________________________________________________________
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December.
A magical thing.
And sweet to remember.
.
“We are nearer to Spring
Than we were in September,”
I heard a bird sing
In the dark of December.
.
― Oliver Herford
“I Heard a Bird Sing”
________________________________________________________
“Snow flurries began to fall and
they swirled around people’s legs
like house cats. It was magical,
this snow globe world.”
.
— Sarah Addison Allen,
American author of First Frost
________________________________________________________
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 December –
rebels, activists, inventors,
refugees, and home bodies,
all with stories to tell, and
things that need saying
________________________________________
December 14
________________________________
1640 – Aphra Behn born, English Restoration playwright, author and poet, one of the first women to earn her living as a writer, becoming a literary role model for future generations of women authors. She sometimes used the pen name Astrea, especially for her early work. She had been recruited as an ‘intelligence gatherer’ for King Charles II, and the Crown paid for her passage to Antwerp, but when the time came for her return to England, there was no response to pleas for payment of her fare, so in December 1666 she reluctantly borrowed money to pay her own way. Back in England, the King continued to turn a deaf ear to all her requests for payment. By 1668, she had been thrown into debtor’s prison. Most 17th century women left destitute and imprisoned would probably resorted to bartering their bodies for food (debtors in prison were responsible for providing life’s necessities for themselves). But Aphra Behn launched her writing career from prison, and was able to pay her way within two years. She became one of the most influential Restoration era playwrights, as well as a famous (and sometimes infamous) poet and novelist. In her poetry, Behn boldly tackled the sexual “double standard” and same-sex love, and often wrote poems in the voice of a character. Vividly talented, outspokenly opinionated, self-supporting, scandalous, and legendary —Aphra Behn refused to accept the restrictions society imposed on women. She lived by her own rules, even in her last years, when illness made it difficult for her to write.
from To Alexis In Answer to His Poem Against Fruition
by Aphra Behn
.
Since man with that inconstancy was born,
To love the absent, and the present scorn
Why do we deck, why do we dress
For such short-lived happiness?
Why do we put attraction on,
Since either way ’tis we must be undone?
.
They fly if honour take our part,
Our virtue drives ’em o’er the field.
We love ’em by too much desert,
And oh! they fly us if we yield.
Ye gods! is there no charm in all the fair
To fix this wild, this faithless wanderer?
.
Man! our great business and our aim,
For whom we spread our fruitless snares,
No sooner kindles the designing flame,
But to the next bright object bears
The trophies of his conquest and our shame:
Inconstancy’s the good supreme
The rest is airy notion, empty dream!
.
Then heedless nymph, be rul’d by me
If e’re your swain the bliss desire;
Think like Alexis he may be
Whose wisht possession damps his fire;
The roving youth in every shade
Has left some sighing and abandon’d maid,
For ’tis a fatal lesson he has learn’d,
After fruition ne’er to be concern’d.
.
“To Alexis In Answer to His Poem Against Fruition” from Aphra Behn: Selected Poems, Fyfield Books Series 2003, Rutledge Publishing
________________________________________
1940 – Carolyn M. Rodgers born and grew up on Chicago’s South Side; American poet, teacher, publisher, and critic. She attended Roosevelt University and the University of Chicago, where she got her MA in English. Early in her career she was associated with the Black Arts Movement, attending writing workshops led by Gwendolyn Brooks and through the Organization of Black American Culture (OBAC). Rodgers co-founded Third World Press in 1967, dedicated to publishing African American works. Her nine collections of poetry include: Paper Soul; Songs of a Blackbird, which won the Poet Laureate Award of the Society of Midland Authors; how I got ovah: New and Selected Poems; The Heart as Ever Green: Poems; and Morning Glory: Poems. She died of cancer at age 69 in April 2010.
Testament
by Carolyn M. Rodgers
.
child,
in the august of your life
you come barefoot to me
the blisters of events
having worn through to the
soles of your shoes.
.
it is not the time
this is not the time
.
there is no such time
to tell you
that some pains ease away
on the ebb & toll of
themselves.
there is no such dream that
can not fail, nor is hope our
only conquest.
we can stand boldly in burdening places (like earth here)
in our blunderings, our bloomings
our palms, flattened upward or pressed,
an unyielding down.
.
“Testament” from Songs of a Black Bird, © 1969 by Carolyn M. Rodgers – Third World Press
________________________________________
December 15
________________________________
1913 – Muriel Rukeyser born, American poet, playwright, writer, social justice and feminist activist ; known for her poems with feminist, social justice, and Judaic themes. In 1968, she signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War. She died at age 66, in February, 1980, from a stroke, with diabetes as a contributing factor. Her poetry collections include: Theory of Flight; The Book of the Dead; The Speed of Darkness; and Breaking Open. Rukeyser was a diabetic, which contributed to the stroke which caused her death at age 66 in February 1980.
