“We have to dare to be ourselves,
however frightening or strange
that self may prove to be.”
― May Sarton,
Journal of a Solitude
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Thirteen poets born in November,
from seven countries, some rich,
some poor, some in between, all
with something to say about Life,
its changes and its inevitable end.
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November 2
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1899 – Wen Yiduo born as Wén Jiāhuá in Xishui, Hubei Province, China; Chinese poet and scholar; after studying at Tsinghua University in Bejing, he came to U.S. in 1922 to study fine arts and literature at the Art Institute of Chicago. His first poetry collection, Hongzhu (紅燭, "Red Candle"), was published in 1923. He returned to China in 1925, and took a university post. In 1928, his second collection, Sishui (死水, "Dead Water"), was published, he joined the Crescent Moon Society, wrote essays on poetry, and began publishing his classical Chinese literature research. When the Second Sino-Japanese War started in 1937, he migrated to Kunming in Western China, where he taught at National Southwestern Associated University. Wen stopped writing poetry in 1931, became involved in social criticism, and by 1944 was supporting the China Democratic League. His outspokeness led to his assassination by secret agents of the Kuomintang ruling party after eulogizing his friend Li Gongpu at Li's funeral in September 1946. Wen Yiduo was age 46 when he was murdered.
End of Days
by Wen Yiduo
.
Dew sobs in the choked waterpipes’ bamboo.
Green plantain tongues lick at the window like a bone.
As chalk-white walls around me back away
the room is now too huge for me to fill alone.
I light a firepit up in my heart’s chamber.
Waiting for my guest from afar, I hush and brood
feeding the flame with telltale turds of rats.
A mottled scaly snakeskin is my kindlewood.
The cock crows hurry. Ash heaps in the pit.
A cold dark wind glances my mouth in one soft blow
and there’s my visitor before my eyes.
I close my eyes at last to follow him and go.
.
– translated from the Chinese by A. Z. Foreman
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1911 – Odysseus Elytis born as Odysseas Alepoudellis in Heraklion, Republic of Crete; Greek poet, essayist, and translator, winner of the 1979 Nobel Prize for Literature. His father moved the family soap factory to Piraeus, then died of pneumonia in 1925. When Odysseas was 16, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis. Bed-ridden for a year, he read Greek poetry voraciously, and discovered the work of C.P. Cavafy. He passed the difficult entrance exams for law school at the University of Athens, but became friends with poet George Seferis and psychoanalyst Andreas Embiricos, who gave Odysseas access to his extensive library. In 1935, his first poem was published under his pen name Elytis in the influential journal Νέα Γράμματα (New Letters). He saw combat as a second lieutenant during WWII, until he contracted typhus abdominalis, and was near death when the German Army was advancing toward the hospital. He risked being moved, survived, and eventually reached Athens. He wrote essays and poetry, and became programme director for the Greek National Radio Foundation. 1960 was a year of change: his brother, sister, and mother died, but he won the Greek First National Prize for poetry for his work Axion Esti. He traveled in Europe and the United States, but went into exile in Paris while the Greek military junta was in power. He returned to Greece after the junta’s fall, wrote essays and poetry collections, including The Sovereign Sun, Diary of an Invisible April, The Little Mariner, and West of Sadness. He died at age 84 in March 1996.
They Came
by Odysseus Elytis
.
They came
dressed up as “friends,”
came countless times, my enemies,
trampling the primeval soil.
And the soil never blended with their heel.
They brought
The Wise One, the Founder, and the Geometer,
Bibles of letters and numbers,
every kind of Submission and Power,
to sway over the primeval light.
And the light never blended with their roof.
Not even a bee was fooled into beginning the golden game,
not even a Zephyr into swelling the white aprons.
On the peaks, in the valleys, in the ports
they raised and founded
mighty towers and villas,
floating timbers and other vessels;
and the Laws decreeing the pursuit of profit
they applied to the primeval measure.
And the measure never blended with their thinking.
Not even a footprint of a god left a man on their soul,
not even a fairy’s glance tried to rob them of their speech.
They came
dressed up as “friends,”
came countless times, my enemies,
bearing the primeval gifts.
And their gifts were nothing else
but iron and fire only.
To the open expecting fingers
only weapons and iron and fire.
Only weapons and iron and fire.
.
