Morning Open Thread: I Was Born to Tell You Certain Things, Even If No One Really Listens

by officebss for MOT - Morning Open Thread

Community

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

Monday, Nov. 10, 2025 Monday, Nov. 10, 2025 at 3:28:23am PST

“Reality continues to ruin my life.” ― Bill Watterson, Calvin and Hobbes

________________________________________________________

“We are all in this together, by ourselves.”
― Lily Tomlin

________________________________________________________

Life isn't fair, it's just fairer than death, that's all.”
― William Goldman, The Princess Bride

________________________________________________________

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.

__________________________________

13 poets born in November, voices
of the long-dead and the now-living,
telling us Life is ever-changing
yet always the same — at once
profound and ridiculous.

__________________________________

November 9

__________________________________

1818 – Ivan Turgenev born in Oryol (modern-day Oryol Oblast in western Russia), to an aristocratic family; Russian novelist, short story writer, poet, playwright, and translator. After the standard schooling for a son of a gentleman, Turgenev spent one year at the University of Moscow and then moved to the University of Saint Petersburg (1834-1837), to study Classics, Russian literature, and philology. He is best known for his novel Fathers and Sons and his play A Month in the Country. Turgenev underwent cancer surgery in January 1883, but the cancer spread to his spine, and he died at age 64 in September 1883.

We Will Still Fight On

by Ivan Turgenev
^.
What an insignificant trifle may sometimes transform the whole man!
^.
Full of melancholy thought, I walked one day along the highroad.
^.
My heart was oppressed by a weight of gloomy apprehension;
I was overwhelmed by dejection. I raised my head….
Before me, between two rows of tall poplars,
the road darted like an arrow into the distance.
^.
And across it, across this road, ten paces from me, in the golden light
of the dazzling summer sunshine, a whole family of sparrows hopped
one after another, hopped saucily, drolly, self-reliantly!
^.
One of them, in particular, skipped along sideways with desperate energy,
puffing out his little bosom and chirping impudently, as though to say he
was not afraid of any one! A gallant little warrior, really!
^.
And, meanwhile, high overhead in the heavens hovered a hawk, destined,
perhaps, to devour that little warrior.
^.
I looked, laughed, shook myself, and the mournful thoughts flew right away:
pluck, daring, zeal for life I felt anew. Let him, too, hover over me,
^.
My hawk…. We will fight on, and damn it all!

– translator not credited

__________________________________

1928 – Anne Sexton born in Newton, Massachusetts; American poet; 1967 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for her book Live or Die. She co-authored four children’s books with poet Maxine Kumin. Sexton struggled for years with severe bipolar disorder. Her poetry collections include: All My Pretty Ones; Transformations; and The Book of Folly. In October 1974, Anne Sexton put on her mother’s old fur coat, removed all her rings, poured a glass of vodka, locked herself in the garage, and started the engine of her car, committing suicide by carbon monoxide poisoning. She was 45 years old. Her last poetry collection, The Awful Rowing Toward God, was published posthumously.

Just Once

by Anne Sexton
^.
Just once I knew what life was for.
In Boston, quite suddenly, I understood;
walked there along the Charles River,
watched the lights copying themselves,
all neoned and strobe-hearted, opening
their mouths as wide as opera singers;
counted the stars, my little campaigners,
my scar daisies, and knew that I walked my love
on the night green side of it and cried
my heart to the eastbound cars and cried
my heart to the westbound cars and took
my truth across a small humped bridge
and hurried my truth, the charm of it, home
and hoarded these constants into morning
only to find them gone.
^.

__________________________________

1937 – Roger McGough born, one of England’s best-loved poets for both adults and children. He is also an author, playwright, and broadcaster. He began his career as one of the leading Liverpool poets in the 1960s, known collectively for ‘The Mersey Sound.’ They were influenced by Beat poetry and Liverpool’s 1960s culture. His work was featured in The Mersey Sound, a 1967 anthology of poetry by McGough, Brian Patten, and Adrian Henri, which became one of the bestselling poetry anthologies of all time, selling over 500,000 copies. McGough was responsible for much of the humorous dialogue in the Beatles’ animated film Yellow Submarine, although he did not receive an on-screen credit. He has also been a presenter on the BBC Radio4 programme Poetry Please.