(excerpt from) Elegy in Joy
by Muriel Rukeyser
.
We tell beginnings: for the flesh and the answer,
or the look, the lake in the eye that knows,
for the despair that flows down in widest rivers,
cloud of home; and also the green tree of grace,
all in the leaf, in the love that gives us ourselves.
.
The word of nourishment passes through the women,
soldiers and orchards rooted in constellations,
white towers, eyes of children:
saying in time of war What shall we feed?
I cannot say the end.
.
Nourish beginnings, let us nourish beginnings.
Not all things are blest, but the
seeds of all things are blest.
The blessing is in the seed.
.
This moment, this seed, this wave of the sea, this look, this instant of love.
Years over wars and an imagining of peace. Or the expiation journey
toward peace which is many wishes flaming together,
fierce pure life, the many-living home.
Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all
new techniques for the healing of the wound,
and the unknown world. One life, or the faring stars.
.
“Elegy in Joy” by Muriel Rukeyser from Birds, Beasts, and Seas: Nature Poems, edited by Jeffrey Yang © 2011 – New Directions Publishing
________________________________________
1937 – Mutsuo Takahashi born on the island of Kyushu, in Fukuoka Prefecture, Japan; Japanese novelist, tanka and free verse poet, and essayist. His father, a factory worker, died when Mutsuo was only a few months old, and his mother left him and his sisters with their grandparents in the rural town of Nōgato, while she went to mainland China. His grandparents were very poor, so he spent much time with extended family and neighbors. He was closest to his uncle, but the uncle died during the Burma Campaign during WWII. After his mother returned, she and the children moved to the port of Moji, but the Alllied bombing raids on Japan were intensifying, and Takahashi’s memoirs describe the chaos and fear as ships in the port were bombed. He contracted tuberculosis, which delayed his graduation from Fukuoka University of Education, but in 1962, his studies completed, he moved to Tokyo, where he worked for an advertising agency, and wrote poetry in his spare time. He was attracted to men, and much of his early work was homoerotic, including his first book that attracted national attention, Bara no ki, nise no koibito-tachi (Rose Tree, Fake Lovers). He sent a copy to the novelist Yukio Mishima, which began a close friendship between them until Mishima’s suicide in 1970. Takahashi also began writing prose, including two novellas. By the mid-1970s, Takahashi was a seasoned traveler, and his themes expanded to include his experiences in other countries and the destiny of mankind. After his retirement from the ad agency in the 1980s, the pace of his writing quickened. He won several important Japanese literary prizes, including the prestigious Kunshō award in 2000 for his contributions to modern Japanese literature. He now lives in the seaside town of Zushi, near Yokohama, and he gives lectures and readings around the world. In 2024, he was awarded the Order of Culture, conferred in person by the Emperor.
Navigation by Night
by Mutsuo Tankahashi
.
The boat is the symbol of desire—
Fleets of Achaean ruffians off to conquer Troy,
The Argo off to steal the Golden Fleece,
Rogue ships searching for the New World
During my youth, the nightly navigations
Of the bow between my thighs was no exception
Now I am moored to the pier—my small boat rows
Secretly at night toward poems on my desk
As my only guide, I rely upon the unreliable ars poetica
Learned during days adrift on a licentious sea
.
“Navigation by Night” - translated from the Japanese by Jeffre Angles
________________________________________
December 16
________________________________
1905 – Piet Hein born in Copenhagen, Denmark; Danish polymath, inventor,
mathematician, designer, puzzle-maker, writer, poet, and pen-and-ink artist. When the Germans invaded Denmark in April 1940, Hein felt he had three choices: do nothing, flee to neutral Sweden, or join the Danish resistance. As he explained in 1968, “Sweden was out because I am not Swedish, but Danish. I could not remain at home because, if I had, every knock at the door would have sent shivers up my spine. So, I joined the Resistance.” His method of resisting was unique – he invented a new kind of poetry. Calling his poems Grooks (pronounced “gruks” in Danish), he wrote under the pen name Kumbel, Old Norse for “tombstone,” outwitting the Nazi censors by writing his seemingly innocuous little poems with subtle double meanings, which were published in the Danish daily paper Politiken. His first,“Consolation Grook,” translates as: “Losing one glove / is certainly painful, / but nothing /compared to the pain / of losing one, / throwing away the other, / and finding / the first one again.” The Danes, looking for hope and encouragement during the occupation, saw what the censors missed. The gloves were metaphors: even if you’ve lost your freedom, don’t lose your self-respect by collaborating with the enemy, or you will never forgive yourself when your country is free again. The poem soon appeared as graffiti on walls all over Denmark. He would write over 7,000 Grooks (some were in English, which he knew well because of his undergraduate studies at Yale). After the war, Hein developed uses for the superellipse curve in city planning, road network designs, furniture making, and housewares. He used his math skills to create numbers games and puzzles. Hein died at age 90 in April 1996. There are at least 10 books of his Grooks, and several collections in English translation.
