Morning Open Thread: The Poets Must Give Us Imagination of Peace

by officebss for MOT - Morning Open Thread

Community

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

Monday, Oct. 20, 2025 Monday, Oct. 20, 2025 at 3:28:18am PDT

“Aggression unopposed becomes a contagious disease.” – Jimmy Carter

________________________________________________________

"All tyranny, bigotry, aggression,
and cruelty are wrong, and whenever
we see it, we must never be silent."
— Ingrid Newkirk,
co-founder of People for the
Ethical Treatment of Animals

________________________________________________________

“If you want to release your aggression, get up
and dance. That's what rock and roll is all about.”
– Chuck Berry

________________________________________________________

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.

Morning Open Thread is looking for contributors —
either occasional, or weekly. If interested, please
contact officebss or Ozarkblue for more information.

So grab your cuppa, and join in.

__________________________________

Thirteen poets born in October,
some had lives far too short,
others lived long, and some are
still with us. But all of them have
something to tell us about the
perilous times we now live in.

__________________________________

October 19
__________________________________

1879 – Emma Bell Miles born; American short story writer, poet, and artist; published The Spirit of the Mountains in 1905, which contained stories, travels narratives, memoir, and cultural analysis of Southern Appalachia. A section of her book on Appalachian music, which first appeared as an article in Harper’s Monthly in 1904, is probably the first on the subject printed in a popular magazine. Her journals have also appeared in print. She died of tuberculosis at age 39 in January 1919.

Music and Fire

by Emma Bell Miles
^.
The night is long, the day was short.
The black frost locks our world;
Against our cabin’s lowly roof
The wind’s keen hate is hurled.
The stark pines’ harp-string hum resounds
Through all the glittering night;
But here the fiddle’s song is higher,
And louder roars our hickory fire,
And brighter gleams its light.
^.
What though our bread is coarse and scant,
Or bare and rude our walls?
Look where on smoky log or chink
The scarlet splendor falls.
Hark to the banjo’s merry din!
So must our souls be fed:
For we, however poor, can yet
The hungry winter’s woes forget,
For music barter bread.
^.

“Music and Fire” from Strains from a Dulcimore, by Emma Bell Miles, published in 1930 by The Bozart Press

__________________________________

1996 – Anna Leader born in Bellingham, Washington; Luxembourger poet and novelist who writes in English; daughter of 2 schoolteachers, who moved the family to Luxembourg in 2000 when Anna was four. Leader won the first prize at the ‘Concours Jeune Printemps’ in 2012 for her poem “Elegy for Two.” Her poetry collection Squeak Like Dolls, and her debut novel Tentative were both published in 2013. She won the Luxembourgish Concours littéraire national in 2014, for her historical novel A Several World; again in 2015, for her poetry collection A Lifetime Lies; and a third time in 2018 for her play Outlast.

a cat talks about cat-poetry

by Anna Leader
^.
“contrary to popular belief, we do read
what’s written about us, and we do take heed
(not only to know what is said—we get bored):
that fellow baudelaire for example we adored,
he understood our “mystique” and how we keep
aspiring to be sphinxes in our sleep.
we liked eliot, too, although he poked fun—
(those names, those rhymes, those puns!
and the sellout to the west end. rather cheap.)
the bit in prufrock, admittedly, was dear
when he talked about the evening, and the fog.
& let’s not mention that nonsense by that edward lear!
(as if a cat and an owl were a compatible pair!
he may as well have married pussy off to a dog.)”

“a cat talks about cat-poetry” © by Anna Leader, is featured on Poems, The Poetry Society website

