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U.S. Supreme Court Justice
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who is responsible and hard-working and at one point
in their life benefited greatly from government programs
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– Tammy Duckworth,
Democratic Senator from Illinois
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13 poets born in April and May,
a time of transition, but whether
toward the better or the worse
is yet to be determined
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April 27
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1882 – Jessie Redmon Fauset was born in Snow Hill, New Jersey, daughter of a minister, whose mother died when she was a child, She graduated from Cornell University in 1905 with a degree in classical languages, one of the first Black women ti win Phi Beta Kappa honors. African American author, novelist, poet, and influential literary editor (1918-1926) for the NAACP magazine The Crisis, where she worked closely with many of the most important black writers of the 1920s. She has been called the “midwife of the literary Harlem Renaissance.” She died at age 79 from heat disease in April 1961.
Oriflamme
by Jessie Redmon Fauset
.
“I can remember when I was a little, young girl,
how my old mammy would sit out of doors in the
evenings and look up at the stars and groan, and
I would say, ‘Mammy, what makes you groan so?’
And she would say, ‘I am groaning to think of my
poor children; they do not know where I be and
I don’t know where they be. I look up at the stars
and they look up at the stars!’”
—Sojourner Truth
.
I think I see her sitting bowed and black,
Stricken and seared with slavery’s mortal scars,
Reft of her children, lonely, anguished, yet
Still looking at the stars.
.
Symbolic mother, we thy myriad sons,
Pounding our stubborn hearts on Freedom’s bars,
Clutching our birthright, fight with faces set,
Still visioning the stars!
.
NOTE: An oriflamme is a banner, symbol, or ideal inspiring courage or devotion
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1920 – Edwin Morgan born in Glasgow, but grew up in Rutherglen, Scotland; prolific Scottish poet and translator associated with the modernism of the Scottish Renaissance; His study of languages at the University of Glasgow was interrupted by WWII. As a non-combatant conscientious objector, he served with the Royal Army Medical Corps. He graduated from university in 1947, and became a lecturer, working his way up to full professor by 1980. He came out was a gay man in 1990, and read a poem at the 1995 opening of the Glasgow LGBT Centre. In 1999, Morgan became the first Glasgow Poet Laureate. He was appointed as the first Makar (National Poet - 2004-2010) for Scotland, and his “Poem for the Opening of the Scottish Parliament” was read at the 2004 opening, His many poetry collections include; This Second Life; From Glasgow to Saturn; The New Divan; Sonnets from Scotland; Newspoems, and Virtual and Other Realities. His last poetry collection, Dreams and Other Nightmares, was published in April 2010. Edwin Morgan died of pneumonia at age 90 at a residential home in August 2010.
The Picnic
by Edwin Morgan
.
In a little rainy mist of white and grey
we sat under an old tree,
drank tea toasts to the powdery mountain,
undrunk got merry, played catch
with the empty flask, on the pine needles
came down to where it rolled stealthily away –
you lay
with one arm in the rain, laughing
shaking only your wet hair
loose against the grass, in that enchanted place
of tea, with curtains of a summer rain
dropped round us, for a rainy day.
.
“The Picnic” from Collected Poems, © 1990 by Edwin Morgan – Carcanet Press
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April 28
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1943 – Jim Northrup born on the Fond du Lac Indian Reservation in Minnesota; Anishinaabe American whose Anishinaabe name Chibenashi means “Big little-bird.” He was an award-winning columnist for News from Indian Country and The Native American Press, poet, political commentator, playwright, and autobiographer. His poetry collections include: Days of Obsidian, Days of Grace; and Three More Poems. Jim Northrup died at age 73, from kidney cancer complications, in August 2016.
Shrinking Away
by Jim Northrup
.
Survived the war but
was having trouble
surviving the peace
Couldn’t sleep more than two hours
was scared to be without a gun
nightmares, daymares
guilt and remorse
wanted to stay drunk all the time
1966 and the VA said
Vietnam wasn’t a war
They couldn’t help
but did give me a copy
of the yellow pages
picked a shrink off the list
50 bucks an hour
I was making 125 a week
We spent six sessions
establishing rapport
Heard about his military life
his homosexuality
his fights with his mother
and anything else he
wanted to talk about
At this rate, we would have
got to me in 1999
Gave up on that shrink
couldn’t afford him
wasn’t doing me any good
Six weeks later my shrink
killed himself—great
Not only guilt about the war
but new guilt about my dead shrink
If only I had a better job
I could have kept on seeing him
I thought we were making real progress
maybe in another six sessions
I could have helped him
That’s when I realized that
surviving the peace was up to me
.
