on our journey home,
we saw
^.
a buzzard
making a kill
on the roadside verge.
^.
It glided across
our windscreen
and hunkered down
^.
on something –
we couldn’t see
what it was – as the wings
^.
folded around
what Lucas called
‘the prey’.
^.
He wanted to know
if buzzards took children,
or cats;
^.
then,
as we slowed to look,
he chose to admire
^.
the plumage
and the fierce light
of its eye.
^.

_______________________________

March 20
________________________________

1899 – Muriel Stuart born on Norbury, South London, UK, as Muriel Stuart Irwin, daughter of a Scottish barrister. She wrote poetry about WWII, sexual politics, and gardening, published in five collections. Her first marriage was very brief. In 1922, she married publisher Alfred William Board. She gave up writing poetry in the 1930s, after the births of their son and daughter, to write books about gardening, including the best-seller Fool’s Garden, as well as Gardener's Choice and Gardener's Nightcap. She died at age 82 in December 1967.

The Seed-Shop

by Muriel Stuart
^.
Here in a quiet and dusty room they lie,
Faded as crumbled stone or shifting sand,
Forlorn as ashes, shrivelled, scentless, dry -
Meadows and gardens running through my hand.
^.
In this brown husk a dale of hawthorn dreams;
A cedar in this narrow cell is thrust
That will drink deeply of a century's streams;
These lilies shall make summer on my dust.
^.
Here in their safe and simple house of death,
Sealed in their shells, a million roses leap;
Here I can blow a garden with my breath,
And in my hand a forest lies asleep.
^.

_______________________________

March 21
________________________________

1841 – Mathilde Blind born as Mathilda Cohen in Mannheim, Germany; English poet, fiction writer, biographer, essayist, critic, and pioneering feminist ‘New Woman’ author. Her mother and stepfather moved the family to London in 1852, and Mathilda changed her first name to Mathilde, and took her stepfather’s surname. Blind's political views were shaped by the foreign refugees who frequented her stepfather's house, including Giuseppe Mazzini, Karl Marx, and Louis Blanc. She attended the Ladies' Institute, St John's Wood, but was expelled for her radical thinking, and went to Switzerland. Women were barred from attending lectures at the University of Zürich, but she took private lessons from scholar Kuno Fischer, author of History of Modern Philosophy. She wrote sexually subversive poems, an erudite essay on Icelandic poetry, and a short story exploring the corrosive effects of class divisions on human relations. In 1886, she lectured on "Shelley's View of Nature Contrasted With Darwin's."Her poetry collections include Poems (1867 – originally published under the pen name Claude Lake); The Prophecy of St. Oran and Other Poems (1881); The Ascent of Man (1889); and Songs and Sonnets (1893). Mathilde Blind died at age 55 in November 1896, bequeathing to Newnham College, Cambridge, the greater part of her property.

I Planted a Rose Tree

by Mathilde Blind
^.
I planted a rose tree in my garden,
In early days when the year was young;
I thought it would bear me roses, roses,
While nights were dewy and days were long.
^.
It bore me once, and a white rose only--
A lovely rose with petals of light;
Like the moon in heaven, supreme and lonely;
And the lightning struck it one summer night.
^.

“I Planted a Rose Tree” from Poetical Works of Mathilde Blind, edited by Arthur Symons – 1900

_______________________________

March 22
________________________________

1926 – Alastair Reid born in Whithorn in Galloway, Scotland, the son of a clergyman; Scottish poet, scholar, children’s author, and translator of South American literature, including poetry by Pablo Neruda. During WWII, he served in the Royal Navy decoding ciphers, then studied Classics at the University of St Andrews and briefly taught at Sarah Lawrence College in Bronxville, New York. In the mid-1950s he travelled to Mallorca, and worked for a time as secretary to author Robert Graves. In the 1980s and 90s, he spent much of his time in the Dominican Republic. Reid published over 40 books of translation, travel writing, and poetry. His poetry collections include: Weathering; Legacies; and Barefoot: The Collected Poems. He died at age 88 in September 2014 of complications from pneumonia.

Scotland

by Alastair Reid
^.
It was a day peculiar to this piece of the planet,
when larks rose on long thin strings of singing
and the air shifted with the shimmer of actual angels.
Greenness entered the body. The grasses
shivered with presences, and sunlight
stayed like a halo on hair and heather and hills.
Walking into town, I saw, in a radiant raincoat,
the woman from the fish-shop. ‘What a day it is!’
cried I, like a sunstruck madman.
And what did she have to say for it?
Her brow grew bleak, her ancestors raged in their graves
as she spoke with their ancient misery:
‘We’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it, we’ll pay for it!’

________________________________

1935 – Kathleen Fraser born in Tulsa, Oklahoma; American poet, essayist, teacher, editor, and champion of women writers. She graduated from Occidental College in Southern California, then taught creative writing at San Francisco State University (1972-1992), where she also directed The Poetry Center and founded the American Poetry Archives. Fraser was co-founder and co-editor (1983-1991), with Beverly Dahlen and Frances Jaffer, of the feminist poetics newsletter (HOW)ever. Her books include: New Shoes; When New Time Folds Up; Movable Tyype; and Collected Poems (published posthumously). Kathleen Fraser died at age 83 in February 2019.

Poem Wondering If I’m Pregnant

by Kathleen Fraser
^.
Is it you? Are you there,
thief I can’t see,
drinking energy
leaving me gasping
for oxygen.
New mystery floating up my left arm,
clinging to the curtain.
Uncontrollable.
Eyes on stalks, full of pollen,
stem juice, petals making ready to unfold,
to be set in a white window,
or an empty courtyard.
Fingers fresh. And cranium,
a clean architecture
with
doors that swing open …
is it you small face?
Is it you?

_______________________________

March 23
________________________________

1965 – Gary Whitehead born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island; American poet and teacher. He teaches English at Tenafly High School in New Jersey. Whitehead has been a featured poet at many poetry festivals, and has won awards and fellowships ranging from the Anne Halley Poetry Prize to a New York Foundation Fellowship in Poetry, and the Princeton University Distinguished Secondary School Teaching Award. He is also a constructor of crossword puzzles. His four published poetry collections are: The Velocity of Dust; Measuring Cubits while the Thunder Claps; A Glossary of Chickens; and Strange What Rises.

Pretend It Was Just the Wind

by Gary Whitehead
^.
Water crept into our furnished home,
the one in the flood zone but zoned
anyway, and anyway our home,
^.
though we spent so little time there.
And now that we’ve moved on,
I think of the outlets sparking out
^.
and my guitar rising against the wall
until it fell and became a boat
that drifted from room to room,
^.
knocking into legs of tables and chairs.
I think of the books the water took
from the shelves and opened
^.
at its leisure as it snaked and rose,
the rain still rapping at the roof
and at the swollen windows.
^.
And of all the items of our life—
our braided rugs, the dog’s bed
and bowls, the sofa with its pillows,
^.
the lamps, the photos, the figurines—
all of them out of their element and into another,
which held them and rocked them gently.