Cat Grook
by Piet Hein
Little cat, little cat, walking so alone;
tell me whose cat are you –
“I’m damned well my own.”
“Cat Grook” from Collected Grooks I, © 1995 by Piet Hein – published by Borgen, 2005 edition
________________________________________
1990 – Safia Elhillo born in Rockville, Maryland; Sudanese-American poet. She earned a BA from the Gallatin School at New York University, an MFA in poetry from The New School, and has taught at Split This Rock. Elhillo won the 2016 Sillerman Prize for African Poets. She was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University (2019-2021). Her poetry collections include: The January Children; Home Is Not A Country; Girls That Never Die; and Bright Red Fruit, which won a Michael L. Printz Award honor book award in 2025.
how to say
by Safia Elhillo
.
in the divorce i separate to two piles books:
english love songs: arabic
my angers my schooling my long repeating name
english english arabic
.
i am someone’s daughter but i am american born it
shows in my short memory
my ahistoric glamour my clumsy tongue when i forget
the word for [ ] in Arabic
.
i sleep unbroken dark hours on airplanes home
& dream i’ve missed my
connecting flight i dream a new & fluent mouth full of
gauzy swathes of Arabic
.
i dream my alternate selves each with a face
borrowed from photographs of
the girl who became my grandmother brows & body
rounded & cursive like Arabic
.
but wake to the usual borderlands i crowd shining
slivers of english to my mouth
iris crocus inlet heron how dare i love a word
without knowing it in Arabic
.
& what even is translation is immigration without
irony safia
means pure all my life it’s been true even in
my clouded Arabic
.
“how to say” © 2017 by Safia Elhilo appeared in Poem-a-Day on June 13, 2017
________________________________________
December 17
________________________________
1807 – John Greenleaf Whittier born in Haverhill, Massachusetts; American Quaker poet, writer, and abolitionist. Remembered now for his anti-slavery writings, his long narrative poem Snow-Bound, and his poems “Barbara Frietchie” and “The Barefoot Boy.” Many of his poems became the lyrics for hymns, including “O Brother Man,” “All as God Wills” and “Children of God.” He was very supportive of women writers, particularly the novelist Sarah Orne Jewitt, who dedicated one of her books to him. He died at age 84 in September 1892. The cities of Whittier, California, and Whittier, Alaska, were named for him.
Somehow Not only for Christmas
by John Greenleaf Whittier
.
Somehow not only for Christmas
But all the long year through,
The joy that you give to others
Is the joy that comes back to you.
And the more you spend in blessing
The poor and lonely and sad,
The more of your heart’s possessing
Returns to make you glad.
_______________________________________
1973 – Nadia Janice Brown born in Queens, NY, to Jamaican immigrants; American poet and author, She was raised and still lives in in Miami, Florida, and is the founder of Author & Book Promotions. Her poetry collections are Unscrambled Eggs, which won the 2005 Carolyn Howard-Jones Prize for Literature, and Becoming: The Life & Musings of a Girl Poet.
Sometimes
by Nadia Brown
.
Sometimes I think I was born
in a small town
some other century
lightening years earlier
than I should have
left my mother’s womb
to come live in a world that’s fierce
.
in this hot bread city
children here behave not as their age
but more like the adults they have not yet become
and who can blame them as the people here are like cats
wandering in and out of stranger’s bed
having no use for moderation
no empathy for restraint
.
it is a lack of temperance
the way in which their unbridled lips
hang like moons
that I truly despise
their unwillingness to quiet their hands
quell the crescendos of their anxious bodies
leads me to believe
that this contemporary way of life
despite being here
was not for me
.
“Sometimes” from Unscrambled Eggs, © 2005 by Nadia Janice Brown – Publishamerica Inc
________________________________________
1987 – Joshua Jennifer Espinoza born in Riverside, California; she is a trangender woman, a poet, and a visiting professor of English at Occidental College in Los Angeles. Her poetry collections are: There Should Be Flowers; I’m Alive. It Hurts. I Love It; and I Don’t Want To Be Understood.