“Shrinking Away” from Walking the Rez Road, © 1994 by Jim Northrup - Voyageur Press
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1953 – Abena Busia born as Abena Pokua Adompim Busia to the Yenfri royal family in Accra, Ghana; Ghanaian writer, poet, feminist, lecturer, and diplomat. Her father was the second Prime Minister of Ghana (1969-1972). Her father was a leader of the opposition to Kwame Nkrumah, so the family went through periods of exile in the Netherlands, Mexico, and the UK. Abena Busia earned a BA in English language at St, Anne’s College, Oxford in 1976, and Doctor of Philosophy in social anthropology at St. Antony’s College in 1984. She has taught at Yale, Bryn Mahr, UCLA, Rutgers, and the University of Ghana. Busia was co-director of the Women Writing Africa Project, which published the four-volume Women Writing Africa Series between 2002 and 2008. In July 2017, Abena Busia was named as Ghana's ambassador to Brazil.
Liberation
by Abena Busia
.
We are all mothers,
and we have that fire within us,
of powerful women
whose spirits are so angry
we can laugh beauty into life
and still make you taste
the salty tears of our knowledge–
For we are not tortured
anymore;
we have seen beyond your lies and disguises,
and we have mastered the language of words,
we have mastered speech
And know we have also seen ourselves raw
and naked piece by piece until our flesh lies flayed
with blood on our own hands.
What terrible thing can you do us
which we have not done to ourselves?
What can you tell us
which we didn’t deceive ourselves with
a long time ago?
You cannot know how long we cried
until we laughed
over the broken pieces of our dreams.
Ignorance
shattered us into such fragments
we had to unearth ourselves piece by piece,
to recover with our own hands such unexpected relics
even we wondered
how we could hold such treasure.
Yes, we have conceived
to forge our mutilated hopes
beyond your imaginings
to declare the pain of our deliverance:
So do not even ask,
do not ask what it is we are labouring with this time;
Dreamers remember their dreams
when they are disturbed–
And you shall not escape
what we will make of the broken pieces of our lives.
“Liberation” from Traces of a Life, © 2008 by Abena Busia – Ayebia Clark Publishing
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April 29
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1863 – C. P. Cavafy born as Konstantinos Petrou Kavafis in Alexandria, Egypt, of Greek parents; an important figure in modern Greek poetry, and widely translated into other languages. He never lived in Greece, where his work was ridiculed and rejected by the Athenian literati, then almost forgotten until a collection of his poems was published in 1935, two years after his death. His family’s import business fell on hard times after his father died when he was 9. His mother moved the family to Liverpool. Cavafy learned English, discovered Shakespeare, Robert Browning, and Oscar Wilde, and chose the Anglicized “Cavafy” as his pen name. When he was sixteen, that business failed, and the family returned, in debt-ridden gentility, to Alexandria’s Greek community. His mother moved the family again when he was 19, to her parents’ home in Constantinople because of increasingly tensions between Egypt and the British Empire, leading to British bombardment of Alexandria in June 1882. Their home was destroyed and Cavafy’s early writing lost. After their return, he worked in the Irrigation Department of the Ministry of Public Works for 30 years. His British bosses valued his excellent English, and he retired as assistant director of his department. Cavafy was homosexual, and had several affairs but no lasting love. Most of his erotic poetry was never published in his lifetime. Cavafy died at age 70 of cancer on his birthday in 1933. His tombstone in the Greek Orthodox Cemetery in Alexandria bears a single word epitaph: Poet.
The God Abandons Antony
by C. P. Cavafy
.
When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all turned to smoke —don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and full of courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and full of courage,
as is right for you who were given this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with whining, or the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final pleasure—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.
.
“The God Abandons Antony” from C. P. CAVAFY: Collected Poems, written in 1911, translation © 1992 by Edmund Keeley and Phillip Sherrard – Princeton University Press, revised edition
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1947 – Yusef Komunyakaa born as James William Brown in Bogalusa Louisiana, the eldest of five children. He served one tour of duty in South Vietnam during the war, and worked for the military paper Southern Cross, leaving the service in 1966. He earned an M.A. in writing from Colorado State University in 1978, and an M.F.A. in Creative Writing from the University of California, Irvine, in 1980. He was awarded the 1994 Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for Neon Vernacular. Currently, Komunyakaa is a professor in the Creative Writing Program at New York University.
Toys in a Field
by Yusef Komunyakaa
Using the gun mounts
for monkey bars,
children skin the cat,
pulling themselves through,
suspended in doorways
of abandoned helicopters
in graveyards. With arms
spread-eagled they imitate
vultures landing in fields.
Their play is silent
as distant rain,
the volume turned down
on the 6 o’clock news,
except for the boy
with American eyes
who keeps singing
rat-a-tat-tat, hugging
a broken machine gun.
“Toys in a Field” from Pleasure Dome: New and Collected Poems, © 2001 by Yusef Komunyakaa – Wesleyan University Press
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April 30
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1945 – Annie Dillard born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; American novelist, essayist, poet, and academic; best known for her narrative style in both fiction and nonfiction. Her first poetry book, Tickets for a Prayer Wheel, was published the same year as Pilgrim at Tinker Creek won the 1975 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. She taught in Wesleyan University’s English department (1980-2001). Her other works include: Teaching a Stone to Talk, a nonfiction and travel essays collection; Encounters with Chinese Writers; The Maytrees, a novel; and Mornings Like This: Found Poems.
