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“If a nation loses its storytellers,
it loses its childhood.”
— Peter Handke,
2019 Nobel Prize
for Literature winner
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Welcome to Morning Open Thread, a daily post
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13 poets born this week
outraged, sad, or silly,
pithy yet profound
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January 28
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1901 – Shinkichi Takahashi born in Ikata, a snall fishing village on Shikoku Island, Japan; Japanese poet who was a pioneer in the Dadaist movement in Japan, and was a master of expressing large ideas in the smallest number of words. His family was too poor to send him to school, so he taught himself to read and write. He went to Tokyo, and worked at menial jobs, but got into trouble, and was in jail when his first book, Dadaist Shinkichi’s Poetry, was published in 1923. In 1928, Zen Master Shizan Ashikaga began training him, in a strict regime that lasted 17 years. His Collected Poems won the 1977 Japanese Ministry of Education Prize for Art. Takahashi’s collection, Triumph of the Sparrow: Zen Poems of Shinkichi Takahashi, was published in 1985, and translated into English in 2000. Takahashi died in June 1987 at age 86.
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The wind blows hard among the pines
Toward the beginning
Of an endless past.
Listen: you’ve heard everything.
― translation of Shinkichi Takahashi’s poem is from Zen Poems of China and Japan: The Crane’s Bill, © 1973 – Grove Press
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January 29
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1895 – Muna Lee born in Raymond, Mississippi, then raised from age 7 in Hugo, Oklahoma; American lyric poet, mystery novelist, feminist, translator and advocate for Latin American literature and Pan-Americanism. She graduated from the University of Mississippi at age 18 in 1913, and worked as a teacher. She was also writing poetry which began appearing in national literary magazines. Muna Lee won Poetry magazine’s inaugural 1916 Prize for Lyric Poetry. Lee taught herself Spanish and got a job with the U.S. Secret Service in New York City, where she worked as a translator during WWI. She translated confidential letters from Spanish, Portuguese and French. Her poetry in translation began to be published in Pan American magazines. In 1925, she published Poetry, an anthology of her translations of Latin American poets. In the 1930s, Lee did work for the National Women’s Party in Washington D.C., and co-authored 5 detective novels with Maurice Guiness, under the pen name Newton Gayle. Lee was a founding member of the Inter-American Commission of Women, and also worked for the U.S. State Department, primarily on cultural exchanges with Latin America. She died at age 70 from lung cancer in April 1965.
The Unforgotten
by Muna Lee
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I can forget so much at will:
That first walk in the snow,
The violet bed by the April rill,
The song we both loved so;
.
Even the rapture of Love's perfect hour.
Even the anguish of Love's disdain —
But never, but never, the little white flower
We found one day in the rain.
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“The Unforgotten” appeared in The Smart Set magazine’s January 1916 issue
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1941 – Robin Morgan born in Lake Worth, Florida, but grew up in New York; prolific American author, poet, journalist, anti-war and civil rights activist, radical feminist founder of Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, (W.I.T.C.H) and The Sisterhood Is Powerful Fund; known for her essay “Goodbye to All That.” When she was a toddler, her mother started her as a child model, and Robin had her own radio program by age five. By age 8, she was a regular on the TV series Mama. She wanted to write so she fought her mother’s efforts to keep her working in television. At age 13, she discovered that her mother had lied about her father being killed in World War II, and had gone to Florida to give birth Robin to avoid the scandal of being an unwed mother. Morgan taking courses at Columbia University while working as a secretary at Curtis Brown Literary Agency. She married poet Kenneth Pitchford in 1962, had her son Morgan in 1969 (the same year she walked off The Tonight Show when it screened footage of her as a child actor while she was speaking about the first national march against rape). She published her first poetry collection, Monster, in 1972. Her marriage ended in divorce in 1983. Morgan was editor-in-chief of Ms. Magazine (1989-1994). Her poetry collections include: Lady of the Beasts; Depth Perception; A Hot January; and Upstairs in the Garden.