“They Came” from The Axion Esti, by Odysseus Elytis, translation © 1972 by Edmund Keeley and George Savidis – University of Pittsburgh Press
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1955 – David Whyte born in Mirfield, Yorkshire, England to an Irish mother and an English father; Anglo-Irish poet, philosopher, and naturalist. He earned a degree in marine zoology from Bangor University in Wales. In his 20s he worked mainly in the Galapagos Islands, but also led expeditions in the Andes, the Amazon, and the Himalayas. Whyte moved to the U.S. in 1918, where he became a lecturer and began writing poetry and non-fiction books. Whyte has several honorary degrees, including one from Neumann College, Pennsylvania, and another from Templeton College, Oxford. Over the last 25 years, he has spent apportion of each year in County Clare, Ireland, where he has written much poetry about the Burren Mountains. In 2014, he founded Invitas: The Institute for Conversational Leadership. He holds both British and Irish citizenship, but currently lives in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. His poetry collections include: Songs for Coming Home; Where Many Rivers Meet; Fire in the Earth; Pilgrim; The Sea in You; and Essentials.
In the Beginning
by David Whyte
.
Sometimes simplicity rises
like a blossom of fire
from the white silk of your own skin.
You were there in the beginning
you heard the story, you heard the merciless
and tender words telling you where you had to go.
Exile is never easy and the journey
itself leaves a bitter taste. But then,
when you heard that voice, you had to go.
You couldn't sit by the fire, you couldn't live
so close to the live flame of that compassion
you had to go out in the world and make it your own
so you could come back with
that flame in your voice, saying listen...
this warmth, this unbearable light, this fearful love...
It is all here, it is all here.
.
“In the Beginning” from Still Possible, © 2022 by David Whyte – Many Rivers Press
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November 3
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1920 – Oodgeroo Noonuccal AKA Kath Walker born in Minjerribah (aka North Stradbroke Island), Queensland, Australia, and was given the name Kathleen Ruska. Aboriginal Australian poet, political activist, artist, children’s author, and nonfiction writer. She later used her married name Kath Walker, and was the first Aboriginal Australian to publish a poetry collection, We Are Going, which sold out several editions. Yet some critics questioned whether an Aboriginal person could really have written the poems, while others dismissed them as propaganda instead of poetry. In the 1960s, Walker was Queensland state secretary of the Federal Council for the Advancement of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders (FCAATSI), and a key figure in the campaign to win full citizenship for Aboriginal people. In December 1987, she announced she would return her Member of the British Empire (MBE) award in protest over the Australian Government’s plans for the Australian Bicentenary which she described as “200 years of sheer unadulterated humiliation” of Aboriginal people. She also announced changing her first name to Oodgeroo, meaning “paperbark tree” and her last name to Noonuccal, her people’s name. Oodgeroo Noonuccal died from cancer at age 72 in September 1993. Among her many books of poetry are The Dawn is at Hand; My People; The Colour Bar; and Let Us Not Be Bitter.
Son of Mine
(To Denis)
.
by Oodgeroo Noonuccal
.
My son, your troubled eyes search mine,
Puzzled and hurt by colour line.
Your black skin as soft as velvet shine;
What can I tell you, son of mine?
.
I could tell you of heartbreak, hatred blind,
I could tell you of crimes that shame mankind,
Of brutal wrong and deeds malign,
Of rape and murder, son of mine;
.
But I'll tell you instead of brave and fine
When lives of black and white entwine,
And men in brotherhood combine--
This would I tell you, son of mine.
.
“Son of Mine” from We Are Going, © 1965 by Kath Walker – Citadel Press
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1944 – Robert Morgan born in Hendersonville, North Carolina; American poet, biographer, short story writer, and novelist. He studied engineering and mathematics at North Carolin state University before transferring to University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where he graduated with an BA in English in 1965. He completed an MFA degree at the University of North Carolina Greensboro in 1968. Since 1971, he has taught at Cornell University, where he was appointed as a Professor of English in 1984. In 2008, he won the Thomas Wolfe Fiction Prize. Among his many poetry collections are: Zirconia Poems; Land Diving; Groundwork; Bronze Age; Wild Peavines; and Dark Energy.
Long Term Cooling
by Robert Morgan
.
On coldest nights the house will pop
in corners and along the walls,
way up among the rafters, down
along the joists and sills. As wood
contracts in wicked cold the nails
tear loose, boards strain and shriek and pull
apart with powerful knocks and breaks
that seem the cracks of cosmic doom
echoing the original
vast bang, the long term cooling off,
throughout the whole of actual time,
echoing still the first sublime.
.
