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“We live in capitalism. Its power seems
inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.
Any human power can be resisted and
changed by human beings. Resistance
and change often begin in art, and very
often in our art, the art of words.”
― Ursula K. Le Guin
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“Never doubt that a small group
of thoughtful, committed citizens
can change the world. Indeed, it
is the only thing that ever has.”
― Margaret Mead
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Welcome to Morning Open Thread, a daily post
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for the day's posting. We support our community,
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Thirteen poets born in
October and November,
as seasons change and
the days grow colder,
a time to look inward
then take the next step.
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October 27
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1914 – Dylan Thomas born in Uplands, Swansea, in Wales; Welsh poet and author; he left school at 16 and worked as a journalist for a short time. By 1934, he was a well-known poet and short story writer, but found earning a living as a writer was difficult, so he augmented his income with reading tours and radio broadcasts. Under Milkwood, A Child’s Christmas in Wales and other works were broadcast by BBC radio. He also went on tours in America during the early 1950s, before his death at age 39 in New York City in 1953, from the combined effects of alcoholism and bronchial disease.
In my craft or sullen art
By Dylan Thomas
.
In my craft or sullen art
Exercised in the still night
When only the moon rages
And the lovers lie abed
With all their griefs in their arms,
I labour by singing light
Not for ambition or bread
Or the strut and trade of charms
On the ivory stages
But for the common wages
Of their most secret heart.
.
Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.
.
“In My Craft or Sullen Art” from The Collected Poems of Dylan Thomas, © 1952 – New Directions Publishing
1932 – Sylvia Plath born in Jamaica Plain, Boston MA; American poet, novelist, and short-story writer born in Massachusetts. She was eight when she published her first poem. She won a scholarship to Smith College in 1950. Plath struggled with depression most of her life, and made her first suicide attempt in 1953. She married English poet Ted Hughes in 1956. They had two children before separating in 1962. Though best-known for The Bell Jar, her semi-autobiographical novel, she wrote over 400 poems. Plath committed suicide at age 30 in 1963. Her best known poetry collections are The Colossus and Other Poems and Ariel. Her Collected Poems, published in 1981, was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry.
Two Sisters of Persephone
by Sylvia Plath
.
Two girls there are: within the house
One sits; the other, without.
Daylong a duet of shade and light
Plays between these.
.
In her dark wainscoted room
The first works problems on
A mathematical machine.
Dry ticks mark time
.
As she calculates each sum.
At this barren enterprise
Rat-shrewd go her squint eyes,
Root-pale her meager frame.
.
Bronzed as earth, the second lies,
Hearing ticks blown gold
Like pollen on bright air. Lulled
Near a bed of poppies,
.
She sees how their red silk flare
Of petaled blood
Burns open to the sun’s blade.
On that green altar
.
Freely become sun’s bride, the latter
Grows quick with seed.
Grass-couched in her labor’s pride,
She bears a king. Turned bitter
.
And sallow as any lemon,
The other, wry virgin to the last,
Goes graveward with flesh laid waste,
Worm-husbanded, yet no woman;
.
Inscribed above her head, these lines:
While flowering, ladies, scant love not
Lest all your fruit
Be but this black outcrop of stones.
.
“Two Sisters of Persephone” appeared in Poetry magazine’s January 1957 issue
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October 28
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1946 – Sharon Thesen born in Tisdale, Saskatchewan, but her family moved to British Colombia when she was six; Canadian poet, academic, and anthology editor; her 2000 poetry collection, A Pair of Scissors, won the Pat Lowther Award, presented by the League of Canadian Poets. In 2012, she became Professor Emerita of Creative Writing at the University of British Columbia, and now runs the Pinecone Poetry Workshops. Her many poetry collections include Artemis Hates Romance; Holding the Pose; Confabulations; The Beginning of the Long Dash; The Pangs of Sunday; The Good Bacteria; Oyama Pink Shale; and The Receiver.
Looking Something Up in the Dictionary
by Sharon Thesen
.