Matrilineal Descent
by Robin Morgan
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Not having spoken for years now,
I know you claim exile from my consciousness.
Yet I wear mourning whole nights through
for that embrace that warmed my ignorant lust
even past intimacies you had dreamed.
I played your daughter-husband, lover-son, to earn
both Abraham and Ishmael's guilt
for your indulgence, and in time, reproach.
Who sent us to that wilderness we both now know,
although I blamed you for that house of women
too many years. But Time is a waiting woman,
not some old man with a stupid beard,
and when I finally met my father I found him
arrogant and dull, a formican liar
with an Austrian accent. Well, we meet
the phantom that we long for in the end,
and getting there is half the grief.
Meanwhile, my theories rearrange themselves
like sand before this woman whose flaccid breasts
sway with her stumblings, whose diamonds
still thaw pity from my eyes.
You're older than I thought. But so am I,
and grateful that we've come to this:
a ragged truce, an affirmation in me
that your strength, your pushiness, your sharp love,
your embroidery of lies—all, all were survival tools,
as when, during our personal diaspora, you stood
in some far country blocks away,
burning poems I no longer sent you
like Yahrzeit candles in my name, unsure of me at last
who sought a birthright elsewhere,
beyond the oasis of your curse,
even beyond that last mirage, your blessing.
Mother, in ways neither of us can ever understand,
I have come home.
"Matrilineal Descent" from Monster, © 1972 by Robin Morgan – Random House, Inc.
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January 30
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1866 – Gelett Burgess born in Boston, Massachusetts, American artist, art critic, author, poet, and humorist; editor of The Lark humorous magazine (1895-1897); best known for his poem “The Purple Cow.” He was a major figure in San Francisco’s literary resurgence at the turn of the 19th Century, but Gelett Burgess was born in 1866 in Boston. Burgess initially went to Boston’s MIT for his education and graduated from there in 1887. Fed up with the rather conservative nature of the Massachusetts elite, he yearned for a more eclectic existence and headed for San Francisco in 1891 where he initially worked putting his artistic skills to good use as a draftsman. Shortly after that he found himself employed by Berkley University though the job did not last long when he was suspected of being involved in the vandalism of a water fountain and asked to resign. After founding The Lark, which attracted contributors like Carolyn Wells and Maynard Dixon, he went on to write The Goops series, books of humorous poems to teach children good manners. Burgess died at age 85 in 1951 in Carmel, CA.
On Digital Extremities
by Gelett Burgess
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I’d Rather have Fingers than Toes;
I’d Rather have Ears than a Nose;
And As for my Hair,
I’m Glad it’s All There;
I’ll be Awfully Sad, when it Goes!
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“On Digital Extremities” from Goops and How to Be Them by Gelett Burgess – Timeless Classics – 1968 edition
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1935 – Richard Brautigan born in Tacoma, Washington, American novelist, short story writer, and poet. His first published book was a poetry collection, The Return of the Rivers, in 1957. His first novel was A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), followed by his best-known book, Trout Fishing in America, in 1967. Other works include The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western; Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942; All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace; and An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey, which was published posthumously in a French translation in.1994. Revenge of the Lawn is his best-known short story collection. After years of struggling with alcoholism and depression, in 1984, Richard Brautigan, age 49, was living alone in Bolinas, California, in an old house he bought with his earnings years earlier. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head sometime around the middle of September, but his body was not found until several weeks later. He once wrote, “We all have a place in history. Mine is clouds.”
Kafka’s Hat
by Richard Brautigan
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With the rain falling
surgically against the roof,
I ate a dish of ice cream
that looked like Kafka’s hat.
It was a dish of ice cream
tasting like an operating table
with the patient staring
up at the ceiling.