“Pretend It Was Just the Wind,” © 2019 by Gary Whitehead, was
published in The New Yorker, Jan. 7, 2019

____________________________________________

G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

____________________________________________

_{Image: ‘The Cat’ by J. J. Grandville}

Occult and Psychical Sciences: Decoding "Green Grow the Rushes"🎵🕊🌾🌱

Clio2 for Occult and Psychical Sciences on DK

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Friday March 15, 2024 · 4:18 PM PDT

2024/03/15 · 16:18

Juncus effusus effusus, or "soft rush," is one species native to England. Formerly "rushes" included wetland plants that botanists today place in other categories such as reeds, sedges, and sweet flag (calamus). (Photo: Wikipedia, color-edited by Clio2.)

The vernal equinox is nearly here! March 20 (next Wednesday). What delight most of us feel as dark and light dance once more into balance. And green growth springs forth.

vernal (adj.) "pertaining to spring," 1530s, from Late Latin vernalis "of the spring," from vernus "of spring," from Latin ver "the spring, spring-time"

So let's get in a springish mood?

"Primavera" (Spring), by Sandro Botticelli (detail), about 1480

"Spring, the Sweet Spring"

Words by Shakespeare's contemporary Thomas Nashe (1567-about 1601), setting by Latvian (now English-based) composer Ēriks Ešenvalds (1977-), unusual performance by all-soprano Swedish choral group Carolinae Röster.

4:39

YouTube Video

Spring, the sweet spring, is the year’s pleasant king,

Then blooms each thing, then maids dance in a ring,

Cold doth not sting, the pretty birds do sing:

Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

The palm and may make country houses gay,

Lambs frisk and play, the shepherds pipe all day,

And we hear aye birds tune this merry lay:

Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to-witta-woo!

The fields breathe sweet, the daisies kiss our feet,

Young lovers meet, old wives a-sunning sit,

In every street these tunes our ears do greet:

Cuckoo, jug-jug, pu-we, to witta-woo!

Spring, the sweet spring!

Spring_Ahead_leaping_lambs_from_behind_attb_lastwordonnothing_dot_com_blog.jpg — DK image library, uploaded by DixieCollie

verdant (adj.) late 14c., "fresh green color," from Old French verdure "greenness, greenery, green fields, herbs," from verd, variant of vert "green" (12c.), from Latin viridis "green" (source of Spanish, Italian verde)....of uncertain etymology..…

☆'Occult and Psychical Sciences' on DK☆

is a fun spooky group here on DK.

We enjoy sharing stories about the spooky and scary, personal anecdotes, and general paranormal, philosophical, metaphysical, arcane, mysterious, esoteric, and existential information, and conversation about the unexplained in the world and universe. Any and all religion also is welcome here in this space.

This group's aim is polite philosophical debate. Can also be about folklore, history, art, literature, fantasy, sci fi, or scientific developments.

The group is named after "Complete illustrated Book of the Psychic Sciences" (1966), an influential childhood favorite of Angmar's. Its author, Walter Brown Gibson (1897–1985) was an American writer and professional magician, best known for his work on the pulp fiction character The Shadow.

Having explained the origin of the title, please refrain from coming in here to complain that ghost stories, occult or metaphysical or other speculations aren't science. We know! Please enjoy for what it is. ;-)

People are welcome to share their own personal spooky experiences, speculations, philosophy, and similar influences. Please contact Angmar in kmail if you wish to join us! Open thread!

🐣🌱🐤🍀🕊🌾🌱🍀🌼🐰

Note: In another life, I could have been a happy folklorist. So this story is, yes, self-indulgently lengthy.

Seasoned with art, and several more songs. Nothing to distress.

Relax and (I hope) de-stress.

If you have knowledge or ideas, bring them, please!

--Clio2

🐰☘🌿🐤🐣🌾🌼🌱🍀🐇🕊

Now that we're all tuned up (I hope)?

The well-known spring carol, with its odd mix of Christian, pagan and unexplained references:

Green Grow the Rushes-O

🌾🍀🌱🕊🌿🌾🌱☘🌼🌿🌿🌼🕊🌾

Performed by quartet Nowell Sing We Clear, in rousing, traditional north-country style. They use the exact lyrics that fascinated me as a child, in our family's Fireside Book of Folk Songs (1947).

(In spite of the group's title and the album cover, carols aren't limited to midwinter! Stay at-tuned.…)

YouTube Video

The accumulated lyrics, 12th and final verse:

I'll sing you twelve-o

Green grow the rushes-o

What are your twelve-o?

Twelve for the twelve apostles

Eleven for the eleven who went to heaven,

And ten for the ten commandments,

Nine for the nine bright shiners,

And eight for the April rainers.

Seven for the seven stars in the sky,

And six for the six proud walkers.

Five for the symbols at your door,

And four for the gospel makers.

Three, three, the rivals,

Two, two, the lily-white boys,

Clothed all in green-o.

One is one and all alone

And evermore shall be so.

Weird collection of Christian references and who-knows what, aren't they? (Even without getting into alternate versions.)

We'll circle back to possible symbolic meanings. First, what can we say about its place in history?

🌾🍀🌱🕊🌿🌾🌱☘🌼🌿🌿🌼🕊🌾

The Oxford Book of Carols -- which I also grew up with -- contains many traditional songs that were composed for other festivals than Christmas. (And some others as odd as this one.) But what makes a song a carol?

Wikipedia: A carol is a festive song, generally religious but not necessarily connected with Christian church worship, and sometimes accompanied by a dance. --Wikipedia

"Maids dance in a ring..."

Etymonline: carol (n.), c. 1300, "joyful song," also a kind of dance in a ring, from Old French carole "kind of dance in a ring, round dance accompanied by singers".…

The medieval dance style called a "carole" was a circle or line dance. Not much documentation remains, but one known form was called a "branle."

Example of a historical branle, performed by dancers based in Vilnius, Lithuania:

2:17 ("Ecosse" btw is French for "Scotland.")

YouTube Video

So a "carol" might be a song-and-dance, or just a song.

And "Green Grow the Rushes" is a sort of song-and-game: a cumulative song.

Other well-known cumulative carols include "The Twelve Days of Christmas" (of course) and the American gospel classic, "Children, Go Where I Send Thee."

The Fairfield Four is a gospel group that has existed continuously for more than a century -- formed in 1921 at the Fairfield Baptist Church, Nashville, Tenn.

4:35

YouTube Video

This traditional spiritual was first documented and recorded in 1934 but surely is older. Lyrics vary somewhat; here's the last verse as sung above.

Children, go where I send thee!

Where will you send me?

I'm gonna send thee twelve by twelve

Twelve, twelve disciples

Eleven, gospel writers

Ten, the ten commandments

Nine, nine dressed so fine

Eight, the eight that stood at the gate

Seven, the seven came down from heaven

Six for the six that couldn't get fixed

Five for the gospel preachers

Four for the four that stood at the door

Three Hebrew children

Two for Paul and Silas

One for the little bitty baby

Born by the Virgin Mary,

Wrapped in swaddling clothes and

Laid down in the manger,

Born, born, born in Bethlehem.

The ultimate origin of cumulative songs is unknown (along with cumulative verses such as The House That Jack Built), but the first known documented example seems to be a Jewish teaching song.

