Morning Open Thread: In This Suffering World We Must Also Always Have a Song

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Monday, Jun. 09, 2025 Monday, Jun. 09, 2025 at 3:28:02am PDT

no image description available — Whatever government is not a government of laws, is a despotism, let it be called what it may. - Daniel Webster, 19th Century American lawyer and statesman

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How many of my brothers and my sisters
will they kill
before I teach myself
retaliation?
Shall we pick a number?
– June Jordan,
American poet, activist, and teacher
from “I Must Become a Menace to My Enemies”

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Any government, that is its own judge of, and determines
authoritatively for the people, what are its own powers
over the people, is an absolute government of course. It has
all the powers that it chooses to exercise. There is no other
or at least no more accurate definition of a despotism than this.
– Lysander Spooner
American Attorney, Abolitionist. Anti-Capitalist,
author of The Unconstitutionality of Slavery

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13 poets born in June,
each offering us our world
through different eyes
than our own.

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June 8

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1915 – Ruth Stone born as Ruth Swan Perkins in Roanoke, Virginia; American poet, teacher, and author. In 1956, her Kenyon Review fellowship enabled her, with her second husband Walter Stone, to buy an old house in Goshen, Vermont. After Walter inexplicably committed suicide in 1959, she struggled to support herself and her daughters, teaching poetry at colleges and universities across the U.S., but always hanging on to her home. In 2000, her eyesight failing, she finally retired from teaching at age 85, and died at age 96 in November 2011. Her many poetry collections include: Unknown Messages; Ordinary Words, winner of the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award; In the Next Galaxy, winner of the 2002 National Book Award for Poetry; In the Dark; and What Love Comes To, a Pulitzer Prize finalist

Green Apples

by Ruth Stone
^.
In August we carried the old horsehair mattress
to the back porch
and slept with our children in a row.
The wind came up the mountain into the orchard
telling me something:
saying something urgent.
I was happy.
The green apples fell on the sloping roof
and rattled down.
The wind was shaking me all night Long,
shaking me in my sleep
like a definition of love,
saying, this is the moment,
here, now.

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1920 – Gwen Harwood born in Tasmania; one of Australia’s finest poets whose early work was published under various pseudonyms, including Walter Lehmann, Francis Geyer, and Miriam Stone; librettist for over a dozen works by prominent Australian composers. She won many awards for her poetry, including the 1977 Robert Frost Medallion. She died at age 75 in December 1995. The Gwen Harwood Poetry Prize was created in her memory in 1996.

"Thought is Surrounded by a Halo"

by Gwen Harwood

Show me the order of the world,
the hard-edge light of this-is-so
prior to all experience
and common to both world and thought,
no model, but the truth itself.
^.
Language is not a perfect game,
and if it were, how could we play?
The world's more than the sum of things
like moon, sky, centre, body, bed,
as all the singing masters know.
^.
Picture two lovers side by side
who sleep and dream and wake to hold
the real and imagined world
body by body, word by word
in the wild halo of their thought.

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1937 – Gillian Clarke born in Cardiff, the capital of Wales; Welsh poet, playwright, Welsh-speaker and translator; co-founder in 1990 of Tŷ Newydd, the National Writing Centre of Wales, which offers residential creative writing, courses in Welsh and English, retreats, seminars, and forums. She held the role of National Poet of Wales (2008-2016), and in 2010 became the second Welsh poet to be awarded the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. In 2011 she was made a member of the Gorsedd of Bards (Welsh-speakers who have contributed to Welsh culture), and in 2012 she received the Wilfred Owen Association Poetry Award. Her poetry collections include: Snow on the Mountain; Sundial; The King of Britain’s Daughter; Nine Green Gardens; Zoology; and The Silence.

Legend

by Gilliam Clarke
^.
The rooms were mirrors
for that luminous face,
the morning windows ferned
with cold. Outside
a level world of snow.
^.
Voiceless birds in the trees
like notes in the books
in the piano stool.
She let us suck top-of-the-milk
burst from the bottles like corks.
^.
Then wrapped shapeless
we stumped to the park
between the parapets of snow
in the wake of the shovellers,
cardboard rammed in the tines of garden forks.
^.
The lake was an empty rink
and I stepped out,
pushing my sister first
onto its creaking floor.
When I brought her home,
^.
shivering, wailing, soaked,
they thought me a hero.
But I still wake at night,
to hear the Snow Queen’s knuckles crack,
black water running fingers through the ice.

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June 9

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1791 – John Howard Payne born, probably in New York City. He was the son of a successful elocutionist who trained him in public speaking. An American actor and poet, he is best known for his 1822 poem “Home, Sweet Home” which was quickly set to music. He was the first American-born actor to perform on the British stage. In his later years, he was appointed as American Counsel to Tunis, where he died of congestive heart failure at age 60 in April 1852.