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“Kafka’s Hat” from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, © 1989 by Richard Brautigan – Houghton Mifflin
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January 31
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1915 – Thomas Merton born in Prades, in southern France, to expat artists – an American mother and a New Zealand father. He was a notable 20th century American Roman Catholic poet, monk, and a prolific writer on spiritual and social themes. The family moved to the U.S. during WWI, where his mother died of stomach cancer in 1921, when Merton was six years old. He lived first with his grandparents, then with his father in France in 1926, before they moved to England in 1928. After a year at the University of Cambridge, he earned B.A. (1938) and M.A. (1939) degrees at Columbia University, New York City. He converted to Catholicism during his time at Columbia. After teaching English (1938-1941), he entered the Trappist Abbey of Gethsemani in Kentucky, and was ordained as a priest in 1949. Merton’s first published works were collections of poems—Thirty Poems (1944), A Man in the Divided Sea (1946), and Figures for an Apocalypse (1948). It was his autobiographical Seven Storey Mountain (1948), which brought him international attention. In the 1960s, he wrote social criticism in response to the movements for civil rights, nonviolence and pacifism, and against the nuclear arms race. He also studied Eastern philosophy, mysticism, and Buddhism. On a trip to Asia in 1968, he met several times with the Dalai Lama, but then was fatally electrocuted by a faulty wire at an international monastic convention in Thailand. He was 53 years old.
The Dark Morning
by Thomas Merton
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This is the black day when
Fog rides the ugly air:
Water wades among the buildings
To the prisoner’s curled ear.
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The rain, in thin sentences,
Slakes him like danger,
Whose heart is his Germany
Fevered with anger.
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This is the dark day when
Locks let the enemy in
Through all the coiling passages of
(Curled ear) my prison!
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“The Dark Morning” by Thomas Merton appeared in Poetry magazine’s April 1942 issue, and in The Collected Poems of Thomas Merton, © 1977 by The Trustees of the Merton Legacy Trust – New Directions, 1980 edition
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1952 – Di Brandt (née Janzen) born in Winkler, Manitoba, Canada, and grew up in a nearby Mennonite farming village; Canadian poet, scholar, essayist, and literary critic. Her first poetry collection, questions i asked my mother, was published in 1987. Brandt has degrees from the University of Manitoba and University of Toronto, and has taught Canadian literature and creative writing. She was poetry editor at Prairie Fire Magazine and Contemporary Verse 2 during the 1980s and 1990s. She also served as Manitoba and Prairie Rep at the League of Canadian Poets National Council and the Writers' Union of Canada National Council. She was the first person to be appointed as Poet Laureate of Winnipeg (2018-2019). She has collaborated with other Canadian artists on poetry with music recordings and a chamber opera. Her other poetry collections include: Agnes in the sky; Now You Care; Walking to Mojacar; and The Sweetest Dance on Earth.
Early Spring Thaw
by Di Brandt
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Today I am made of water, touch my shoulder and I leak,
my belly a lake, my bones an open river flowing toward
sea, all this salt in me, who would have thought,
dissolving into flesh, tears, an open wound, rubbed raw.
The wind of February sweeps the air clean, the sky with
its fugitive clouds, its murky definitions, vaguely white,
soon the clear pale lemon yellow fading into dark rose
and then blue black, the night, with its cold sparkle, its
spectacular consolation.
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And me in early spring thaw, gasping for new air,
imagine, in all this snow, melting.
“Early Spring Thaw” © 2002 by Di Brandt, appeared in Rattle #18, Winter 2002
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February 1
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1902 – Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, on the 37th anniversary of the day Abraham Lincoln signed the 13th Amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Hughes became an American poet, novelist, short story writer, non-fiction writer, and playwright. In 1924, he was working in Washington D.C. where he met and impressed the poet Vachel Lindsay, who was popular for his dramatic readings of his own work, and included three Hughes poems at his next reading, rather pompously declaring he had “discovered an American Negro genius.” Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926. In the 1930s, his first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon gold medal for literature. Hughes spent most of the rest of his life in Harlem, becoming a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Though most of the honors and awards he received during his life were either for his novels or for his body of work, he is best remembered now for his poetry. He published 17 collections of his poems during his life, and his Collected Poems were published after his death at age 66, from complications after surgery for prostate cancer, in May 1967.