Wikipedia:

Echad Mi Yodea (Hebrew: אחד מי יודע?, lit. 'One, Who Knows?') is a traditional cumulative song sung on Passover and found in the haggadah [text setting forth the sequence of the Passover seder]. It enumerates common Jewish motifs and teachings. It is meant to be fun and humorous, while still imparting important lessons to the children present.

Recitation varies from family to family. The song has versions in Hebrew, Yiddish, Arabic, and many other vernacular languages....

According to the Encyclopedia Judaica, this song is first found in Ashkenazi Haggedot [plural of Haggadah] of the 16th century (1500s).

Uniquely, the cumulation of Echad Mi Yodea goes all the way to 13.

This video version, in Yiddish, provides the lyrics in Yiddish and English. (Btw, tempo picks up after the first verse, so if you listen, it doesn't seem too long.)

The Yiddish Philharmonic Chorus, founded in 1923, is based in New York City. Its original members included many garment workers.

7:17

YouTube Video

"Echod mi yodea" has been compared with a specifically Christian cumulative song, also German, "Guter Freund, Ich frage Dich (Good Friend, I Ask You)."

"Guter Freund" was published with several tunes, first so far as known in 1820, and had an alternate title, "Twelve Numbers." I wasn't able to find a video, but here are the lyrics (in German).

🌾🍀🌱🕊🌿🌾🌱☘🌼🌿🌿🌼🕊🌾

And what about the specific history of "Green Grow the Rushes?" Sparse.

According to Wikipedia:

By 1868 several variant and somewhat garbled versions were being sung by street children as Christmas carols. [Collector and folklorist Cecil] Sharp [writing in the early 1900s] states that the song was very common in Somerset and the whole of the West of England.…

Not all collected versions included the chorus about the rushes, but reportedly, it was sung with that chorus at the nation's most elite boys' boarding school, Eton.

Decoding the symbols?

To sum up: Our song's relatives, "Echod mi Yodea" and "Guter Freund," as religious teaching songs, make logical sense throughout.

"Go Where I Send Thee" is similar in spirit though less exacting, as it evokes various categories of saints and sinners.

(And of course "The Twelve Days of Christmas" in contrast is just for fun: seasonal but without any reference to religion.)

In contrast, the imagery of "Green Grow the Rushes" has always been found confusing and controversial.

The stanzas are clearly much corrupted and often obscure, but the references are generally agreed to be both Biblical and astronomical.

--Wikipedia

Wikipedia goes on to relate various interpretations of the more puzzling stanzas. I won't duplicate the list of suggestions here -- they are all at the link.

What follows are my own preferred ideas, at least one of them (I think) unique, and if they instigate discussion, that's just what they are meant to do!

So instead of going in numerical order, let's start with the most obvious and work towards the more obscure.

Several stanzas are familiar religious references:

Four for the gospel makers

Symbols of the four "gospel makers" surround the central figure of Christ in glory. Clockwise from upper left: Matthew, an angel; John, an eagle; Luke, a winged ox; and Mark, a winged lion. Carved in ivory, Europe, 1200s. Wikipedia.

Twelve for the twelve apostles

Easy peasy.

Synaxis_of_the_Twelve_Apostles_by_Constantinople_master_early_14th_c._Pushkin_museum.jpg — The twelve apostles, Russia, 1300s. Judas was one originally (later replaced by Matthias). Wikipedia; U.S. public domain.

Ten for the ten commandments

Hebrew Decalogue (a.k.a. "Ten Commandments"), Jekutiel ben Isaac Sofer, Amsterdam, 1768 C.E. Tempera and watercolor on parchment. "Text written in two columns, symbolizing the Tablets of the Law." Wikipedia.

More ambiguous:

Eleven for the eleven that went to heaven

...has been conjectured to mean the original twelve apostles, minus the traitor Judas. It works.

And of course

One is one and all alone and ever more shall be so

God the creator, by Thomas du Val, Augustinian friar, Clairfontaine Abbey, diocese of Chartres, Royal MS 19 D III, Vol. I, f. 3, manuscript completed in 1411. British Library.

veneration (n.) early 15c., from Old French veneracion, from Latin venerationem (nominative veneratio) "reverence, profoundest respect," noun of action from past participle stem of venerari "to worship, revere," from venus (genitive veneris) "beauty, love, desire".…

🙏

A favorite resonance btw:

[Christian Neoplatonist philosopher] Plotinus [200s A.D.] taught that there is a supreme, totally transcendent "One", containing no division, multiplicity, nor distinction; likewise, it is beyond all categories of being and non-being. The concept of "being" is derived by us from the objects of human experience and is an attribute of such objects, but the infinite, transcendent One is beyond all such objects and, therefore, is beyond the concepts which we can derive from them. The One "cannot be any existing thing" and cannot be merely the sum of all such things...but "is prior to all existents".

--Wikipedia

And,

that's five of the twelve stanzas.

🌾🍀🌱🕊🌿🌾🌱☘🌼🌿🌿🌼🕊🌾

Now for something a bit more challenging: the astronomicals

⭐⭐⭐⭐🌦⭐⭐⭐⭐

Eight for the April rainers

There's actually a clear reference in this: a star cluster known since ancient Greek times as the Hyades.

The Greeks believed that the helical rising [earliest appearance during the fall] and setting [disappearance, in the spring] of the Hyades star cluster were always attended with rain....The Hyades were daughters of Atlas....and sisters of Hyas in most tellings....Their number varies from three in the earliest sources to fifteen in the late ones.

The story about the Hyades is that after their brother Hyas was killed in a hunting accident, his weeping sisters were turned into stars whose tears fall as rain.

From the perspective of observers on Earth, the Hyades Cluster appears in the constellation of Taurus, where its brightest stars form a "V" shape along with the still-brighter Aldebaran.

English hawthorne (also called the May tree) in flower. Wikipedia.

We still say (or did in the quaint and far-off times when I was a child, studying raindrops as they slide down the window pane), "April showers bring May flowers."

As a winter constellation, Taurus appears each fall and slips beneath the horizon each spring, bringing the Hyades with it. This is why, in England, the formation was once popularly known as the “April Rainers” to explain the “April showers” common for that time of year.

--The Farmers' Almanac

⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐

⭐

Seven for the seven stars in the sky

The most obvious identification is the Pleiades, a tight cluster of stars also called the Seven Sisters. The Pleiades are not far from the Hyades.

There are thousands of stars in this cluster. It's commonly said that most people can only see six, but someone with very sharp sight can detect a seventh. (The truth may be a little more complicated.)

The story about these stars being seven sisters cuts across continents and may be 100,000 years old. They are always escaping a male attacker.

The seventh sister is hiding, or very young, or for some other reason is difficult or impossible to see.

In Greek mythology the Pleiades are -- like the Hyades -- daughters of Atlas, and are fleeing the hunter, Orion.

Orion chases the Pleiades girls. (DK library, uploaded by Onomastic.)

Six for the six proud walkers

This one is my conjecture, though not entirely original:

Most stars are "fixed," that is, they stay in the same places relative to each other. But there were six bright objects that, in old times, people could watch in the night sky that followed individual paths through the field of stars:

the moon, plus the five planets that were known in ancient and medieval times

planet (n.) late Old English planete, in old astronomy, "star other than a fixed star; star revolving in an orbit," from Old French planete (Modern French planète) and directly from Late Latin planeta, from Greek planētēs, from (asteres) planētai "wandering (stars)," from planasthai "to wander," a word of uncertain etymology.