Home, Sweet Home

by John Howard Payne
^.
Mid pleasures and palaces though we may roam,
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home;
A charm from the sky seems to hallow us there,
Which, seek through the world, is ne'er met with elsewhere.
Home, home, sweet, sweet home!
There's no place like home, oh, there's no place like home!
^.
An exile from home, splendor dazzles in vain;
Oh, give me my lowly thatched cottage again!
The birds singing gayly, that come at my call —
Give me them — and the peace of mind, dearer than all!
Home, home, sweet, sweet home!
There's no place like home, oh, there's no place like home!
^.
I gaze on the moon as I tread the drear wild,
And feel that my mother now thinks of her child,
As she looks on that moon from our own cottage door
Thro' the woodbine, whose fragrance shall cheer me no more.
Home, home, sweet, sweet home!
There's no place like home, oh, there's no place like home!
^.
How sweet 'tis to sit 'neath a fond father's smile,
And the caress of a mother to soothe and beguile!
Let others delight mid new pleasures to roam,
But give me, oh, give me, the pleasures of home.
Home, home, sweet, sweet home!
There's no place like home, oh, there's no place like home!
^.
To thee I'll return, overburdened with care;
The heart's dearest solace will smile on me there;
No more from that cottage again will I roam;
Be it ever so humble, there's no place like home.
Home, home, sweet, sweet, home!
There's no place like home, oh, there's no place like home!

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1940 – Gary Geddess born in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada; Canadian poet, fiction and nonfiction author, playwright, critic, anthologist, and translator. He earned a B.A. in English and Philosophy from the University of British Columbia, then an M.A. and a Ph.D. in English from the University of Toronto. Among other jobs, he worked as a gillnet fisherman, a boxcar loader, shelf stocker, a fishing guide and water-taxi driver before his career as a college professor at Western Washington University, the British Columbia Institute of Technology, and the University of Victoria. He has written about human rights issues in Chile during its dictatorship, in Nicaragua during its civil war, and in Palestine and Israel after the Oslo peace accord. He now lives on Thetis Island, British Columbia. Among his many books of poetry are: Rivers Inlet; Snakeroot; War & other measures; The Terracotta Army; Changes of State; No Easy Exit; Flying Blind; and The Resumption of Play. Geddes has won many honors, including the Canada’s National Poetry Prize for The Acid Test in 1981, and the 2018 Freedom to Read Award, in recognition of his body of work that promotes free expression.

Sandra Lee Scheuer

by Gary Geddess

(Killed at Kent State University, May 4, 1970
by the Ohio National Guard)
^.
You might have met her on a Saturday night,
cutting precise circles, clockwise, at the Moon-Glo
Roller Rink, or walking with quick step
^.
between the campus and a green two-story house,
where the room was always tidy, the bed made,
the books in confraternity on the shelves.
^.
She did not throw stones, major in philosophy
or set fire to buildings, though acquaintances say
she hated war, had heard of Cambodia.
^.
In truth she wore a modicum of make-up, a brassiere,
and could no doubt more easily have married a guardsman
than cursed or put a flower in his rifle barrel.
^.
While the armouries burned, she studied,
bent low over notes, speech therapy books, pages
open at sections on impairment, physiology.
^.
And while they milled and shouted on the commons,
she helped a boy named Billy with his lisp, saying
Hiss, Billy, like a snake. That’s it, SSSSSSSS,
^.
tongue well up and back behind your teeth.
Now buzz, Billy, like a bee. Feel the air
vibrating in my windpipe as I breathe?
^.
As she walked in sunlight through the parking-lot
at noon, feeling the world a passing lovely place,
a young guardsman, who had his sights on her,
^.
was going down on one knee, as if he might propose.
His declaration, unmistakable, articulate,
flowered within her, passed through her neck,
^.
severed her trachea, taking her breath away.
Now who will burn the midnight oil for Billy,
ensure the perilous freedom of his speech;
^.
and who will see her skating at the Moon-Glo
Roller Rink, the eight small wooden wheels
making their countless revolutions on the floor?
^.

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June 10

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1904 – Lin Huiyin born in Hangzhou, China; Chinese architect, poet, essayist, architectural historian, playwright, and translator. Born into a wealthy family, Huiyin traveled extensively with her father, and reached a level of education rare for women of the time, including a degree from the University of Pennsylvania (in Fine Arts – as a woman, she was refused admittance to Penn’s School of Architecture) and she also enrolled in stage design classes at Yale University. She was the first woman architect in modern China and her husband Liang Sicheng was known as the “Father of Modern Chinese Architecture.” They both worked as founders and faculty of the Architecture Department of Northeastern University in 1928 and, after 1949, as professors in Tsinghua University in Beijing. She studied ancient Chinese architecture, and with her husband began restoration work on China’s cultural heritage sites during the Republican Era of China, until the 1937 Japanese invasion. They fled with their children and other faculty members before the invading forces. By 1940, Huiyin was suffering from tuberculosis. After the war, she took part in the standardization of Beijing city planning. She died of tuberculosis in 1955. The American artist Maya Lin, designer of the Vietnam Veterans Memorial, is her niece.