__________________________________

October 20
__________________________________

1854 – Arthur Rimbaud born as Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud, in Charleville-Mézières in northern France near the Belgium border; French poet who influenced modern literature, and was a precursor of surrealism. His father, a serving officer, met and married his mother after a short courtship. Captain Rimbaud stopped coming back on leave after seven years. There was no divorce, but he vanished from his children’s lives, and Rimbaud’s mother imposed her will, demanding scholastic excellence from her two sons, even punishing them by withholding food. Arthur excelled in Greek, Latin, and French literature, and began writing poetry. After the Franco-Prussian War started in 1870, 16-year-old Rimbaud ran away from home, stealing books and alcohol. He sent a letter and two of his poems to poet Paul Verlaine, a leader of the French Symbolist movement. One of the poems was “Le Dormeur du Val” (The Sleeper in the Valley). Verlaine responded, “Come, dear great soul. We await you …” and sent him a one-way ticket to Paris. Though Verlaine was married, the two began a torrid but brief affair, indulging in absinthe, hashish, and opium. Parisian literary society was scandalized by this new enfant terrible, and Verlaine’s abandonment of his wife and new-born son. They went to London, scraping by on meager earnings from teaching and an allowance from Verlaine’s mother. Verlaine soon abandoned Rimbaud, and returned to his wife. Rimbaud continued on his path of self-destruction, but ultimately died of cancer at age 37 in November 1891. A number of his poems were published individually, or in anthologies, but Une Saison en Fenfer (A Season in Hell) and Illuminations were collections published before his death, and several of his poems and prose works were published after his death.

The Sleeper In The Valley

by Arthur Rimbaud
^.
A small green valley where a slow stream flows
And leaves long strands of silver on the bright
Grass; from the mountaintop stream the Sun’s
Rays; they fill the hollow full of light.
^.
A soldier, very young, lies open-mouthed,
A pillow made of fern beneath his head,
Asleep; stretched in the heavy undergrowth,
Pale in his warm, green, sun-soaked bed.
^.
His feet among the flowers, he sleeps. His smile
Is like an infant’s – gentle, without guile.
Ah, Nature, keep him warm; he may catch cold.
^.
The humming insects don’t disturb his rest;
He sleeps in sunlight, one hand on his breast;
At peace. In his side there are two red holes.
^.

– translator not credited

__________________________________

1950 – Susan Deer Cloud, a mixed-lineage Catskill Indian, born in Livingston Manor, NY, to Joseph R. Hauptfleisch and Dorothea Mae Lare; American poet, fiction writer, essayist, and former academic. She currently lives year-round in the Catskill Mountains. Deer Cloud previously published under her then-married name Susan Clements. Her poetry collections include Before Language; Hunger Moon; Braiding Starlight; Confluence; and The Broken Hoop.

Midnight Moving Towards Winter Solstice

by Susan Deer Cloud
^.
After we get off the phone
your voice lingers, almost
like some soft night bird
in somber lamplight.
^.
Past bedroom window
a quarter moon, beneath it
a star or planet.
^.
If I could remember
how to read late winter sky,
maybe I’d know where
I’ll be moving to,
^.
that move I told you about
when our voices braided together
through three thousand miles
of witching hour air. You tired
^.
and I weary, trying not to feel fear
when my life balances on a high wire
of not owning an oversized house, too big car,
pipedream that possessing things will keep me safe.
^.
Friend, your voice seems more beautiful
to me than anything I could ever buy,
moon out there makes me shine,
wide awake dream breaks open my heart.
^.
Only it terrifies, this moving on again,
this being reminded we are all shape-shifting
stardust, and I just another Indian
^.
with nowhere to die.

__________________________________

1981 – Mai Der Vang born in Fresno, CA, daughter of Hmong refugees fleeing Laos; Hmong-American poet. She earned a BS in English from UC Berkeley, and an MFA in creative writing-poetry from Columbia. Her poetry collection, Afterland, won the Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award in 2016, and her second book, Yellow Rain, was a finalist for the 2022 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Yellow Rain is myotoxin trichothecene, which was dropped on the Hmong, who were fighting against the Communists, after the U.S withdrawal.

Departures

by Mai Der Vang
^.
Say goodbye at a border, a barrier, a checkpoint
fenced with metal gates.
^.
Come back to these spaces. Gather all possessions.
^.
Or don’t say goodbye. There is no measure to hold
minutes when the river has arrived.
^.
The Mekong has made its way. Everyone crosses
with marrow of one another.
^.
Bombs shred open veins of gardens and fields,
missiles among homeless,
^.
stateless wandering wreckage of imported wars.
^.
From one country comes one government
with one means.
^.
What cost for public service of bystanding eyes?
^.
What debt to wake the blood?
^.
Breeze solidifies with night jasmine in the cold.
^.
At the separation, refuse to say goodbye.
Do not concede the acceptance of this end.
^.
Whatever the trajectory. However the reckoning.
^.