It gives me such great pleasure
to spin my office chair around to face the bookshelf
and pull out Webster’s Seventh New Collegiate Dictionary
with the softening navy-blue leather covers
.
heavy in the hand, but happy to fall open at any page—
.
to look up the word laconic which I thought
described some recent poems, but then I wondered
what laconic actually means.
.
It turns out it means what I thought it did,
“terseness, sparing of words.” What a strange thing
it is to open a dictionary inherited via one’s ex-husband
in the long-ago divorce—
.
& to wonder how he might feel now so far away
to see his grandmother’s handwriting on the flyleaf
in blue fountain-pen ink
some words she’d wanted to look up:
.
nostalgia, arthritis, recluse.
.
“Looking Something Up in the Dictionary” from The Pangs of Sunday, © 1990 by Sharon Thesen – McClelland & Stewart
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October 29
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1933 – Valerie Worth Bahike born in Philadelphia, and grew up in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, where her father taught biology at Swarthmore College; American young readers author and poet who wrote under her maiden name. Her family moved to Tampa, Florida (1947-1950) before spending a year in Bangalore, India. Valerie Worth earned an English degree with high honors at Swarthmore in 1955, and then married George Bahike, who became an English Professor at Kirkland College, now part of Hamilton College. At Kirkland, she met Natalie Babbitt who became the illustrator for most of Worth’s books, including her Small Poems series, and the posthumously published Peacock and Other Poems (2002). Valerie Worth died of cancer at age 60 in July, 1994.
My Cat
by Valerie Worth
.
Tamsine roams
The garden
Like an old
Familiar spirit,
.
Visiting the
Weedy fence,
Examining
The bushes,
.
Noting how
The wind revolves
And where the
Sun advances,
.
Printing every
Shimmer, every
Shadow, with
Her presence,
.
Which will
Stay to haunt
The place when
She is gone.
.
“My Cat” from Pug and Other Animal Poems, © 2013 by the Estate of Valerie Worth –Farrar, Straus and Giroux
1939 – Malay Roy Choudhury (also spelled Roychoudhury) born in a slum Patna, Bihar Provence, British India; Indian Bengali poet, playwright, short story writer, essayist, and novelist. As a child, he was sent a Catholic school, then a seminary run by a Hindu sect. Choudhury was a leading figure of the “Hungry Generation” AKA the Hungryalist Movement, which challenged contemporary literary norms, political authority, and championed the refugees from the Partition of India and Pakistan who were receiving no government assistance. Allen Ginsberg visited Malay in 1963. Choudhury and 10 others were arrested in 1965, charged with obscenity, and Choudhury was jailed for a month. He wrote three dramas; several poetry collections, including Medhar Batanukul Ghungur, Naamgandho, and Illot; an autobiography; and translated into Bengali works by William Blake, Arthur Rimbaud, Jean Cocteau, and Allen Ginsberg. In later life, he was offered several awards and honors, but declined them all on principle. Malay Roy Choudhury died at age 83 in October 2023.
Existence (Astitwa)
by Malay Roy Choudhury
.
Midnight knock on the pin-drop door
You have to replace a dead under-trial
Shall I put on a shirt/ Gulp a few morsels?
Slip off through the terrace/
.
Door-planks shatter and wall plaster flakes
Masked men enter and en-flank
'What's the name of that squint-eyed guy
Where's he hiding? Speak up, or come with us! '
.
I choke in terror. Sir, yesterday at sunrise
He was lynched by a mob.
.