My First Love
by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
.
My first love was silence.
I built myself from scratch
and no one listened.
This was the best time of my life.
I used to carry the clothes
to the laundry room
and pray for all the fog
in the world to surround me.
I’d let my thoughts
catch rides
with passing airplanes.
All that womanhood
caught in the roof
of my mouth
was like honey.
I knew it would never
go bad
so I never said a word
about it.
.
“My First Love” from There Should Be Flowers, © 2016 by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza – Civil Coping Mechanisms
________________________________________
December 18
________________________________
1894 – John Rodker born as Simon Solomon in Manchester, England, to a Polish Jewish immigrant family. They moved to London when he was six. He was a British writer, essayist, poet, translator, and publisher of modernist writers. By 1911, he was one of the “Whitechapel Boys,” a group of Jewish male writers who met at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. Rodker was a conscientious objector during WWI. He was arrested in 1917, and sent to the Home Office Work Centre in Princetown – formerly the infamous Dartmoor Prison. He describes that time in Memoirs of Other Fronts. In 1919, Rodker started the Ovid Press, a short-lived press which published T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and drawings by Vorticist artists Wyndham Lewis and Edward Wadsworth, and the French artist Henri-Gaudier-Brzeska. Fluent in French and German, he moved to Paris, where he worked on a French translation of James Joyce’s Ulysses, set up the Casanova Society, which published limited editions, then published occult works under the imprint ‘J. Rodker’. He went bankrupt during the Depression, and eked out a living working for Preslit, the Soviet overseas literature organ, as well as making English translations of French literature. Back in London in the 1940s, he founded the Imago Publishing Company. Rodker’s poetry collections include: Poems; Hymns; and Collected Poems: 1912-1925. He died suddenly of a heart attack at age 60 in October 1955.
The Searchlight
by John Rodker
.
The searchlights over London
Are like the fingers of a woman,
Wandering over the dead form of a lover.
.
She had not thought to do that
While he was living,
To better know his loveliness;
Or if she had
He’d stopped her with his kisses.
Now in her great grief
Her fingers are to her
Sight and sound and hearing.
.
By all the ways of sense
She knows him lost to her,
Yet cannot voice her grief.
.
Only can she raise white hands towards the heavens,
And passionate cursings and great grief;
Yet no sign comes, no portent.
Oh, if one blistering tear might come from on high
To crumple up and twist the earth,
She’d know her nightly passion not so vain―
When her first pang
Burst the heavens with howling of guns!
.
“The Searchlight” by John Rodker appeared in the October 1919 issue of Poetry magazine
________________________________________
December 19
________________________________
1940 – Phil Ochs born in El Paso, Texas, American singer-songwriter, journalist, and anti-war and social justice activist, known for his songs “Draft Dodger Rag” “What Are You Fighting For?” and “I Ain’t Marching Anymore.” As a teenager, he was a clarinetist, and by age 16 he was a soloist with the Capital University Conservatory of Music in Ohio. But he was interested in politics and folk music, so he started The Word, an underground newspaper, and learned to play the guitar. Early in 1962, he moved to New York, and became part of the Greenwich Village folk music scene. By 1963, he was performing at Carnegie Hall. He wrote hundreds of songs, and released eight albums. But by 1975, he had fallen victim to depression, bipolar disorder, alcoholism, and paranoia. He committed suicide at age 35 in April 1976.
Another Country
by Phil Ochs
.
Oh, a rifle took its aim and a man fell to the ground.
He tried to stand again but everybody held him down:
A time of terror when the bullet pierced the air —
I know that couldn't happen here.
Oh, it must have been another country —
Yes, it must have been another land.
That couldn't happen in the U.S.A.
We'd never treat a man that way.
.
And a migrant worker sweats underneath the blazin' sun.
He's fallen on his knees but his work is never done.
He begs someone to listen but nobody seems to care,
And I know that couldn't happen here.
Oh, it must have been another country —
Yes, it must have been another land.
That couldn't happen in the U.S.A.
We'd never treat a man that way.
.
And a man is working steady, it's good money he receives
But he's thrown out of work for the wrong things he believes.
He didn't have the thoughts most everybody shares.
I know that couldn't happen here,
so it must have been another country —
Yes, it must have been another land.
That couldn't happen in the U.S.A.
We'd never treat a man that way.
.
And a man is sent to prison to wait until he dies.
He fights to save his life, for years and years he tries.