(The sixth planet, Uranus, was first discovered in 1781, Neptune in 1846, and poor dethroned Pluto in 1930. So, alternatively if the song was composed in the late 1700s, or first half the 1800s -- it's possible that the six "proud walkers" are simply the six planets known at that time.)

m384.031va.jpg — The planet Mercury. Von dem Gang des Himels und Sternen Germany, Rhineland, second half of the 15th century, MS M.384. Fol. 031v. The Morgan Library and Museum, New York, N.Y.

Now it gets more difficult.

Two, two the lily-white boys, clothed all in green-o

A pair of boys, in the context of astronomy or mythology, immediately suggests Castor and Pollux (or in Greek, Polydeukes), a traditional constellation also called Gemini, the Twins, or the Dioscouroi (Zeus' boys). Gemini that is at its highest in the sky just about now. (This constellation becomes visible in winter and disappears in June.)

There are many stories about Divine Twins in many cultures.

Castor and Pollux were born to Leda, queen of Sparta. There are multiple and contradictory stories about them. They are the sons of Zeus-in-the-form-of-a-swan. No, only one, the other twin was the son of Leda's mortal husband; one twin was mortal, the other immortal.

They hatched out of an egg. No, there were two eggs, the other producing two girls.

They rescued their sister Helen (later of Troy) from a prior kidnaping, before that whole started-the-Trojan-war episode. They sailed with Jason on the Argo. They are patrons of horsemen and sailors, and so on.

Engraving, about 1825 according to Brittanica

Castor and Pollux are traditionally depicted as young men or even children.

green (adj.) Old English grene, Northumbrian groene "green, of the color of living plants," in reference to plants, "growing, living, vigorous," also figurative, of a plant, "freshly cut," of wood, "unseasoned" earlier groeni, from Proto-Germanic *grōni- ..…From c. 1200 as "covered with grass or foliage." From early 14c. of fruit or vegetables, "unripe, immature;" and of persons, "of tender age, youthful, immature, inexperienced;" hence "gullible, immature with regard to judgment" (c. 1600).

--Etymonline

Birth of twins Castor and Pollux from a single egg. Cesare da Sesto (1477-1523) after a lost painting, "Leda and the Swan," by Leonardo da Vinci (detail). With a coincidental background of rushes!

And/Or?

The Infant Jesus with St. John Baptist As a Child, Lucas Cranach the Elder (1472-1553)

Three, three, the rivals

Tough one. A thought of my own here:

These three goddesses, Venus the victor?

The Judgement of Paris, by Peter Paul Rubens, painted in 1638-39. One of the most famous episodes in all classical mythology. You remember: a goddess called Discord tossed out a golden apple inscribed, "to the most beautiful." Three goddesses claimed it: Athena, Juno, and Venus. Paris, a handsome prince of Troy, was picked to judge. (What were they thinking?!) Venus bribed him by promising him Helen; yes, that Helen. Venus won the apple. (That's her in the middle.) Paris then kidnapped Helen from her husband, starting the Trojan War.

venery (n.1)"pursuit of sexual pleasure," mid-15c., from Medieval Latin veneria "sexual intercourse," from Latin venus (genitive veneris).…

Venus late Old English, from Latin Venus (plural veneres), in ancient Roman mythology, the goddess of beauty and love, especially sensual love, from venus "love, sexual desire; loveliness, beauty, charm; a beloved object".…

Venus is also...a planet.

Q.E.D.?

Nine for the nine bright shiners

Another tough one.

One suggestion has been nine concentric crystalline "celestial spheres." In classical to Renaissance astronomy, their differing motions were supposed to cause the progress of the heavenly bodies.

Various astronomers posited various numbers and arrangements of spheres, first with the earth in the center and later, heliocentric systems.

One possible earth-centered arrangement could be: 1) closest to earth, the sphere of the moon; 2) Mercury; 3) Venus; 4) the Sun; 5) Mars; 6) Jupiter; 7) Saturn; 8) the fixed stars; and 9) the "Empyrean," a "fiery" sphere supposed to encircle the whole.

In Christian religious cosmologies, the Empyrean was "the source of light" and where God and saved souls resided...."

--Wikipedia

The celestial spheres by Nicholas Oresme (1320-1382), Le livre du Ciel et du Monde, Paris, BnF, Manuscrits, Fr. 565, fo 69

Or taking a different tack:

*dyeu- Proto-Indo-European [conjectured]root meaning "to shine," in derivatives "sky, heaven, god"....[T]he hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by: Sanskrit deva "god" (literally "shining one"); diva "by day;" Avestan dava- "spirit, demon;" Greek delos "clear;" Latin dies "day," deus "god;" Welsh diw, Breton deiz "day;" Armenian tiw "day;" Lithuanian dievas "god," diena "day;" Old Church Slavonic dini, Polish dzień, Russian den "day;" Old Norse tivar "gods;" Old English Tig, genitive Tiwes, name of a god.]

--Etymonline

What about the group of nine goddesses, called the Muses?

Two of the nine Muses, Urania (astronomy) and Calliope (epic poetry), by Simon Vouet, about 1634. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. Public domain.

Just an idea.

*****

And now the biggest puzzler, though possible clues exist:

Five for the symbols at your door

Protective mark in the form of a pentagram, St. James the Great Church (originally dating to tge medieval period), Aslackby, Lincolnshire. The Arts Society, London: theartssociety.org/... Cropped and color-edited by Clio2.

The use of "apotropaic" (turning-away) symbols as a protection against evil is common to many cultures. Only recently have such symbols at English historic sites gained much attention. But such so-called "witch marks" are documented from quite a few medieval and Renaissance-period structures.

Witch marks can be found in all types of buildings from barns and cottages to grand country houses to churches. The markings can also be found on furniture, gravestones and in caves such as Reynard’s Kitchen Cave in Dovedale.

Markings are usually found next to windows, doorways and fireplaces in buildings. These draughty locations were the most vulnerable and potential entrance points for demons, witches and evil spirits. The witch marks were etched into stone, plaster and woodwork.

--National Trust

Some other protective symbols, Norfolk and Suffolk medieval graffiti survey, at the-history-girls.blogspot.com/...

Other types of mark include the intertwined letters V and M or a double V (for the protector, the Virgin Mary, alias Virgo Virginum), and crisscrossing lines to confuse any spirits that might try to follow them.

--National Trust

(Virgo Virginum = virgin of virgins)

"There is a category of marks known as 'Marian' marks because they relate to the Virgin Mary. Where we get overlapping V's and the letter M we can be fairly confident that these refer to the initials of the Virgin. Worship of her was a very important part of pre-Reformation religion and it did not completely die away post-Reformation. It would seem that these marks are an invocation to the Virgin that she may protect the location in question." Worcester Cathdral, Prince Arthur's Chantry, early 1500s. www.apotropaios.co.uk/...