The Cats Protection League

by Roger McGough
^.
Midnight. A knock at the door.
Open it? Better had.
Three heavy cats, mean and bad.
^.
They offer protection. I ask, 'What for?'
The Boss-cat snarls, 'You know the score.
Listen man and listen good
^.
If you wanna stay in the neighbourhood,
Pay your dues or the toms will call
And wail each night on the backyard wall.
^.
Mangle the flowers, and as for the lawn
a smelly minefield awaits you at dawn.'
These guys meant business without a doubt
^.
Three cans of tuna, I handed them out.
They then disappeared like bats into hell
Those bad, bad cats from the CPL.
^.

__________________________________

1961 – Jackie Kay born in Edinburgh, Scotland to a Scottish mother and a Nigerian father and was adopted by a couple who lived in Glasgow — he worked for the Communist Party of Great Britain, and she was Scottish secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. Jackie Kay calls her memoir, Red Dust Road, a “love letter” to her adoptive parents. Kay is a Scottish poet, novelist, and playwright. She was the Scottish Makar (Scotland’s National Poet) from 2016 to 2021. Her first collection of poems, The Adoption Papers, won the Saltire Society Award for Best First Book, and a Scottish Arts Council Book Award. Her poetry collections include: Other Lovers; Trumpet; and Life Mask.

Darling

by Jackie Kay
^.
You might forget the exact sound of her voice
or how her face looked when sleeping.
You might forget the sound of her quiet weeping
curled into the shape of a half moon,
^.
when smaller than her self, she seemed already to be leaving
before she left, when the blossom was on the trees
and the sun was out, and all seemed good in the world.
I held her hand and sang a song from when I was a girl —
^.
Heel y'ho boys, let her go boys -
and when I stopped singing she had slipped away,
already a slip of a girl again, skipping off,
her heart light, her face almost smiling.
^.
And what I didn't know or couldn't say then
was that she hadn't really gone.
The dead don't go till you do, loved ones.
The dead are still here holding our hands.
^.

__________________________________

November 10

__________________________________

1954 – Marlene van Niekirk born on a farm in Caledon, Western Cape, South Africa; South African academic, novelist, short story writer, and poet. She writes in Afrikaans, and teaches creative writing at her alma mater, Stellenbosch University in the Western Cape province of South Africa, which offers doctoral degrees in both English and Afrikaans. She also has a degree in philosophy from the University of Amsterdam. She has published two award-winning novels, five poetry collections, and several short story collections. Her novel Agaat (Aye) was inspired by her experiences as a lesbian being treated as an outsider by the Afrikaner community. Much of her work has been translated into English. Her poetry collections include: Sprokkelstar (Sparkling Star); Groenstaar (Green Star); and Kaar (Rain).

Rock Painting

by Marlene van Niekirk
^.
Whoever set you upright here, little quagga foal,
alone on your first legs, a birth moment
no bigger than a hand, wobbly and with lips
parted in fresh bleating, eyeless
in the first light, a mouth tentatively
seeking the udder, whoever posited you here,
Equuleus of the Cederberg, in the first raising
of the rear, in the precarious tensing
of the forequarters, has flung a red balance into the grey
one-way grain of rock, fashioned a gravity
of defencelessness that concatenates us, tourists
of oblivion, in emotion, compassion,
courage, connects us to your first painter
in the unspectacular patriotism of tenderness.
In our navel stirs the same brush, red ochre, eland fat,
in our sight the same dead stars,
we who over the ages emerge from the brown river,
noticing and renaming you, preserve you forever, Celeris,
swiftly vibrating shadow on this liminal rock –
no matter whether you perish, your snout smashed
against the leaden law of the mightier,
or gambol away on lanky legs, lovely, prancing,
in the wine-brown water of time.
^.

__________________________________

November 11

__________________________________

1937 – Alicia Ostriker born in Brooklyn NY; American Jewish feminist poet and scholar; professor of English at Rutgers University since 1972, She is noted for her poetry collections: Once More Out of Darkness, which featured poems about pregnancy and childbirth; A Dream of Springtime; Waiting for the Light; and the feminist classic The Mother-Child Papers, inspired by the birth of her son during the Vietnam War, just weeks after the Kent State shootings. Her collection, The Imaginary Lover, won the William Carlos Williams Award of the Poetry Society of America. Her non-fiction work includes Writing Like a Woman, which explores the poetry of contemporary poets like Anne Sexton, May Swenson and Adrienne Rich; and The Nakedness of the Fathers: Biblical Vision and Revisions, which takes a look at the Torah — which was followed by For the Love of God. In 2018, she was named as the New York State Poet.