Remember
by Langston Hughes
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Remember
The days of bondage—
And remembering—
Do not stand still.
Go to the highest hill
And look down upon the town
Where you are yet a slave.
Look down upon any town in Carolina
Or any town in Maine, for that matter,
Or Africa, your homeland—
And you will see what I mean for you to see—
The white hand:
The thieving hand.
The white face:
The lying face.
The white power:
The unscrupulous power
That makes of you
The hungry wretched thing you are today.
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“Remember” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes – Vintage Classics, Random House
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1918 – Muriel Spark born as Muriel Sarah Camberg in Edinburgh, Scotland; Scottish novelist, playwright, poet, short story writer, and essayist; best known for her novels, particularly The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which was adapted for the stage, and then made into a film in 1969, starring Maggie Smith, who won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance of the title role. Her novel Memento Mori was adapted for BBC television in 1992, and also featured a distinguished cast, including Dame Maggie Smith, Sir Michael Hordern, and Zoe Wanamaker. Among her poetry collections are: The Fanfarlo and Other Verse; Going Up to Sotheby’s; and All the Poems. She died at age 88 in April 2006 in Italy and is buried there.
The Messengers
by Muriel Spark
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Arriving late sometimes and never
Quite expected, still they come,
Bringing a folded meaning home
Between the lines, inside the letter.
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As a scarecrow in the harvest
Turns an innocent field to grief
These tattered hints are dumb and deaf,
But bring the matter to a crisis.
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They are the messengers who run
Onstage to us who try to doubt them,
Fetching our fate to hand; without them
What would Sophocles have done?
“The Messengers” from All the Poems, © 2004 by Muriel Spark – Carcanet
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1927 – Galway Kinnell born in Providence, Rhode Island; American poet whose 1982 collection, Selected Poems, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and split the 1983 National Book Award for Poetry with Charles Wright’s Country Music: Selected Early Poems. Kinnell graduated from Princeton University in 1948 alongside friend and fellow poet W. S. Merwin, then earned his Master of Arts degree from the University of Rochester. Kinnell traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East, and went to Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship. Upon returning to the U.S., he joined CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and worked on voter registration and workplace integration in Hammond, Louisiana. This effort got him arrested. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. His experiences inspired his book-long poem The Book of Nightmares. He was poet laureate of the state of Vermont (1989-1993), and a Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets. He died of leukemia at age 87 in 2014.
Ah Moon
by Galway Kinnell
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I sat here as a boy
On these winter rocks, watching
The moon-shapes change on the skies;
Nor did I know then the moon
Only affects her mortality.
.
Now no more does a boy
Ah Moon! from these rocks
Or through a frosted window, cry;
And for a dying curve
The wiser heart weeps not.
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Then why to these rocks
Do I return, why,
The last quarter being nearly
Wasted, does the breath
Return dragoning the night?
.
Unless it be the soul
Is such and such a country
Cut by shape and light
That would be whole again,
So it must be dark.
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“Ah Moon” from Collected Poems, © 2017 by The Literary Estate of Galway Kinnell, LLC – First Mariner Books 2018 edition
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February 2
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1923 – James Dickey born, American poet, novelist, and literary critic; best known for his novel Deliverance. The author of 30 books of poetry, Dickey fabricated major pieces of his life to create that swaggering Southern Man’s Man persona — a combination Star Athlete-Great White Hunter-Bravura Cocksman-Heroic Warrior under which he hid in plain sight. He lied about his athletic ability and his war record. He greatly overstated his sexual virtuosity. He had no hunting experience with a bow, and quite possibly not with any other weapon either. What kept him from being just a whiskey-soaked Good Ole Boy swapping lies on a Saturday night was his remarkable talent. The saddest thing I can say about James Dickey is that he drank that talent to death a couple of decades before he actually died in 1997.
Buckdancer’s Choice
by James Dickey
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So I would hear out those lungs,
The air split into nine levels,
Some gift of tongues of the whistler
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In the invalid’s bed: my mother,
Warbling all day to herself
The thousand variations of one song;
.