What has "five" got to do with these marks? Well...the pentagram has, among other things, been associated with the "five wounds of Christ." So maybe?

And perhaps even more striking:

"V" for the Virgin Mary...also means "five" in Roman numerals...which were used in England until the adoption of Arabic numerals, a transition that was not complete until the 1500s.

virgin (n.) c. 1200, "unmarried or chaste woman noted for religious piety and having a position of reverence in the Church," from Anglo-French and Old French virgine "virgin; Virgin Mary," from Latin virginem (nominative virgo) "maiden, unwedded girl or woman," also an adjective, "fresh, unused," probably related to virga "young shoot"..…

--Etymonline

🌱

And Virgo...the Virgin...is also....a constellation.

I'm almost convinced here of my own cleverness in connecting "five" with the protective "V"... ;-)

*****

[But then....this: a memory floats up of an old word that sounds a bit like "symbol"... What about…possibly.....

simnel (n.) kind of sweet cake or bun made of fine flour, c. 1200, from Old French simenel "fine wheat flour; flat bread cake, Lenten cake," probably by dissimilation from Vulgar Latin *siminellus (also source of Old High German semala "the finest wheat flour," German Semmel "a roll"), a diminutive of Latin simila "fine flour".... In England especially as a gift offered on certain holidays....

--Etymonline

Modern simnel cake (borrowed from Good Housekeeping UK, www.goodhousekeeping.com/...). These cakes are often topped with 11 marzipan spheres, said to represent the 12 apostles minus Judas (compare "the eleven who went to heaven"?)

Wikipedia:

Simnel cakes are often associated with Mothering Sunday, also known as Simnel Sunday [just about this time of the year -- in fact, last Sunday was "Mothering Sunday"]. According to historian Ronald Hutton, in 17th Century...Gloucestershire and Worchestershire the custom of live-in apprentices and domestic servants going home (their only day off in the year) to visit their…mothers (and family) on Mothering Sunday started…

Visitors might bring a simnel cake as well as other eatables, and/or a gift of money, especially if their families were running short of supplies at the end of winter.

These cakes could be purchased from a baker. They were originally made with a rich preserved-fruit filling, first boiled in a cloth like a pudding, then baked, so they developed a tough crust that would have travelled well.

The cake later became simply an Easter cake.

Could the original line have been

Five for the simnels at your door ?

Perhaps too much of a stretch -- for, in that case, where does the "five" come from? Just thought to mention.]

*****

Variants

There are many variations recorded of "Green Grow the Rushes" carol, another name for which is "The Dilly Carol."

Kate Rusby is a Yorkshire singer. Her rendition sounds haunting, and almost Appalachian.

It's not a cumulative rendition, though it proceeds by numbers. It ends with ten. Some of the lyrics are..different.

5:15

YouTube Video

Chorus:

Come, I will sing you

Green grow the rushes-o

I'll sing you one-o [increases with each verse]

Down among the rushes-o

.

One of them was all alone

Ever more will be-o

.

Two of them were lily babes

Dressed all in green-o

.

Three of them were strangers

Come to see the babe-o

.

Four the four evangelists

Down among the green-o

.

Five the ferryman in the boat

Sailing on the sea-o

.

Six the gospel preacher

Stories all to tell-o

.

Seven stars all in the sky

Shining there above-o

.

Eight is for the morning break

When all the birds awake-o

.

Nine is for the dilly-bird

Never seen but heard-o

.

Ten the hand of kindness

Ten begins again-o.

(Ferryman? Charon ?????!)

Marsh wren — Dilly bird ????????? VERY difficult to see or photograph: marsh wren, by Jeff Graham (DK image library)

And at last, to leave with you with one more 🎵 tune 🎶:

In researching, one meets many cautions, not to mix up the carol with a dialect poem called "Green Grow the Rashes-O" [Scottish pronunciation of "rushes"] by the Scottish bard, Robert Burns. Burns -- himself never averse to a bit of venery -- penned this hymn to womankind, in 1784.

But.…how did the two come to share the same chorus?

According to The Word on the Street, a site that specializes in publishing old "broadside ballads" [cheap popular sheet music]

Burns wrote [his] version of 'Green Grow the Rashes, O' from a much older and more crude fragmentary ballad.

In other words, the chorus of the holy carol, and of Burns's homage to women, may have sprung from a single common source -- a still older one, of a yet more earthy nature.

Something to think about!

Here's renowned Scottish singer Eddi Reader with a joyous rendition of Burn's dialect verses. (You'll find the words if you wish at the link to Word on the Street.)

5:34

YouTube Video

🌾🍀🌱🕊🌿🌾🌱☘🌼🌿🌿🌼🕊🌾

🌱🌼🐣Happy spring!🐑🕊🍀

Poll

29 votes Show Results

I prefer

29 votes Vote Now!

I prefer

Simnel cakes

1 vote

Heavenly spheres

1 vote

Robbie Burns

2 votes

The nine Muses

0 votes

Protective symbols

1 vote

The moon and five planets

1 vote

The divine Twins

0 votes

April showers

3 votes

Six planets

0 votes

Three goddesses

2 votes

Botticelli

2 votes

Mysterious ambiguities

8 votes

Spring, the sweet spring!

8 votes

Morning Open Thread: How I Became a Woman – Poems for Women’s History Month

officebss for MOT - Morning Open Thread

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday March 11, 2024 · 5:52 AM PDT

2024/03/11 · 05:52

“… this bullet had no innocence, did not wish anyone well, you can't tell us otherwise by naming it mildly, this bullet was never the friend of life, should not be granted immunity by soft saying -- friendly fire, straying death-eye, why have we given the wrong weight to what we do?” from “For Mohammed Zeid of Gaza, Age 15” – by Naomi Shihab Nye

______________________________________

“Censoring books that deal with difficult,
adolescent issues does not protect anybody.
Quite the opposite. It leaves kids in the darkness
and makes them vulnerable. Censorship is the
child of fear and the father of ignorance. Our
children cannot afford to have the truth of
the world withheld from them.”
– Laurie Halse Anderson, author of Shout,
Catalyst, and The Impossible Knife of Memory

______________________________________

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.

So grab your cuppa, and join in.

_______________________________

March is Women’s History Month,
so this week, which straddles the
middle of the month, I am
showcasing 13 women poets

_______________________________

March 10
________________________________

1842 – Ina Donna Coolbrith born in Nauvoo, Illinois; American poet, author, and city librarian of Oakland (1874-1892); California’s inaugural Poet Laureate (1915-1928), the first state-appointed poet laureate. Her poetry collections include A Perfect Day and Wings of Sunset. Coolbrith’s health was in decline before the 1906 earthquake. She escaped from her house carrying her cat, but the fire burned it to the ground. She lost over 3,000 books, many were first editions signed by their authors, and the manuscript of her history of the California literary scene, which she never completed. She lived in temporary quarters until her friends raised the money to build a new house for her. Ina Coolbrith died in 1928 at age 86.

A Memory

by Ina Donna Coolbrith
^.
Through rifts of cloud the moon's soft silver slips;
A little rain has fallen with the night,
Which from the emerald under-sky still drips
Where the magnolias open, broad and white.
^.
So near my window I might reach my hand
And touch these milky stars, that to and fro
Wave, odorous. ... Yet 't was in another land —
How long ago, my love, how long ago!
^.