– translated from Bengali, translator not credited
“Existence” from Selected Poems of Malay Roy Choudhury, © 2021 by Malay Roy Choudhury – edited by Tanvir Ratul – Antivirus Publication
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October 30
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1871 – Paul Valery born in Sète on the Mediterranean coast of France, but raised in nearby Montpellier; French poet, essayist, philosopher, and public speaker. He lived in Paris most of life. In addition to his poetry and fiction, his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, science, and current events. Valéry was to the Académie Française in 1925, and later represented France on cultural matters at the League of Nations. During WWII, the Vichy regime stripped him of some distinctions because of his quiet refusal to collaborate with Vichy and the German occupation. Valéry died at age 73 in Paris in July 1945, and given a state funeral in the newly liberated city. His poetry is available in English translation in Collected Works of Paul Valery, Volume 1: Poems and The Idea of Perfection: The Poetry and Prose of Paul Valéry, a bilingual edition published in 2020.
The footsteps
by Paul Valery
.
Your steps, children of my silence,
Holy, slowly placed,
Towards the bed of my vigilance
Proceed mute and frozen.
.
Pure person, divine shadow,
How sweet are your steps held back!
Gods!…all the gifts I guess
Come to me on these bare feet!
.
If, from your protruding lips,
You prepare to appease him,
To the inhabitant of my thoughts
The food of a kiss,
.
Do not hasten this tender act,
Sweetness of being and not being,
Because I lived to wait for you,
And my heart was only your steps.
.
– translator not credited
1881 – Elizabeth Madox Roberts born in Perryville, Kentucky ; American poet and author; known for her novels, which were mainly set in rural Kentucky. Most notable are The Time of Man, The Great Meadow, A Buried Treasure, and Black Is My Truelove’s Hair. She was diagnosed with terminal Hodgkin’s disease in1936, and died at age 59 in 1941.
Babes In The Woods
by Elizabeth Madox Roberts
.
The two little children that died long ago
Away in the woods on the top of a hill–
And a good little robin that knew all about it
Came with strawberry leaves in her bill,
.
To cover them up, and she kept very quiet
And brought the leaves one at a time, I think.
And some of the leaves would have little holes in them,
And some would be red and pink.
.
And these little Babes-in-the-Woods that were dead
Must have lain very still, and they heard all the talk
That the bees would be saying to more little bees,
And maybe they even could hear the ants walk.
.
And they could look out through a crack in the leaves
And see little bushes and some of the sky.
They could see robin coming with leaves in her mouth,
And they watched for her when she went by.
.
“Babes in the Woods” from Under the Tree, originally published in 1922
1961 – Leo Yankevich born in Sharon, Pennsylvania, but grew up in Farrell, a steel town in western Pennsylvania, American ex-pat poet, translator, and editor of The New Formalist (2001-2010). He studied History and Polish Studies at Alliance College, receiving a BA in 1984. After the fall of the Iron Curtain in 1989, he settled permanently in Gliwice, an industrial city in Upper Silesia in southern Poland. He died at age 57 in December 2018.
At a Suicide’s Grave (1869-1897)
by Leo Yankevich
.
Here where this graveyard comes to a sudden end
you lie forgotten beside a crumbling wall,
yet sometimes at night a nova calls you friend,
and the moon itself recalls your rise and fall.
.
“At a Suicide’s Grave (1869-1897)” from The Unfinished Crusade: New and Selected Poems, © 2000 by Leo Yankevich – The Mandrake Press
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October 31
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1852 – Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman born in Randolph, Massachusetts ; prolific American feminist novelist, poet, and short story and children’s writer. She was a constant reader, and hated domestic chores. She wrote stories and verses from her early teens, then earned money from their publication in magazines to help her family after their dry goods business failed. Her mother died when she was 24, and her father died when she was 31, so she moved in with her friend Mary Wales, and earned a living writing. Her stories challenged the conventional restraints on women, featuring strong independent female characters, and themes like the struggles of rural women. At age 49, she married Dr. Charles M. Freeman, a prosperous man seven years her junior, but he was addicted to alcohol and sleeping powders, and they were soon legally separated. He died in the New Jersey State Hospital in 1923, leaving her only a dollar in his will. In April 1926, Wilkins Freeman was the first recipient of the William Dean Howells Medal for Distinction in Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She died at age 77 of a heart attack in March, 1930, and is now best known for her short stories, especially her tales of the supernatural. Her poems were published individually in popular magazines of the time.