Matisse, Too

by Alicia Ostriker
^.
Matisse, too, when the fingers ceased to work,
Worked larger and bolder, his primary colors celebrating
The weddings of innocence and glory, innocence and glory
^.
Monet when the cataracts blanketed his eyes
Painted swirls of rage, and when his sight recovered
Painted water lilies, Picasso claimed
^.
I do not seek, I find, and stuck to that story
About himself, and made that story stick.
Damn the fathers. We are talking about defiance.
^.

__________________________________

1946 – Wing Tek Lum born in Honolulu, Hawaii; American poet, realtor, and former social worker. In the late 1960s, while studying engineering and art at Brown University, he joined the protests against the Vietnam War, and was arrested at the Pentagon during a march on Washington. After graduating from Brown, he attended the Union Theological Seminary, and graduated with a Masters in Divinity in 1973, then spent three years as a social worker in New York City’s Chinatown. In 1976, he moved back to Honolulu, where he and his brother run his family’s real estate company, and he is also the business manager for Bamboo Ridge Publishing, which has published his poetry books Expounding the Doubtful Points, and The Nanjing Massacre: Poems, which was inspired by Iris Chang’s non-fiction book The Rape of Nanking. Lum was honored with an American Book Award in 1988, and an Elliot Cades Award for Literature in 2013.

Plum Blossoms

by Wing Tek Lum
^.
Cold mountain winds scour the valley.
A hush descends upon the hard earth,
^.
betraying no tears.
The gaunt plum hugs the river.
^.
Its branches, shorn of leaves,
reach out like stark cries
^.
in the Winter night, a spider’s agony.
Yet nubs of blossoms
^.
nudge through the crinkled bark
on one twig, then another.
^.
Buds nestle in crooks and crevices,
white as frost, grudging smiles,
^.
a compassion nourished from within,
seeking air, seeking light.
^.

__________________________________

November 12

__________________________________

1651 – Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz born in San Miguel Nepantla, New Spain (now Mexico); Hieronymite nun, self-taught scholar, feminist philosopher, composer, and poet. She was called “The Mexican Phoenix.” Her criticism of misogyny and the hypocrisy of men led to her condemnation by the Bishop of Puebla, and in 1694 she was forced to sell her collection of books and focus on charity towards the poor; she died at age 46, in April the next year, from the plague while nursing her sister nuns.

Sor Juana’s poem responding to a man who questioned the legitimacy of her birth:

Tonic for a Pompous Ass

by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz
^.
Not to have an honest father
would be shameful, I’d agree,
if I had made my father rather
than my father making me.
^.
Your mother, so compassionate,
saw to it that you’d succeed
a host of father candidates
so you could claim the one you need.
^.

__________________________________

1906 – George Dillon born in Jacksonville, Florida; American Jazz age poet, translator, and editor at Poetry magazine. His family moved to Kentucky, Ohio, and Missouri before settling in Chicago. He met Edna St. Vincent Millay early in his career, and their love affair is chronicled in his collection The Flowering Stone, and her sonnet sequence Fatal Interview. The Flowering Stone won the 1932 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Dillon was an associate editor at Poetry magazine. When founding editor Harriet Monroe died in 1936, he took over as editor (1936-1949). He also translated plays by Jean Racine, and worked with Millay on translations of Charles Baudelaire’s Les Fleurs du Mal. George Dillon died at age 61 in 1968.

To Losers

by George Dillon
.
Let loneliness be mute. Accuse
Only the wind for what you lose,
Only the wind has ever known
Where anything you lost has gone.
It is the wind whose breath shall come
To quench tall-flaming trees and numb
The narrow bones of birds. It is
The wind whose dissipating kiss
Disbands the soft-assembled rose.
It is the wordless wind that knows
Where every kind of beauty goes.
^.
And if you lose love in the end
Say it was taken by the wind.
^.

__________________________________

November 13

__________________________________

1850 – Robert Louis Stevenson born in Edinburgh, Scotland; Scottish novelist, essayist, poet, and travel writer. Known for Treasure Island; Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde; Kidnapped; and A Child’s Garden of Verses. In spite of ill-health which left him frequently bed-ridden, he traveled widely, in Europe, the United States, and the South Pacific, then spent his last years in Samoa, where he died at age 44 of a stroke in December 1894.