“Long Term Cooling” from Red Owl, © 1972 by Robert Morgan – W.W. Norton & Company
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November 4
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1919 – Patricia Beer born in Exmouth, Devon, England into a family of Plymoth Bretheren, a strict religious order; English poet, teacher, memoirist, and critic. She earned a Bachelor of Letters degree at the University of Oxford, after which she taught in Italy for seven years. Returning to England, she began to publish poetry in 1959, and wrote full-time from 1968 on. She was a candidate to replace Ted Hughes as UK Poet Laureate, but she died of a stroke at age 79 in August 1999. Among her poetry collections are: The Survivors; The Estuary; Poems; and Autumn.
The Conjuror
by Patricia Beer
.
Arriving early at the cemetery
For ‘the one o’clock’, we looked around
At the last sparks of other people’s grief,
The flowers fading back into the ground.
.
A card inscribed ‘With reverent sympathy
From the Magicians’ Club was propped against
A top hat made of blossoms and a wand
Tied with a back velvet bow. We sensed
.
The rabbits and the ladies sawn in half
One blink away from being visible
Although the quick deceiving hand was changing
To flyaway dust under a ton of soil.
.
The funeral that we came for turned the corner.
They had been right to the word of you,
Who conjured up for us, a hearse approaching
An interest in life, Bravo. Bravo.
.
“The Conjuror” from Collected Poems, © 1990 by Patricia Beer – Carcanet Press
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November 5
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1850 – Ella Wheeler Wilcox born on a farm in Johnstown, Wisconsin; prolific American poet and author. She began writing poetry at age 8, and her poetry began being published when she was 13. “Solitude” is probably her best-remembered poem, for its opening lines, “Laugh, and the world laughs with you;/ Weep, and you weep alone./ For the sad old earth must borrow its mirth / But has trouble enough of its own.” She was influenced by the movements of her time: New Thought, Theosophy, and Spiritualism. After her husband’s death in 1916, she attempted to communicate with him, but never received an answer from “the other side.” She was an animal rights advocate and a vegetarian. Ella Wheeler Wilcox died of cancer at age 69 on October 30, 1919. Her poetry collections include Poems of Passion, Poems of Reflection, and Poems of Peace.
The Beggar Cat
by Ella Wheeler Wilcox
.
Poor little beggar cat, hollow-eyed and gaunt,
Creeping down the alley way like a ghost of want,
Kicked and beat by thoughtless boys, bent on cruel play,
What a sorry life you lead, whether night or day!
.
Hunting after crusts and crumbs, gnawing meatless bones,
Trembling at a human step, fearing bricks and stones,
Shrinking at an outstretched hand, knowing only blows,
Wretched little beggar cat, born to suffer woes.
.
Stealing to an open door, craving food and meat,
Frightened off with angry cries and broomed into the street.
Tortured, teased and chased by dog through the lonely night,
Homeless little beggar cat, sorry is your plight.
.
Sleeping anywhere you can, in the rain or snow,
Waking in the cold, gray dawn, wondering where to go,
Dying in the street at last, starved to death at that,
Picked up by the scavenger – poor tramp cat!
.
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1943 – John Brandi born in Los Angeles, CA; American poet and artist. He studied art and anthropology at Cal State University, Northridge, and graduated in 1965. As a Peace Corps volunteer, he lived in Ecuador (1966 -1968), working with Quechua farmers struggling for land rights. Returning to the U.S., he protested the Vietnam War, moved to Alaska, then Mexico, and finally to California's Sierra Nevada mountains, where he met poet and environmental activist Gary Snyder. In 1971, David Meltzer published Brandi's first collection of prose poems, Desde Alla. That same year, Brandi moved to New Mexico, built a hand-hewn cabin in the northern mountains, and founded Tooth of Time Books, a small press devoted to poetry. He often traveled the Southwest with Japanese poet Nanao Sakaki, and taught Poetry-in-schools programs. In 1979 he made the first of many excursions to India and the Himalayas, following his father’s footsteps as a soldier in the India- Burma Theater. In 2009 he gave the keynote address for the Haiku North America Conference in Ottawa, Canada His many poetry collections include: Field Notes from Alaska; Firebook; That Back Road In; Weeding the Cosmos (haiku); Facing High Water; and The Great Unrest.
Letter From Kathmandu
by John Brandi
.
Friends, let us wake with disbelief
bare our souls, tell our stories, lose our eyes,
become vagrants of the Sea.