A Silver Sloop in the Sky
by Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman
.
Oh, merrily now, my deary,
Willy Wisp through the marsh doth flit,
And he holdeth his little lantern,
Lest he fall in a way-side pit.
.
He sleeps 'mongst the tall blue lilies,
Willy Wisp, in the marsh all day,
But at night he lighteth his lantern,
And frolicketh out to play.
.
Through the field, with their golden torches,
The fire-flies come in a troop;
Low over the trees is sailing
The moon like a silver sloop.
.
Yes, the fire-flies come with their torches;
And now through the bearded grass
The glowworms bring their yellow lamps,
That the fairies may see to pass.
.
The fairies were ferried from elf-land
In a boat on a silver wire,
And they prance thro' the fields on their milk-white steeds,
And their silver bugles wind;
.
You may see the moon like a silver wheel
Roll over the road of blue;
You may see the moon like a silver sloop
In a waveless ocean, too.
.
But look in your childhood, deary,
Or your heart may grow so old
That you cannot see the fairies dance,
Or the glowworms' lamps of gold.
.
And you so low for wisdom
In after-years may stoop;
You will see the moon like a barren globe.
But never a silver sloop.
.
“A Silver Sloop in the Sky” appeared in October 11, 1887 issue of Harper’s Young People
1876 – Natalie Clifford Barney born in Dayton, Ohio; American playwright, novelist and poet; lived openly as a lesbian in Paris for 60 years; formed a “Women’s Academy” (L’Académie des Femmes); she was a feminist, a pacifist, and a free love advocate; her weekly Salon brought together expat writers and artists, with their French counterparts, from modernists to members of the French Academy.
The Phantom Guest
by Natalie Clifford Barney
.
We lay in shade diaphanous
And spoke the light that burns in us
.
As in the glooming’s net I caught her,
She shimmered like reflected water!
.
Romantic and emphatic moods
Are not for her whom life eludes…
.
Its vulgar tinsel round her fold?
She’d rather shudder with the cold,
.
Attend just this elusive hour,
A show in a shadow bower,
.
A moving imagery so fine,
It must have been her soul near mine
.
And so we blended and possessed
Each in each the phantom guest,
.
Inseparate, we scarcely met;
Yet other love-nights we forget!
.
“The Phantom Guest” from Poems and Poèmes: Autres Alliances by Natalie Clifford Barney – Forgotten Books Classic Reprint 2018
1935 – Colleen J. McElroy born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a military family that moved often; African American author of short stories, plays, television scripts, poetry, and nonfiction. She earned a PhD in ethnolinguistic patterns of dialect differences and oral traditions from the University of Washington. McElroy was director of speech and hearing services at Western Washington University before becoming a professor of English and creative writing at the University of Washington. Her poetry collections include Sleeping with the Moon, which won the 2008 PEN Oakland National Literary Award; Travelling Music; Queen of the Ebony Isles; and Winters without Snow.
Lothar’s Wife
by Colleen J. McElroy
.
he’s only a smart-ass when he’s home
with Mandrake
he’s silent and obedient as a snail
his bald pate bowing into the cape’s
trail and dreaming
of tales he’ll bore me with
his one night home
.
once a month
that’s what I get like clockwork
and always on the full moon
half my allowance he reserves
for sheets, tearing them with his teeth
to vent the forced silence
of those other twenty-odd days
.
did I say odd
it’s that one day that’s odd
his coming home full of half-tricks
he’s picked up from the master
the hypnotic hunger
he so willingly tries on me
he claims he stole me, bought me
.
claims he’s Zulu, Bantu, Beja
depending on the hour, day, or year
says I was the black spot
in the white of his eye
the speck he turned into leopard
that unwittingly turned into woman
neither of us no longer knows what’s real
.
and my mother beats her fat tongue
against her gums
as each month I try to reveal the puzzle
stroking the lines from his hairless
obsidian crown
I hear her rumbling around in the next room
I soothe his sweet head and she moans
.
heaven protect us from all the things
to which we can become accustomed
.