Music Heard Late at Night

by Lin Huiyin

for Xu Zhimo

^{(who died in a plane crash in 1931 – believed to be in route to meet Lin Huiyin)}

.
I blushed,
hearing the lovely nocturnal tune.
.
The music touched my heart;
I embraced its sadness, but how to respond?
.
The pattern of life was established eons ago:
so pale are the people's imaginations!
.
Perhaps one day You and I
can play the chords of hope together.
.
It must be your fingers gently playing
late at night, matching my sorrow.
.

“Music Heard Late at Night” by Lin Huiyin, translation by Michael R. Burch

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June 11

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Ben Jonson born in London’s Westminster district, English playwright, poet, and critic. His father died before his birth, and his mother married a master bricklayer. Though educated at Westminster School, he became an apprentice bricklayer, then joined English forces fighting with the Dutch revolting against Spanish rule. He next became a strolling player, then joined the Admiral’s Men troupe. By 1597, he was writing plays, mostly comedies, and soon gave up acting. His first big hit was Every Man in His Humour, presented by the Lord Chamberlain’s Men in 1578 – the same year he killed a fellow actor in a duel, considered murder. He pleaded “benefit of clergy” (ability to read the Latin Bible), paid a forfeit, and was branded on his left thumb. By 1603 he was creating masques (stories told through singing and dancing) for the royal court of JamesIV/ I. The masques paid much better than writing plays. In 1616, Jonson was granted a yearly pension, and published the first volume of his collected works, including his epigrams (poems in a classical style). By the 1620s, he’d written almost all his best works, and suffered a series of strokes. In 1625, Charles I came to the throne. Jonson got fewer commissions for masques, though Charles did increase his pension. Jonson had started work on The Sad Shepherd, a pastoral drama instead of a comedy, when he died at age 65 in August 1637.

On Gut

by Ben Jonson
^.
Gut eats all day and lechers all the night;
So all his meat he tasteth over twice;
And, striving so to double his delight,
He makes himself a thoroughfare of vice.
Thus in his belly can he change a sin:
Lust it comes out, that gluttony went in.

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1911 – Josephine Miles born in Chicago, Illinois; American poet, academic, and literary critic; her family moved to Southern California when she was a child, hoping the milder climate would lessen the degenerative effects of her severe arthritis, but she became completely dependent on others, unable to operate a wheelchair or feed herself. She earned a BA in English literature at UCLA, then a doctorate from UC Berkeley. In spite of her physical disabilities, her brilliance as a scholar led to her becoming the first woman tenured in the English department at the University of California, Berkeley. She and Benjamin H. Lehman developed the first interdepartmental “Prose Improvement Project” which was expanded into James Gray’s Bay Area Writing Project. The National Writing Project grew out of these pioneering efforts at writing across curriculum programs. She mentored many young poets, including Jack Spicer, Diane Wakoski, William Stafford, Thom Gunn, and A. R. Ammons. She died at age 74 in May 1985, and bequeathed her home to the University of California. The PEN Oakland Josephine Miles Literary Award was established in her honor to recognize achievement in multicultural literature. Her poetry collections include: Lines at Intersection; Local Measures; To All Appearances; and Coming to Terms.

by Josephine Miles

Harper’s and many magazines contain
A dead soldier, split and unshaven,
A ponderous corpse of shell and possible pain
He has struck that printed haven.
^.
There not to rest. He dies there the months over
In the causes of debate.
Waiting as at a trench, at the inside cover
The burial before which we hesitate.
^.

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June 12

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1892 – Djuna Barnes born in Cornwall-on-Hudson, New York; American notable modernist novelist, poet, playwright, journalist, and visual artist. Her works include her poetry collection The Book of Repulsive Women; Ladies Almanack, a satiric chronicle of amorous intrigues in 1920s Paris; and Nightwood, a classic of lesbian fiction. She drank heavily and wrote little in the 1940s, but swore off alcohol in 1950. She then wrote The Antiphon, a verse play, and much poetry. Though ravaged by arthritis in later years, Barnes continued writing until her death just after her 90^th birthday in June, 1982.

This Much and More

by Djuna Barnes

If my lover were a comet
Hung in air,
I would braid my leaping body
In his hair.
^.

Yea, if they buried him ten leagues
Beneath the loam,
My fingers they would learn to dig
And I’d plunge home!
^.