.
Let us seek the heat
of the kernel that feeds in the dark
and step aside of men whose twisted lips
pretend to lead, but are not real
in their pursuit of war.
.
We've already seen years
of massacre, hydrogen light the night,
children with ruined eyes, tortured by what
no one should ever see.
.
Let us leave our security,
open our memory, bring flowers
from the storm, write letters that become
sanctuaries, so that we ourselves
may become sanctuaries.
.
Friends, a dream
runs up to me smiling. I call on you
to see in the dark, to finish
the song inside you.
.
“Letter From Kathmandu” from In What Disappears, © 2003 by John Brandi – White Pine Press
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1974 – Susana Chávez Castillo born in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua, Mexico; Mexican writer, poet, journalist, human rights activist, and campaigner against Femicide. Beginning in the 1990s, she led protests against the unsolved killings of women raped and killed in Ciudad Juárez, Chihuahua state, on the border with the United States. She was also active in organisations supporting the families and friends of the deceased women, including the group Return Our Daughters (Nuestras Hijas de Regreso a Casa). Chávez coined and popularized the slogan “Not one more death” (‘Ni una muerte más’) which was used at the protests and took part in poetry readings that she dedicated to murdered women. Chávez was herself murdered and mutilated in Ciudad Juárez. Her body was found strangled with a bag over her head and her left hand cut off in the city centre on January 6, 2001 but was only identified five days later.
"Sangre Nuestra" (Our Blood)
by Susana Chávez Castillo
.
Blood of my own,
blood of sunrise,
blood of a broken moon,
blood of silence,
of dead rock,
of a woman in bed
jumping into nothingness,
Open to the madness.
Blood clear and definite,
fertile seed,
Blood the unbelievable journey,
Blood as its own liberation,
Blood, river of my songs,
Sea of my abyss.
Blood, painful moment of my birth,
Nourished by my last appearance.
.
"Sangre Nuestra" (Our Blood) by Susana Chávez Castillo appeared at Dissident Voices: The Poetry of Resistance in March 2017
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November 6
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1966 – Sandile Dikeni born in Karoo town of Victoria West, Union of South Africa; poet, editor, journalist, and political commentator. He studied law at the University of the Witwatersrand and the University of the Western Cape, and later earned a degree in journalism from Peninsula Technikon. He began writing poetry while detained by South Africa’s apartheid regime. Which Dikeni later performed at political rallies. After apartheid ended, he worked as a journalist and political commentator, started the AM Live and PM Live radio shows at SAFM in 1995, and worked as arts editor for the Cape Times, the Die Suid Afrikaan and as political editor of This Day. He survived a car accident in 2005. After recovering slowly from a coma, he continued to participate in events, but died at age 53 of tuberculosis in November 2019. His first poetry collection, Guava Juice, was published in 1992, and his prose collection, Soul Fire: Writing the Transition, appeared in 2002.
Telegraph to the Sky
by Sandile Dikeni
.
Stay with me
when the sun rises
from a western sky
with silver spears lashing
at earth and our youth
when the eastern horizon
hangs smoke
as celebration to a fading dream
will you take my blistered hand
to a kiss?
That journey
between reflex action
and conviction
where moments flash
from substance to emotion
and where we count seconds as instinct
we live in times where we are against time
and impulse rules over us
as undirected, unelected factor
we live cliché as fact
and fact is cliché
to the one beat of change.
.
“Telegraph to the Sky” from Telegraph to the Sky, © 2002 by Sandile Dikeni – UKZN Press
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November 7
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1961 – Kim Roberts born in Charlotte, North Carolina; American poet, editor, anthologist, and literary historian. She has published five books of poetry, including The Wishbone Galaxy; Kimnana; Animal Magnetism, which won the 2009 Pearl Poetry Prize; and The Scientific Method. She also published By Broad Potomac’s Shore; Great Poems from the Early Days of Our Nation’s Capital, and A Literary Guide to Washington, DC: Walking in the Footsteps of American Writers from Francis Scott Key to Zora Neale Hurston. In 2000, Roberts founded the literary journal Beltway Poetry Quarterly, and was its editor until 2020.
Stuffing
by Kim Roberts
.
“Underneath the breast all my heart is shaken”
—Sappho
.
The gift was not the mummies. Hundreds
of mummified crocodiles dug up in 1900,
from the ruins of ancient Oxyrhynchus.
.
The gift was not the mummies, but their stuffing.