“A Memory” from Songs from the Golden Gate, by Ina Donna Coolbrith – published by Houghton Mifflin in 1907

________________________________

1900 – Margaret Fishback born in Washington DC; American poet, prose author, and advertising copywriter, rumored to be the highest-paid woman copywriter in the world in the 1930s. After earning a degree from Goucher College, she joined Macy’s as a divisional advertising copywriter – later promoted to chief copywriter. In 1936, she married Alberto Gatone Antolini, chief rug buyer for Macy’s. She left Macy’s in 1951 to work for ad agencies, and contributed to ad campaigns for Arrow Shirts, Borden's, Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, Clairol, DuPont, Hanes Hosiery, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Seagram's, Simmons Beautyrest, Wrigley, and many others before her 1963 retirement. Her poems and short stories appeared in magazines and newspapers, including The New Yorker and The New York Times. Five collections of her poems originally printed in magazines and papers were published, including: I Feel Better Now; I Take It Back; One to a Customer; and Time for a Quick One. Margaret Fishback died at age 85 in September 1985.

Busy Day at the Office

by Margaret Fishback
^.
This is a day when I covered no ground.
Just pushed and shuffled my papers around,
Nudged at letters and winced at bills,
Sorting them out into different hills,
Hunted fretfully for a ruler,
Worried the overworked water cooler,
Sharpened pencils and filled my pen,
Then shuffled my papers around again.
^.

________________________________

1979 – Ama Codjoe born “with roots in Memphis and Accra,” raised in Youngstown, Ohio; African American poet, social justice activist, and dancer. She received the Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellowship from New York University, and earned an MFA in Dance Performance from Ohio State University. Codjoe was a Cave Canem fellow, a Black Bottom Tuesday Poet, and Associate Director of Professional Development for the DreamYard Art Center. Her poetry collection, Blood of the Air, won the 2019 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, and Bluest Nude: Poems won the 2023 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

Diamondback

by Ama Codjoe
^.
Like an organ coiled
deep inside or a lasso
of lightning and high
noon, the rattlesnake
traveled the length
of my spine, sunning itself
inside me. Then death—some
call it god—drew a diamond
on the snake’s back,
and marked my chest
with feeling. How godly
the two of us were, shaking
what was hollow.
Dirt stained
the front of my blouse.
I felt venom
rise in my ears. I heard
the snake molting,
turning my skin bronze
and flawless. This is how
I became a woman,
sun rattling
across my back,
dust glittering my tongue,
the snake’s tail whirring.
^.

_______________________________

March 11
________________________________

1955 – Myriam Moscona born in Mexico City, of Bulgarian Sephardic descent, Mexican poet and journalist; author of nine books, two of them available in bilingual editions, translated by Jen Hofer: Tela de sevoya /Onioncloth, about a journey to Bulgaria in search of her Sephardic heritage, and Negro marfil / Ivory Black, winner of the Academy of American Poets 2012 Harold Morton Landon Award. Negro marfil / Ivory Black is an experiment in inversions: some text can be read either left to right or right to left.

Ivory Black [Not to speak]

by Myrian Moscona
^.
Not to speak
To see and to translate into moans It's not pain
To moan from birth
Only the eye and the conquering of a tongue
(that you wanted to say that for the slit?)

To return toward hearing (to touch oneself) via the
heart is heard slowly
Is guarded like a black poem as if it were an eye
who might rain
^.

_______________________________

March 12
________________________________

1951 – Susan Musgrave born in Santa Cruz, California to Canadian parents; prolific Canadian poet, children’s author, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and anthologist. She left school at 14, running away to Berkeley, California. Her first poems were published when she was 16. Her collection, Songs of the Sea-Witch, appeared in 1970. Her first husband was a lawyer, her second husband was an accused drug smuggler, and she married her third husband in the prison where he was serving a sentence for bank robbing, after reading the manuscript of his novel. Though granted full parole in 1987, he was convicted again for bank robbery in 1999. Her first novel, The Charcoal Burners, reflected her interest in West Coast mythologies and feminism. Musgrave now lives in Haida Gwaii, an archipelago in British Columbia. She was nominated four times for the Governor-General’s Literary Award. Her 20 poetry collections include: Entrance of the Celebrant; The Impstone; Kiskatinaw Songs; A Man to Marry, A Man to Bury; Right through the Heart; What the Small Day Cannot Hold; Origami Dove; and Exculpatory Lilies.

Things that Keep and Do Not Change

by Susan Musgrave
^.
Out on the windy gulf, breakers
like bouldery sheets of laundry
tumble and spin towards the horizon
in my sleep. We've been fogbound for three days
and I've learned the difference between bad
ice and good, how to travel in a blizzard
using the wind to set your course.
^.
One night I woke and a white shadow
was trying to get into bed with me.
My tongue went numb and the only words
I could remember came out cold. I used to think
white was no colour at all, only your absence
making itself known, your ghost
doubling back to pull down my stiff
winter underwear from our drooping clothesline -
little thief! When they found you
the foam on the beach after the north wind
blew all night was white and deep.
We've been fogbound for days
and I've learned to set my course on the wind.
^.

________________________________

1952 – Naomi Shihab Nye born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Palestinian father and an American mother; poet, songwriter, children’s author, novelist, teacher, and editor. In 1966, her family moved to the West Bank because her paternal grandmother was sick. They returned to the U.S. in 1967, just before the Six-Day War broke out, settling in San Antonio, Texas. She earned a BA in English and world religions from Trinity University in 1974. Nye teaches creative writing at Texas State University, and runs writing workshops for children and teens. Honored for her body of work with the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and the Poetry Foundation chose her as the Young People’s Poet Laureate for the 2019-2021 term. In addition to editing anthologies of verse by contemporary poets, she’s published over two dozen collections of her own poetry. Her debut young adult novel Habibi was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and honored with a Jane Addams Children’s Book Award.

Shoulders

by Naomi Shihab Nye
^.
A man crosses the street in rain,
stepping gently, looking two times north and south,
because his son is asleep on his shoulder.
^.
No car must splash him.
No car drive too near to his shadow.
^.
This man carries the world’s most sensitive cargo
but he’s not marked.
Nowhere does his jacket say FRAGILE,
HANDLE WITH CARE.
^.
His ear fills up with breathing.
He hears the hum of a boy’s dream
deep inside him.
^.
We’re not going to be able
to live in this world
if we’re not willing to do what he’s doing
with one another.
^.
The road will only be wide.
The rain will never stop falling.
^.

________________________________

1976 – Jessica Fisher born in Claremont, California, daughter of poet and academic Ann Fisher-Wirth; American poet, translator, critic, and co-editor with Robert Haas of the Addison Street Anthology. She earned a PhD in English literature from UC Berkeley, and was the Holloway Postdoctoral Fellow in Poetry and Poetics (2009-2011). Her first book, Frail-Craft, won the 2006 Yale series of Younger Poets Competition, and her second, Inmost, won the 2011 Nightboat Poetry Prize. In 2012, she was awarded the Joseph Brodsky Rome Prize Fellowship in literature. She has translated poetry by Hans Aro and Czelaw Milosz.