“This Much and More” from Collected Poems: With Notes Toward the Memoir, by Djuna Barnes – edited by Phillip Herring and Osias Stutman – University of Wisconsin Press – 2005 edition

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1926 – Noriko Ibaragi born in Osaka City, Japan; Japanese poet, playwright, essayist, children’s book writer, and translator. She spent her childhood in Nishio, near Mikawa Bay, Honshu. She was studying at the Imperial Women’s Pharmaceutical College in Tokyo during WWII, and lived through air raids and food shortages. Her best-known poem, Watashi ga ichiban kirei datta toki, written 12 years after the war, is about her regret that her youth was spent in wartime. Pete Seeger later set a translation of her poem to music as “When I Was Most Beautiful.” In 1946, she was nominated for a Yomiuri Prize for her first play, Tohotsumioyatachi (Walking Parents). In 1950, she married a doctor and began submitting her poetry to Shigaku magazine. In 1953, she co-founded the poetry journal Kai (Oars) with Hiroshi Kawasaki, another writer for Shigaku. At the age of 50, she began learning Korean, and became a notable translator of modern Korean poetry. Her 1999 poetry collection Yorikakarazu (Don’t lean on) sold a record-breaking 150,000 copies. Ibaragi died of a brain hemorrhage at age 79 in February 2006.

Room

by Noriko Ibaragi
^.
Bare writing table,
wooden bed-frame,
a spinning wheel –
just these things on the floor;
^.
with stretched plant fibre
a pair of chairs
were lightly
hung on the wall;
^.
of all those I’ve seen,
this the most beautiful,
not one thing unneeded –
that country’s Quaker room.
^.
My desire
is simple existence,
simple words,
a simple life.
^.
Still now, supported,
two chairs lightly floating;
only the deep air
offered me a seat.
^.

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June 13

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1865 – William Butler Yeats born in Sandymount, Dublin, Ireland; Irish poet, dramatist, prose writer, and literary critic; admired as one of the greatest poets of the 20th Century. He was awarded the 1923 Nobel Prize in Literature. Yeats is a key figure in the Irish Literary Revival (also ironically called the Celtic Twilight), and was a co-founder of the Abbey Theatre with Lady Augusta Gregory. His collected works take up fourteen volumes. He died of heart failure at age 73 in January 1939.

The Cat and the Moon

by William Butler Yeats

^.
The cat went here and there
And the moon spun round like a top,
And the nearest kin of the moon
The creeping cat, looked up.
Black Minnaloushe stared at the moon,
For, wander and wail as he would
The pure cold light in the sky
Troubled his animal blood.
Minnaloushe runs in the grass
Lifting his delicate feet.
Do you dance, Minnaloushe, do you dance?
When two close kindred meet,
What better than call a dance?
Maybe the moon may learn,
Tired of that courtly fashion,
A new dance turn.
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
From moonlit place to place,
The sacred moon overhead
Has taken a new phase.
Does Minnaloushe know that his pupils
Will pass from change to change,
And that from round to crescent,
From crescent to round they range?
Minnaloushe creeps through the grass
Alone, important and wise,
And lifts to the changing moon
His changing eyes.

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1940 – David Budhill born in Cleveland, Ohio; American poet, playwright, novelist, essayist, and short story writer, who lived for many years in the mountains of northern Vermont. Author of eight poetry collections, eight plays, two novels, a short story collection, a children’s picture book, and dozens of essays. His play Judevine, a stage version of his narrative poems, has had at least 65 productions in 22 states since the early 1980s. In 2011, he was honored with the Kjell Meling Memorial Award for Distinction in the Arts & Humanities. He died at age 76 in 2016, and was posthumously named The People’s Poet of Vermont by the state’s legislature.

What Issa Heard

by David Budhill

^.
Two hundred years ago Issa heard the morning birds
singing sutras to this suffering world.
^.
I heard them too, this morning, which must mean,
^.
since we will always have a suffering world,
we must also always have a song.
^.

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June 14

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1907 – René Char born L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue in southeastern France; prolific French poet and member of the French Résistance. His first poetry collection, Cloches sur le cœur (Bells on the Heart), was published in 1928. Char joined the Résistance in 1940, and commanded the Durance parachute drop zone. In the 1960s, he joined the campaign against the stationing of atomic weapons in Provence. Among his many books are Seuls demeurent (Remain Alone); Les Matinaux (The Mornings); and Éloge d’une soupçonnée (Eulogy of a Suspect). Char was in Paris when he died of a heart attack at age 80 in February 1988.

The Window

by René Char
^.
Pure rains, expected women,
The face you wipe,
This glass bound to torment,
Is the face of revolt;
The other, the happy glass,
Shivers before the wood fire.
I love you twin mysteries,
I touch each of you;
I am in pain and I am light.
^.

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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!