Out of their mouths came blackened scraps
of papyrus. In Egypt, 56 fragments of poems
.
by Sappho were discovered. They unfurled
in pieces, still legible tatters. Words
of ardor written among olive groves
.
disengorged from double ranks
of serrated teeth. Despite dessication, despite travel
across deserts of time. The layers of words
.
came unglued, still sharp, set loose like breezes
through myrtle leaves, like the echo
of incoming tides tonguing the tender shore.
.
“Stuffing” © 2024 by Kim Roberts appeared in Kitchen Table Quarterly, Autumn 2024 issue
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November 8
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1875 – Qui Jin born in Xiamen, Fujian, China; Chinese revolutionary, feminist, journalist, and poet. She was born to a wealthy family, and grew up in her ancestral home in Shaoxing, Zhejiang province, which was famous for educating girls. Her family supported her pursuit of advanced education, and she began writing poetry at an early age. Though Qiu Jin’s feet were bound, Qiu Jin learned how to ride a horse and use a sword—activities only men were permitted to learn then. She had entered into an arranged marriage in 1893, at age 21, a late age for a Chinese woman of her time, but her husband shared none of her interests, and they didn’t get along well. In the early 1900s, Japan had started to experience Western influences earlier than China and were expanding its power. China began sending young members of wealthy families to Japan to learn how China could rebuild its power. Qiu Jin left her husband and children to study at a Japanese language school and a Girls Practical School. When Qiu returned to China in 1906, she became a pioneer of women’s liberation and the republican revolution in China. Within the Revolutionary Alliance, Qiu was responsible for recruiting in Zhejiang Province, while also writing Stones of the Jingwei Bird, a novel about five wealthy women who flee from arranged marriages and join the revolutionaries. An eloquent orator, Qui Jin spoke for women to marry as they chose, to get an education, and for abolishing foot binding. In 1906 she co-founded China Women's News (Zhongguo nü bao), a radical women's journal with another woman poet, Xu Zihua. They published only two issues before it was closed by the authorities. She then co-founded with her friend Xu Xilin the Datong School to train revolutionaries, secretly planning the overthrow of the Manchu government. But Xu Xilin was executed for attempting to assassinate his Manchu superior, and Qui Jin was arrested, accused of being a co-conspirator. Though tortured, she refused to admit any involvement, but her own writings were used against her, and she was publicly beheaded in July 1907 at age 31. Several newspapers with a range of political perspectives described her treatment as unjust, focusing on her advocacy for women rather than her revolutionary activities.
Reflections
by Qui Jin
.
written during travels in Japan
.
The sun and moon without light. Sky and earth in darkness.
Who can uplift the sinking world of women?
I pawned my jewels to sail across the open seas,
parting from my children as I left the border at Jade Gate.
Unbinding my feet to pour out a millennium’s poisons,
I arouse the spirit of women, hundreds of flowers, abloom.
Oh, this poor handkerchief made of merfolk-woven silk,
half stained with blood and half soaked in tears.
.
“Reflections” by Qui Jin – English translation © 2025 by Yilin Wang – appeared at Asymptote, an online site for world literature in translation
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1946 – Ronnie R. Brown born in Brockton, Massachusetts but spent most of her adult life in Canada; Canadian poet and creative writing teacher who lives in Ottawa. She was awarded both the Board of Governors' and the Graduate Students' Award for excellence in poetry. Brown teaches creative writing at both Concordia and Carleton Universities, and produces and co-hosts the FM arts programme Sparks II. In 1986, a staged adaptation of her poetry series, On Falling Bodies, was presented at Ottawa's National Arts Centre. Her poetry collections include: Re Creation; Decisive Moments; Photographic Evidence; and Night Echoes.
Some Say the Heart …
by Ronnie R. Brown
.
is "just like a wheel..." or is
perhaps "...a lonely hunter..."
Others call it a muscle, decry
the romantic foolishness
of Valentines--the candy, the flowers,
the jewelry they wring from
lovers oh so
anxious to please.
.
Ask her
and she will tell you
that her heart--though fully
functional (even after all
these years) --still
longs at times
for lost loves. Still skips
beats when she dreams
their faces, remembers
the places where she
was touched. How,
like a finger she broke when
she was seventeen,
on dark, cold nights
alone in her bed, her heart
sometimes aches, reminding her
of all that was and all
that "might have been."
.
“Some Say the Heart …” from States of Matter, © 2005 by Ronnie R. Brown – Black Moss Press
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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