__________________________________

October 21
__________________________________

1907 – Nikos Engonopoulos born just north of Athens, Greece; prolific Greek writer, poet, painter, and translator. His family visited Constantinople (now Istanbul) in the summer of 1914, then stayed there through WWI. He began studying in Paris, but was called up for national military service in 1927-1928. He then spent two years in Athens working during the day, and going to school at night. Engonopoulos worked as a designer at the Ministry of Public Works (1930-1936) while studying painting. His father died in Constantinople in 1937. In 1938, three of his poems were published in the journal O Kyklos, and he published his first poetry collection, Do Not Distract the Driver. He worked as a set and costume designer at a theatre, published a second volume of poetry, and his paintings were part of a group exhibition. In 1941, he was called up to the Albanian Front. By 1942, his paintings are being shown in several exhibitions, and his reputation is established. In 1945, he begins teaching design and drawing at the National Technical University, but also continues to write both prose and poetry. In 1973, he was named Professor Emeritus, and retired. Engonopoulos was awarded the Cross of the Commander of the Phoenix, and won the State Prize for Poetry twice. He died at age 78 in October 1985. In 2007, a retrospective of his art and poetry was published to commemorate the 100th anniversary of his birth.

Poetry 1948

by Nikos Engonopoulos
^.
this age
of civil strife
is no age
for poetry
and such like:
when something is about
to
be written
it's
as if
it were being written
on the other side
of death announcements
^.
which is why
my poems
are so bitter
(and when - in any case - were they not?)
and are
- above all -
also
so
few
^.

“Poetry 1948” from Selected Poems by Nikos Engonopoulos, translated by David Connolly – Harvard Department of the Classics, 2018 Bilingual edition

__________________________________

1947 – Ai was born as Florence Anthony in Albany, Texas but spent her impoverished early years in Tucson, Arizona; American poet and educator; her book Vice: New and Selected Poems, won the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry. She describes herself as ½ Japanese, ⅛ Choctaw-Chickasaw, ¼ Black, as well as Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche. She attended the University of Arizona and the M.F.A. program at UC Irvine. After being a visiting professor at several colleges, she taught at Oklahoma State University until her death at age 62 from breast cancer in March 2010. Her poetry collections include: Killing Floor, the 1978 Lamont Poetry Selection; Sin, winner of an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation; Vice, which won the 1999 National Book Award for Poetry; and No Surrender, published posthumously in September 2010. She died of breast cancer at age 62 in March 2010.

Disregard

by Ai

^.
Overhead, the match burns out,
but the chunk of ice in the back seat
keeps melting from imagined heat,
while the old Hudson tiptoes up the slope.
My voile blouse, so wet it is transparent,
like one frightened hand, clutches my chest.
The bag of rock salt sprawled beside me wakes, thirsty
and stretches a shaky tongue toward the ice.

^.
I press the gas pedal hard.
I’ll get back to the house, the dirt yard, the cesspool,
to you out back, digging a well
you could fill with your sweat,
though there is not one reason I should want to.
You never notice me until the end of the day,
when your hand is on my knee
and the ice cream, cooked to broth,
is hot enough to burn the skin off my touch.
^.

__________________________________

October 22
__________________________________

1919 – Doris Lessing born to British parents in Kermanshah, Kermanshah Province, Iran; British-Zimbabwean novelist, screenwriter, playwright, essayist, poet, and socialist. In 1925, her family moved to what was then Southern Rhodesia. When she won 2007 Nobel Prize in Literature at age 87, she was the oldest person to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature. Best known for her novel The Grass Is Singing, for her five novel Children of Violence series, and The Golden Notebook, considered a feminist classic. Her two poetry collections are Fourteen Poems and The Wolf People. Doris Lessing died at age 94 in November 2013.