Daywork

by Jessica Fisher
^.
Close your eyes he said and took my hand.
There was something he wanted to show me,
something I couldn’t see. Raised like a scar,
a seam running through the body, here
where the day went dark. I’d wanted to see
the limits of sight, to know where the painter
had found an edge, and stopped,
the day done and the brushes washed,
the figure left to dry, in the dark room
someone half made would try to close his open eye
and find that eye will stay open and never see,
never see the rearing of the horse he rides
you know the posture you’ve leant back in the saddle
the beast beneath, you pulled at its reins and told it to quit
it can’t quit it’s trying to stop
the bit in the mouth and no sight in its eyes
seen and yet blind this was the drama
he wanted to show don’t you think or think
of the woman holding the room on her shoulders
have you ever felt like that like you are to keep
very still while others move around you
in birth I remember the midwife took my reins
is that right she held me here and there
and reached inside she was touching my baby
I had nothing to do but let it happen
I let it happen so well trained really a vehicle
you ride me or drive me oh but if you are the head
I am the neck I will turn you to my advantage
will you make me see what is wrought through me
^.

_______________________________

March 13
________________________________

1742 – Anne Hunter born in Waterford, Ireland as Anne Home, a military surgeon’s daughter; English Romantic lyricist and poet. She married London surgeon John Hunter, and hosted many gatherings of London’s literary and intellectual figures, including the Bluestockings, proto-feminist intellectuals. Hunter originally published her poetry anonymously, but later published Poems and The Sports of the Genii as Mrs. John Hunter. She contributed lyrics to works by composer Franz Joseph Haydn, and published two song books, The Lark and The Charmer. Anne Hunter died at age 78 in January 1821.

To My Daughter On Being Separated from Her
on Her Marriage

by Anne Hunter
^.
Dear to my heart as life’s warm stream
Which animates this mortal clay,
For thee I court the waking dream,
And deck with smiles the future day;
And thus beguile the present pain
With hopes that we shall meet again.
^.
Yet, will it be as when the past
Twined every joy, and care, and thought,
And o’er our minds one mantle cast
Of kind affections finely wrought?
Ah no! the groundless hope were vain,
For so we ne’er can meet again!
^.
May he who claims thy tender heart
Deserve its love, as I have done!
For, kind and gentle as thou art,
If so beloved, thou art fairly won.
Bright may the sacred torch remain,
And cheer thee till we meet again!^.

________________________________

1920 – Ann Darr born as Lois Ann Russell in Bagley, Iowa; American poet, teacher, pilot, and WWII WASP (Women's Airforce Service Pilot). “I was one of the lucky women who were part of the experiment that proved women could fly as well as men.” She published eight poetry collections, including Riding with the Fireworks; St. Ann's Gut; Do You Take This Woman; The Myth of a Woman's Fist; and Confessions of a Skewed Romantic. She recorded some of her poems for the Library of Congress Contemporary Poets Series, and many were published in over 70 journals and 30 anthologies. She was featured in the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City, where she wrote and performed radio scripts for NBC and ABC before moving to the Washington, D.C. area. She taught at The American University in Washington, D.C. and at the Writer's Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Late in life, Ann Darr was stricken with Alzheimers, and died at age 87 in December 2007.

Flight over the Zuni Mountains

by Ann Darr
^.
Hold death by the heels
And tickle his nose with a feather,
For the wind is our blood
It will blow itself away.
Never a dark red rivulet trickling through the grass
Beside the bolts and the pressed wood props made in
  Camden, New Jersey
^.
Let the engines drone a funeral dirge,
The sharp staccato when one cylinder plays alone.
The quiet…just the wind.
No sound when the ribs crumple,
Like the old tree falling in the forest
With no one to hear,
For we are not there.
We stand and lean on a cloud
And call for another beer.
^.
This we know:
We are the wind.
We will come back gently over the lake,
We will lash the waves and bend the trees;
We will lie side by side on the high mountains,
Drinking martinis and telling the old jokes over.
Never our wings will melt or crumple with heat
  or hardness.
This we know.
For the man who draws the blueprint, shapes
the wings,
Threads the bolts and pulls the props
Is not our faith.
Ours is the wind and the wind is us
And no one shall bury us ever.
We have known space not surrounded by
closets and cabbages cooking
We have whirled rainbows over our heads;
We have owned the earth by rising from it;
Never again shall we walk with ordinary feet.
^.
The wings were shaped from a woman’s weeping…
No other tears shall fall.
^.

_______________________________

March 14
________________________________

1949 – Lynn Emanuel born in Mount Kisco, New York; American poet and academic. She earned an MA from City College of New York, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. She lived, worked, and traveled in North Africa, Europe, and the Near East. Emanuel is Director of the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series, and a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Her husband, anthropologist Jeffrey H. Schwartz, named the early primate Microadapis lynnae after her. Her poetry collections include: Oblique Light; Hotel Fiesta; The Dig; Noose and Hook; and The Nerve of It, which won the 2016 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.

Seizure

by Lynn Emanuel
^.
This was the winter mother told time by my heart
ticking like a frayed fan belt in my chest.
This was the fifties & we were living on nothing
& what of her, the black girl, my own black nurse,
what of her who arrived on Greyhound in the heart
of so dramatic a storm it froze the sleeves at her wrists
& each nostril was rimed with white like salt on a glass,
what of her who came up the dark stair on the limp of her
own bad ticker, weary, arrogant, thin, her suitcase noosed
with rope, in the grip of a rage she came, a black woman,
into our white lives, like a splinter, & stayed. Charming
& brilliantly condescending, she leaned down to kiss “the baby,”
& hissed my little princess & hushed the Jordan & set the chariots
on the golden streets & Mother, I cried to her, & went out like a light.
^.

_______________________________

March 15
________________________________

1907 – Elma Stuckey born in Memphis, Tennessee, granddaughter of former slaves; African American poet and schoolteacher. She earned a teaching certificate from Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, and ran a nursery school in rural Tennessee until she moved to Chicago in 1945. She became a supervisor for the Illinois Department of Labor. At age 69, she published her first poetry collection, The Big Gate. Her poetry initially got attention when she read her poems on Stud Terkel’s Chicago radio program. Her second collection, The Collected Poems of Elma Stuckey, was published the year before her death. She died at age 81 in September 1988 while in Washington DC to record readings of her poetry for the Smithsonian Institution.

Humanity

by Elma Stuckey
^.
If I am blind and need someone
To keep me safe from harm,
It matters not the race to me
Of the one who takes my arm.
If I am saved from drowning
As I grasp and grope,
I will not stop to see the face
Of the one who throws the rope.
Or if out on some battlefield
I’m falling faint and weak,
The one who gently lifts me up
May any language speak.
We sip the water clear and cool,
No matter the hand that gives it.
A life that’s lived worthwhile and fine
What matters the one who lives it?