“Lothar’s Wife” from What Madness Brought Me Here: New and Selected Poems, 1968-1988, © 1990 by Colleen J. McElroy – Wesleyan University Press
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November 1
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1989 – Kameisha Jerae Hodge born in Washington DC as the oldest of eleven children, but the family was split up, and she, with her mother and a brother, went through a period of homelessness, often staying in shelters or with relatives. Hodge is a Black American author, poet, and spoken word artist. In 2019, she became founder and CEO of Sovereign Noir Publications, seeking to elevate Black women’s voices. She began entering spoken word competitions in middle school, and met Yolanda D. Coleman-Body, who encouraged her to write. Hodge joined the Writing Organization Reaching Dynamic Students, a student arts group, and performed at mic nights and poetry slams. While studying English at Lafayette College, she got a summer internship at MTV’s development department. After earning a BA from Lafayette in 2012, she pursued an MA in English and creative writing at Southern New Hampshire University. Her poetry collections include: Atlas of Consciousness; Double Consciousness: An Autoethnic Guide to My Black American Experience; and Woman. Queer. Black.
nobody
by Kameisha Jerae Hodge
.
i’ve decided to marry. we have been destined to be together,
see –oh sorry – I haven’t introduced you yet. I apologize.
.
accompanying me in life will be someone who has come to be
known as nobody. i love nobody and nobody loves me. when
arguments arise, nobody will flee. nobody shadows me like a
dark night stalker at the dawn of dusk, hawking over me at the
first sign of distrust.
.
nobody holds me as if I were the last of a dying breed of faith-
ful wives . . . as if I were the missing piece—found— for the
puzzle of his life. nobody kisses me as if i’m his lifeline, like he
has wanted me for a lifetime. he wants another being’s body
with which to intertwine— mine. nobody and i were made for
each other. nobody and i
.
we make the perfect couple.
.
“nobody” from Atlas of Consciousness, © 2010 by Kameisha Jerae Hodge – Sovereign Noir Publications
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November 2
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1919 – Jorge de Sena, born as Jorge Cândido Alves Rodrigues Telles Grilo Raposo de Abreu de Sena, Lisbon, Portugal; Portuguese poet, critic, essayist, novelist, dramatist, and translator, and professor. He received a degree in civil engineering from the University of Porto, but was already publishing poems at age 18. De Sena’s liberal and outspoken convictions regarding Portuguese politics during the Salazar dictatorship led to his exile in Brazil in 1959, then, after the military coup in Brazil in 1964, to the United States in 1965. He died at age 58 in California in June 1978. His poetry collections include: Coroa da Terra; Fidelidade; Arte de Música; and Visão Perpétua (published posthumously).
Iberian Gazelle
by Jorge de Sena
Suspended on three legs (as one is lost),
she remains balanced in bronze
on the discreet museum pedestal.
The ears lifted, as if hearing,
the feet making a reluctant start
while a vacant look strays, distracted,
into liquid rustlings of a forest.
The trees fell long ago. And times
lost without remembrance when
mountainyard villages died
– their traces erased, stone by stone.
And long ago, the people, too
– but which people? – raped, invaded, in blood,
fire, slavery, or simply ravished
by love for men in tall ships
with long oars and billowing sails, the people
vanished, without commotion, trading
their forests for cliffs above heave
of sea by smooth coves or beaches,
their clear fountains for deep rivers
sinuously cutting the green.
This was long ago; the gazelle remains,
with her small fine nose, lithe frame,
and almost human breast. Maybe
she was fit offering for some god? Or was she
the goddess graced with gifts?
Or was she merely gazelle, pure
idea of Iberian gazelle?
On three legs she remains suspended.
.
“Iberian Gazelle” from Metamorphoses, © 1963 by Jorge de Sena – translation © 1991 by Francisco Cota Fagundes and James Houlihan – Copper Beach Press, 1991 edition
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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