What Does Poetry Save You From

by Doris Lessing
^.
From the pale silence
of morning and the din
of afternoon.
^.
From the flight into darkness
of those I continue
to love.
^.
From my inarticulate body
and the syllables
that clog my mouth.
^.
From having to say
“nothing” when a stranger
asks me what I do.
^.
From my worst sins.
From the failure
Of any other absolution.
^.

__________________________________

1929 – Stanley Cooperman born in New York City, who became a Canadian citizen in 1972; American-Canadian poet, literary critic, and academic. He earned a BA and an MA from New University, and a PhD from Indiana University. Cooperman taught at the University of Tehran through a Fulbright Award, and at several U.S. Universities. He committed suicide at age 46 in April 1976. His poetry collections include: The Owl Behind the Door; Cappelbaum’s Dance; Canadian Gothic and Other Poems; and Greco’s Last Book: Selected Poems, published posthumously.

The Target

by Stanley Cooperman
^.
I am cold.
Trees do not give me pleasure,
nor the garden
waiting for its change of season.
Without wife, without children,
I am a creature
without skin in a fierce rain.
My eyes see nothing,
and my hands
move to no purpose.
Therefore
I ask all those who are alone
who wear their lives
like a loose garment:
what shall I do
with my days and nights?
what shall I do
in the small hours,
when the world becomes a mirror
I cannot look upon?
^.

__________________________________

October 23
__________________________________

1942 – Douglas Dunn born in Inchinnan, Scotland, UK; Scottish poet, academic, and critic. He was educated at the Scottish School of Librarianship, and worked as a librarian before attending the University of Hull. From which he graduated with a First Class Honours degree. His first poetry collection, Terry Street, was published in 1969, and won a Scottish Arts Council Book Award and a Somerset Maugham Award. He then worked in Hull's Brynmor Jones Library. In 1991, Dunn became a Professor of English at the University of St Andrews, then Director of the University's Scottish Studies Centre in 1993 until his retirement in 2008. He is now an Honorary Professor at St Andrews, still undertaking postgraduate supervision in the School of English. His other poetry collections include: Love or Nothing (winner of the 1976 Geoffrey Faber Memorial Prize); Elegies; Northlight; New Selected Poems 1964-2002; Invisible Ink; and The Noise of a Fly.

Curmudgeon

by Douglas Dunn
^.
He is a man for whom everyone’s a trespasser.
Co-existence? He doesn’t believe in it.
Give you the time of day? Not one minute.
He is happy to be a grinning contrarian.
Music, he claims, gives him indigestion.
He dismisses several generations
Including most members of his own.
He is a virtuoso concert pessimist
Who even disagrees with his own agreements.
He is the exact opposite of mellow.
You never see him sitting in the sun.
And as for ‘foreigners’—oh-ho!—
He is the Keeper of terms like ’wog’ and ‘dago’.
Longevity has failed to teach him benevolence.
I notice his visible weak spot
Spilling from the back of his eternal cap—
And I think he deserves my parting shot:
And so I say to him, ‘Get your hair cut.’
^.

__________________________________

October 24
__________________________________

1923 – Denise Levertov born in Ilford in east London; British-American poet. She married an American in 1947, and moved to the U.S. in 1948. Known for her anti-Vietnam war poems in the 1960s and 1970s, which also included themes of destruction by greed, racism, and sexism. Her later poetry reflects her conversion to Catholicism. No matter the subject, she was always an acute observer, and wrote with a rare combination of economy and grace. Levertov was the author of 24 books of poetry, as well as non-fiction, and served as poetry editor of The Nation and Mother Jones. She was honored with the Robert Frost Medal in 1990, and the Lannan Literary Award for Poetry in 1993. In 1997, Levertov died from complications of lymphoma at age 74.

Making Peace

by Denise Levertov
^.