Winter-Time

by Robert Louis Stevenson
^.
Late lies the wintry sun a-bed,
A frosty, fiery sleepy-head;
Blinks but an hour or two; and then,
A blood-red orange, sets again.
^.
Before the stars have left the skies,
At morning in the dark I rise;
And shivering in my nakedness,
By the cold candle, bathe and dress.
^.
Close by the jolly fire I sit
To warm my frozen bones a bit;
Or with a reindeer-sled, explore
The colder countries round the door.
^.
When to go out, my nurse doth wrap
Me in my comforter and cap;
The cold wind burns my face, and blows
Its frosty pepper up my nose.
^.
Black are my steps on silver sod;
Thick blows my frosty breath abroad;
And tree and house, and hill and lake,
Are frosted like a wedding-cake.
^.

__________________________________

1946 – Wanda Coleman born as Wanda Evans in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles; Black American poet, short story, and soap opera script writer. Her poetry began to be published in a local newspaper when she was 13. By age 20, she was married and had two children, but went to writing workshops on the weekends. By 1969, she was divorced, and supporting her children by waiting tables and doing typing jobs. Her first published poetry volume was a chapbook, Art in the Court of the Blue Fag, in 1977, andher first full-length book of poetry, published two years later, was Mad Dog Black Lady. Her other collections include Heavy Daughter Blues and African Sleeping Sickness, both mixes of poetry and short stories; Ostinato Vamps; Bathwater Wine; and Mercurochrome. She died in November 2013, just before her 67^th birthday. Wicked Enchantment: Selected Poems was published posthumously in 2020.

Dear Mama (4)

by Wanda Coleman
^.
when did we become friends?
it happened so gradual i didn’t notice
maybe i had to get my run out first
take a big bite of the honky world and choke on it
maybe that’s what has to happen with some uppity
youngsters
if it happens at all
^.
and now
the thought stark and irrevocable
of being here without you
shakes me
^.
beyond love, fear, regret or anger
into that realm children go
who want to care for/protect their parents
as if they could
and sometimes the lucky ones do
.
into the realm of making every moment
important
laughing as though laughter wards off death
each word given
received like spanish eight
^.
treasure to bury within
against that shadow day
when it will be the only coin i possess
with which to buy peace of mind
^.

__________________________________

November 14

__________________________________

1969 – Noelle Kocot born in Brooklyn, New York. Kocot graduated from Oberlin College, and teaches creative writing at The New School in New York. Now uses “They” as their personal pronoun. The death of Kocot’s husband, composer Damon Tomblin, from a drug overdose inspired Kocot’s collection Sunny Wednesday. They are the author of nine poetry collections including: Poem for the End of Time and Other Poems; Phantom Pains of Madness; The Raving Fortune; and Ascent of the Mothers.

On Being an Artist

by Noelle Kocot
^.
Saturn seems habitual,
The way it rages in the sky
When we're not looking.
On this note, the trees still sing
To me, and I long for this
Mottled world. Patterns
Of the lamplight on this leather,
The sun, listening.
My brother, my sister,
I was born to tell you certain
Things, even if no one
Really listens. Give it back
To me, as the bird takes up
The whole sky, ruined with
Nightfall. If I can remember
The words in the storm,
I will be well enough to sit
Here with you a little while.
^.

__________________________________

November 15

__________________________________

1942 – Ruth Berman born in Kentucky, but grew up in Minnesota to parents who read aloud a wide range of literature to their children. She is an American science fiction and fantasy author, anthologist, and speculative poet. In 1973, she was a finalist for the John W, Campbell Award for Best New Writer. She is best known for her novel Bradamant’s Quest, which won the 2011 Midwest Book Award. Her poetry has won awards, including the 2003 Rhysling Speculative Poetry Award for Best Short Poem for “Potherb Gardening.” The poem featured here, “Knowledge Of,” won the 2006 Dwarf Stars Award.

Knowledge Of

(For Laurel)

by Ruth Berman
^.
Eve biting into Newton's apple
Knew the attraction between the globes
Of fruit and Earth,
The bodies of herself and Adam,
The gravity of holding
The bubbles shaped by surfaces of stars.
^.
Eve tasted the tart universe
Holding the red shift in her hands.
^.

_______________________________________________

G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

_______________________________________________

_{Image: ‘First Frost’}