Even though he changed himself he dies upon the chair.
I know that couldn't happen here.
Oh, it must have been another country —
Yes, it must have been another land.
That couldn't happen in the U.S.A.
We'd never treat a man that way.
.
Oh, I know we'd never treat a man that way.
“Another Country” by Phil Ochs, © 1963 Appleseed Records
________________________________________
1970 – Deborah Paredez born in San Antonio, Texas; American poet, scholar, and critic. Her scholarly work, Selenidad: Selena, Latinos, and the Performance of Memory, was published in 2009, the same year she co-founded Canto Mundo, an organization and workshop to promote Latinx poetry. She has also published American Diva, about the impact of performers like Celia Cruz, Tina Turner, and Rita Moreno. She teaches poetry and ethnic studies at Columbia University. Her poetry collections are This Side of Skin and Year of the Dog.
“Uvalde Shooting Highlights Role of Doors in Security Plans”
- AP News Headline
.
by Deborah Paredez
.
The teacher remembers pulling the door
closed. She thought the door
would lock because that door
is always supposed to lock. The door
failed to lock. They say when god closes a door
the shooter will fire through the door’s
.
windows. At first they said she left the door
open and the shooter got through the door.
She remembers she had opened the door
to carry in supplies, propping the door
open with a rock. But she closed the door
when she heard the shooter just outside the doors.
.
I ran back into the building. I still had the rock in the door.
So—I opened the door—
kicked the rock—and then locked the door.
Later, they verified she had closed the door
and the door
did not lock. Later, there will be a closed-door
.
inquiry at the state Capitol. It’s through the closed door
that all the men with guns will enter. The classroom doors
have windows above the knobs. The glass on one door
shatters from gunfire and a man walks through the door-
frame and fires more than 100 rounds. A thin blue door
connects one classroom to another. He shot the door,
.
a girl in the classroom tells the 911 dispatcher. Through the door
bullets graze two officers and they retreat farther from the door.
No other men with guns will go near the classroom door
for another forty minutes. They said they needed the door’s
key from the janitor. It remains unclear if they tried the door
to see if it was locked. The girl calls again and watches the door
.
and covers herself in her dead friend’s blood and this is how the door
between heaven and hell cracks open. The door-
way is a thin blue line. The men with guns unlock the door
and shoot the shooter who shoots back from the closet door-
frame. The governor orders all the schools to check their doors
each week and all the doors everywhere come unhinged and every door
.
is a door is a door is a door is a door
is a door is a door is a door is a door
is a door is a door is a door is a door.
.
“Uvalde Shooting Highlights Role of Doors in Security Plans” © 2022 by Deborah Paredez - published in Poem-a-Day on July 25, 2022
________________________________________
December 20
________________________________
1954 – Sandra Cisneros born in Chicago, Illinois; Mexican-American novelist, short-story writer, essayist, poet. activist, and feminist. Known for The House on Mango Street and Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. She earned a BA from Loyola University Chicago, and an MFA from the Iowa Writer’s Workshop. In 2015, she was a National Medal of Arts recipient, and has been honored with numerous literary awards. Her poetry collections include: Bad Boys; My Wicked,Wicked Ways; and Loose Woman: Poems.
Cloud
by Sandra Cisneros
.
"If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud
floating in this sheet of paper."—Thich Nhat Hanh
.
Before you became a cloud, you were an ocean, roiled and
murmuring like a mouth. You were the shadow of a cloud
crossing over a field of tulips. You were the tears of a
man who cried into a plaid handkerchief. You were a sky
without a hat. Your heart puffed and flowered like sheets
drying on a line.
.
And when you were a tree, you listened to trees and the tree
things trees told you. You were the wind in the wheels of a
red bicycle. You were the spidery Maria tattooed on the
hairless arm of a boy in downtown Houston. You were the
rain rolling off the waxy leaves of a magnolia tree. A lock
of straw-colored hair wedged between the mottled pages of a
Victor Hugo novel. A crescent of soap. A spider the color
of a finger nail. The black nets beneath the sea of olive
trees. A skein of blue wool. A tea saucer wrapped in
newspaper. An empty cracker tin. A bowl of blueberries in
heavy cream. White wine in a green-stemmed glass.
.
And when you opened your wings to wind, across the
punched-tin sky above a prison courtyard, those condemned to
death and those condemned to life watched how smooth and
sweet a white cloud glides.
.
“Cloud” from Woman Without Shame: Poems, © 2022 by Sandra Cisneros – Knopf Publishing
_________________________________________________________
G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTies!
_________________________________________________________