A voice from the dark called out,
‘The poets must give us
imagination of peace, to oust the intense, familiar
imagination of disaster. Peace, not only
the absence of war.’
^.
But peace, like a poem,
is not there ahead of itself,
can’t be imagined before it is made,
can’t be known except
in the words of its making,
grammar of justice,
syntax of mutual aid.
^.
A feeling towards it,
dimly sensing a rhythm, is all we have
until we begin to utter its metaphors,
learning them as we speak.
^.
A line of peace might appear
if we restructured the sentence our lives are making,
revoked its reaffirmation of profit and power,
questioned our needs, allowed
long pauses . . .
^.
A cadence of peace might balance its weight
on that different fulcrum; peace, a presence,
an energy field more intense than war,
might pulse then,
stanza by stanza into the world,
each act of living
one of its words, each word
a vibration of light—facets
of the forming crystal.
^.

__________________________________

October 25
__________________________________

1914 – John Berryman born as John Smith in Oklahoma; American poet and scholar noted for The Dream Songs, a collection of 385 eighteen-line lyric poems in three stanzas, which won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. When he was 12 years old, his father shot himself just outside the boy’s bedroom window, which became a recurring subject in his poetry. After his mother remarried, he took his stepfather’s surname. Berryman graduated from Columbia in 1936, then went to study at Cambridge University for two years on a scholarship. In 1948, he published his first important book of poetry, The Dispossessed. After teaching at Harvard and Princeton, he became a professor at the University of Minnesota, where he remained for the rest of his life. In 1956, Homage to Mistress Bradstreet, a “dialogue” with the 17^th century poet Anne Bradstreet, brought more critical acclaim. 77 Dream Songs from 1964 and 1968’s His Dream, His Rest were combined in The Dream Songs in 1969, and became his masterwork. Berryman’s lifelong struggles with alcoholism and depression ended at age 58 in 1972, when he jumped off a Minneapolis bridge a week after New Year’s.

The Traveller

by John Berryman
^.
They pointed me out on the highway, and they said
'That man has a curious way of holding his head.'
^.
They pointed me out on the beach; they said 'That man
Will never become as we are, try as he can.'
^.
They pointed me out at the station, and the guard
Looked at me twice, thrice, thoughtfully & hard.
^.
I took the same train that the others took,
To the same place. Were it not for that look
And those words, we were all of us the same.
I studied merely maps. I tried to name
The effects of motion on the travellers,
I watched the couple I could see, the curse
And blessings of that couple, their destination,
The deception practised on them at the station,
Their courage. When the train stopped and they knew
The end of their journey, I descended too.
^.

__________________________________

1973 – Suheir Hammad born in Amman, Jordan, to Palestinian refugees; her family came to the U.S. when she was five, and she grew up in Brooklyn. Hammad is an American poet, author, playwright, film narrator and performer, and political activist. Hip-hop entrepreneur Russell Simmons signed her for HBO’s Def Poetry Jam because of her poem “First Writing Since” – her reaction to the September 11 attacks. She recited original works on the Def Poetry Jam tour (2002-2003). In 2007, she was cast in her first fiction role in cinema, the Palestinian film Salt of this Sea by Palestinian filmmaker Annemarie Jacir, which debuted as an official selection in the Un Certain Regard competition of the Cannes Film Festival. She has written a memoir, Drops of This Story, and several plays, including Blood Trinity and Libretto. Her poetry collections are Born Palestinian, Born Black/ The Gaza Suite and Zaatar Diva.

What I will

by Suheir Hammad
^.
I will not
dance to your war
drum. I will
not lend my soul nor
my bones to your war
drum. I will
not dance to your
beating. I know that beat.
It is lifeless. I know
intimately that skin
you are hitting. It
was alive once
hunted stolen
stretched. I will
not dance to your drummed
up war. I will not pop
spin break for you. I
will not hate for you or
even hate you. I will
not kill for you. Especially
I will not die
for you. I will not mourn
the dead with murder nor
suicide. I will not side
with you nor dance to bombs
because everyone else is
dancing. Everyone can be
wrong. Life is a right not
collateral or casual. I
will not forget where
I come from. I
will craft my own drum. Gather my beloved
near and our chanting
will be dancing. Our
humming will be drumming. I
will not be played. I
will not lend my name
nor my rhythm to your
beat. I will dance
and resist and dance and
persist and dance. This heartbeat is louder than
death. Your war drum ain’t
louder than this breath.
^.

_________________________________________________

G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!