________________________________

1952 – Susan Stewart born in York, Pennsylvania; American poet, academic, and literary critic, with a PhD in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania. Her 2002 book, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, won the Truman Capote award for literary criticism. She is a professor in the Humanities and English Departments at Princeton, a member of the Associated Faculty of the Department of Art and Archaeology, and editor of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. Stewart was Director of Princeton’s Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts (2009-2017). She teaches history of poetry, literary criticism, and aesthetics. Her poetry collections include: Yellow Stars and Ice; The Hive; The Forest; Columbarium, which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award; and Cinder. She was a co-translator with Wesley Smith of Andromache by Euripides, and collaborated with composer James Primosch on A Sybyl, a song cycle for the Chicago Symphony.

A Language

by Susan Stewart
^.
I had heard the story before
about the two prisoners, alone
in the same cell, and one
gives the other lessons in a language.
Day after day, the pupil studies hard—
what else does he have to do?—and year
after year they practice,
waiting for the hour of release.
They tackle the nouns, the cases, and genders,
the rules for imperatives and conjugations,
but near the end of his sentence, the teacher
suddenly dies and only the pupil
goes back through the gate and into the open
world. He travels to the country of his new
language, fluent, and full of hope.
Yet when he arrives he finds
that the language he speaks is not
the language that is spoken. He has learned
a language one other person knew—its inventor,
his cell-mate and teacher.
And then the other
evening, I heard the story again.
This time the teacher was Gombrowicz, the pupil
was his wife. She had dreamed of learning
Polish and, hour after hour, for years
on end, Gombrowicz had been willing to teach
her a Polish that does not and never
did exist. The man who told
the story would like to marry his girlfriend.
They love to read in bed and between
them speak three languages.
They laughed—at the wife, at Gombrowicz, it
wasn’t clear, and I wasn’t sure that they
themselves knew what was funny.
I wondered why the man had told
the story, and thought of the tricks
enclosure can play. A nod, or silence,
another nod, consent—or not, as a cloud
drifts beyond the scene and the two
stand pointing in different directions
at the very same empty sky.
Even so, there was something
else about the story, like teaching
a stunt to an animal—a four-legged
creature might prance on two legs
or a two-legged creature might
fall onto four.
I remembered,
then, the miscarriage, and before that
the months of waiting: like baskets filled
with bright shapes, the imagination
run wild. And then what arrived:
the event that was nothing, a mistaken idea,
a scrap of charred cloth, the enormous
present folding over the future,
like a wave overtaking
a grain of sand.
There was a myth
I once knew about twins who spoke
a private language, though one
spoke only the truth and the other
only lies. The savior gets mixed
up with the traitor, but the traitor
stays as true to himself as a god.
^.
All night the rain falls here, falls there,
and the creatures dream, or drown, in the lair.

_______________________________

March 16
________________________________

1951 – Deborah Tall born in New York City but grew up in a middle class Jewish family in Philadelphia’s suburbs; American poet, non-fiction writer, academic, and editor of the literary journal The Seneca Review. She lived on the Irish island of Inishbofin for five years in the 1970s, chronicled in her book, Island of the White Cow. She met husband and fellow poet, David Weiss, after returning to New York City. In 2004, Tall was diagnosed with inflammatory breast cancer. Her four poetry collections are: Eight Colours Wide; Ninth Life; Come Wind, Come Weather; and Summons. Her non-fiction book, A Family of Strangers, published shortly before her death, records her search for the family her parents never spoke of. After uncovering her father’s original last name prior to immigrating just before WWII, she then traced what happened to the family members who had stayed in Ukraine. Tall died at age 55 in September 2006.

Interlude

by Deborah Tall
^.
This autumn you take me for walks.
We’ve thought it out.
The little we know
repeats itself;
^.
a rain of leaves.
We brush against trunks
to loosen bark.
We’ve thought it out
^.
but instead
we name the weeds,
invent a cause for the path’s
peculiar twist.
^.
In the middle we turn back,
walk it over.
It’s no more reasonable
from this side.
^.
A few hundred feet
and we’re back in public
adjusting our sweaters,
stilling our avid eyes.
^.

______________________________________

G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

______________________________________

_{Image: Not falling, flying 4 - by Karen Bloomfield}

Using ol'fashion HTML in DK diary drafts to get line-breaks for poetry and lists etc

mettle fatigue for Cranky Users

Community (This content is not subject to review by Daily Kos staff prior to publication.)

Monday March 04, 2024 · 8:54 PM PST

2024/03/04 · 20:54

Screenshot_2021-03-16DailyKosGroupMondayMorningMeta.png

<big><big>[Line]-break</big></big>forces a hard return, in drafts and in kosmail, without adding the extra vertical space that hitting the ENTER / RETURN key would for starting a new paragraph. Ordinarily, the same effect is do’able just by holding down SHIFT and hitting RETURN, but sometimes the DK system won’t let that easier way work.

UPDATE. This command only work in diary drafts, kosmail, and group descriptions. And it ONLY works there if typed correctly: i.e., without blankspaces between the command characters.
It does nothing in comments regardless of how you type it. If you want a line-break in comments so there’s no excess vertical space between lines that hitting enter/return causes, simply holding down shift and THEN hit return/enter,

This html command is especially valuable for poetry, and for lists when you don’t want to use the bullet-point or numbered-item formatting buttons, such as when you don’t want your list indented from the left margin. Compare:

With bulletpoint button:

one

two

three

Without:
■ one
■ two
■ three

<big>(</big>I like blockpoints. If you do too, you can copy it from here, or find that copyable typographic character and lots of others, including regular bullet-point, at wikipedia page on typographic symbols and https://dev.w3.org/html5/html-author/charref <big>)</big>

<big>Line-break can also to be used to create more than the usual vertical space you get from hitting ENT/RET multiple times</big> at any point in your text where you want it but the DK system doesn’t cooperate.

For folks experienced with html, note that this command doesn’t need you to type a “shut-off” command with forward-slash — the system adds that itself when necessary! — it only needs the initial character-string, which is (omit blanks — they’re only there so the command will actually display in this diary! )<big><big>:

Here’s a poetry example, </big></big>showing the actual typing:

Twas brillig and the slythy tovesDid gyre and gimble in the wabeAll mimsey were the borogroves

in order to get

Twas brillig and the slythy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
All mimsey were the borogroves

BUT if it’s easier to see what you’re doing if you hold down SHIFT and hit ENT/RET after typing each , your typing will look like what’s below, and it’ll work out the same!

Twas brillig and the slythy toves
Did gyre and gimble in the wabe
All mimsey were the borogroves

<big><big>For times when you want a lot of extra vertical white-area</big></big> between one set of paragraphs and the next set, or to isolate a sentence or phrase or whatever, you can get various variations by typing this command right at the end of the preceding sentence/paragraph … OR if you first hit ENT/RET and then type it ... OR by running a row of several of this command along a line … OR a row with ENT/RET between each, etc.

E.g., ABOVE, I typed a row of 4 of’em at the end of the paragraph, and only hit ENT/RET afterward in order to next type THIS sentence and paragraph. Below I’ll type 3, but each on it’s own line, i.e., each followed by ENT/RET…

...so you have some comparison of differences. Experiment to figure out more! :)

TIP: BE SURE TO NOT BOLD, ITALICIZE, OR UNDERLINE the command character-strings, or it may not work.

Commenters please do add more information you consider useful! :)

Newer
Older

RSS