It is called Buckdancer’s Choice.
For years, they have all been dying
Out, the classic buck-and-wing men
.
Of traveling minstrel shows;
With them also an old woman
Was dying of breathless angina,
.
Yet still found breath enough
To whistle up in my head
A sight like a one-man band,
.
Freed black, with cymbals at heel,
An ex-slave who thrivingly danced
To the ring of his own clashing light
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Through the thousand variations of one song
All day to my mother’s prone music,
The invalid’s warbler’s note,
.
While I crept close to the wall
Sock-footed, to hear the sounds alter,
Her tongue like a mockingbird’s break
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Through stratum after stratum of a tone
Proclaiming what choices there are
For the last dancers of their kind,
.
For ill women and for all slaves
Of death, and children enchanted at walls
With a brass-beating glow underfoot,
.
Not dancing but nearly risen
Through barnlike, theatrelike houses
On the wings of the buck and wing.
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“Buckdancer’s Choice” from Buckdancer’s Choice, © 1965 by James Dickey – Wesleyan Press
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1931 – Judith Viorst born, prolific American author of children’s books and both fiction and non-fiction for adults; her book Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day has sold over four million copies. Other books for kids include the Lulu books. She called on her psychoanalytic training to write her non-fiction book Necessary Losses, which was a New York Times bestseller. Among her recent books of poetry are What Are You Glad About? What Are You Mad About?; Unexpectedly Eighty; and Nearing Ninety.
Happiness (Reconsidered)
by Judith Viorst
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Happiness
Is a clean bill of health from the doctor,
And the kids shouldn't move back home for
more than a year,
And not being audited, overdrawn, in Wilkes-Barre,
in a lawsuit or in traction.
.
Happiness
Is falling asleep without Valium,
And having two breasts to put in my brassiere,
And not (yet) needing to get my blood pressure lowered,
my eyelids raised or a second opinion.
.
And on Saturday nights
When my husband and I have rented
Something with Fred Astaire for the VCR,
And we're sitting around in our robes discussing,
The state of the world, back exercises, our Keoghs,
And whether to fix the transmission or buy a new car,
And we're eating a pint of rum-raisin ice cream
on the grounds that
Tomorrow we're starting a diet of fish, fruit and grain,
And my dad's in Miami dating a very nice widow,
And no one we love is in serious trouble or pain,
And our bringing-up-baby days are far behind us,
But our senior-citizen days have not begun,
It's not what I called happiness
When I was twenty-one,
But it's turning out to be
What happiness is.
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“Happiness (Reconsidered)” from Judith Viorst: poems, © 2012 by Judith Viorst — Simon and Schuster
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February 3
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1965 – Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm born in Toronto, Canada; Anishinaabe writer, poet, spoken word artist, and editor-publisher of mixed ancestry from the Chippewas of Nawash First Nation in Canada. In 1993, she founded Kegedonce Press, which publishes indigenous writers in both anthologies and single-author books. Akiwenzie-Damm also started Honoring Words: International Indigenous Authors Celebration Tour, which featured authors from Canada, the U.S., Australia, and New Zealand. She was a co-editor with Josie Douglas of the 2000 anthology Skins: Contemporary Indigenous Writing. The Stone Collection of her short stories was published in 2019, part of the Debwe Series published by HighWater Press.
Stray Bullets
(OKA Re/Vision)
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by Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm
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my touch is a history book
full of lies and half-forgotten truths
written by others
who hold the pens
and power
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my heart is a stray bullet
ricocheting in an empty room
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my head was sold
for the first shiny trinket
offered
.
my beliefs were bought cheap
like magic potions at a travelling road show
with promises
everyone wants to believe
but only a fool invests in
.
my name was stolen
by bandits in black robes
my world was taken
for a putting green
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“Stray Bullets (OKA Re/Vision)” from My Heart Is a Stray Bullet, © 2002 by Kateri Akiwenzie-Damm – Kegedonce Press
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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