– from Write Till You Drop
by Annie Dillard
.
Spend it all, shoot it, play it, lose it, all,
right away, every time.
.
Do not hoard what seems good
for a later place in the book, or
for another book;
give it, give it all, give it now.
.
The impulse to save something good
for a better place later is the signal to
spend it now.
.
Something more will arise
for later, something better.
.
These things fill from behind,
from beneath,
like well water.
.
Similarly, the impulse to keep to yourself
what you have learned is not only
shameful, it is
destructive.
.
Anything you do not give freely and
abundantly becomes lost to you.
.
You open your safe and find ashes.
.
This excerpt from her May 1999 essay “Write Til You Drop” for The New York Times is a “found poem” © 1999 by Annie Dillard
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1973 – Jeannine Hall Gailey born in New Haven, Connecticut; American poet, non-fiction writer, and teaches at National University’s MFA Program. She was the second Poet Laureate of Redmond, Washington (2012-2013). Her poetry collections include: Becoming the Villainess, She Returns to the Floating World; Unexplained Fevers; The Robot Scientist’s Daughter; Field Guide to the End of the World; and Flare, Corona. Her work has been featured on NPR’s The Writer’s Almanac, Verse Daily, and in The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror. Her poems have also appeared in The American Poetry Review and Prairie Schooner.
Lessons Learned From Final Girls
by Jeannine Hall Gailey
.
Don’t wear a bikini. Don’t have sex on the first date. Wear shoes you can actually run in. Be sure to bring your own car for quick escapes. Wear roller-skates if necessary.
.
Don’t hide in the basement, don’t hide in the haunted barn, where the noose still hangs empty. Learn to wield the axe, the chainsaw, the giant blade. Don’t wait for anyone to save you.
.
Don’t bother screaming. Don’t bother empathizing with the killer, don’t bother trying to learn his backstory. Don’t waste time trying to save your friend, the drunk blonde. She is literally dead before she appears on screen.
.
In fact, don’t go to camp at all. Don’t drive with your friends out to the woods on the anniversary of that murder or drowning; don’t sneak out with your boyfriend or go after your lost dog. Don’t bother with the full moon, with wild parties. Stay close. Stay home and eat a sandwich.
.
“Lessons Learned From Final Girls” from Field Guide to the End of the World: Poems, © 2016 by Jeannine Hall Gailey – Moon City Press
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May 1
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1909 – Yannis Ritsos born in Monemvasia on the southern tip of Greece’s Peloponnese peninsula; Greek poet and WWII National Liberation Front resistance fighter. At age 18, he was confined to a sanatorium (1927-1931) for tuberculosis. He joined the Greek Communist Party (KKE) in 1934. His poetry was banned by the Greek Junta (1967-1974). His poetry collections include: Chronicle of Exile; Subterranean Horses; Gestures; and Late into the Night. Ritsos died at age 81 in November 1990.
You Were Kind And Sweet Of Temper
by Yannis Ritsos
.
You were kind and sweet of temper, all the good graces
were yours,
all the wind's caresses, all the gillyflowers of the garden.
.
You were light of foot, treading as softly as a gazelle,
when you stepped past our threshold it always glittered
like gold
.
I drew youth from your youth and to boot, I could even
smile.
Old age never daunted me and death I could disregard.
.
But now where can I hold my ground? Where can I find
shelter?
I'm stranded like a withered tree in a plain buried in snow.
.
“You Were Kind And Sweet Of Temper” from Yannis Ritsos: Selected Poems 1938-1988, © 1988 by Yannis Ritsos; translation © 1989 by Kimon Friar and Kostas Myrsiades – BOA Editions
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May 2
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1931 – Ruth Fainlight born in New York City to an American Jewish mother and a British father; prolific Anglo-American poet, short story writer, translator, librettist, and critic who has mainly lived in the UK since she was 15 but has also lived in France and Spain. She studied for two years at the Birmingham and Brighton Colleges of Art. Fainlight has written criticism for BBC Radio, The Times Literary Supplement, The Guardian and other publications. She was married to British writer Alan Sillitoe from 1959 until his death from cancer in 2010. Fainlight has published over 25 collections of poetry and prose poems, including: Cages; To See the Matter Clearly; Fifteen to Infinity; The Knot; Climates; Sugar-Blue Paper; Pomegranate; and Somewhere Else Entirely. She has also translated works by Lope de Vega, Jean Joubert, and Sophocles, as well as writing opera libretti for The Dancer Hotoke; The European Story, and Bedlam Britannica. Fainlight was honored with a 1994 Cholmondeley Award for Poetry and made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in 2007.
Animal Tamer
by Ruth Fainlight
.
You would have made a good animal tamer –
I can tell by the way you’re taming the wild black cat
that appeared last week at the bottom of the garden.
Every morning she comes a little further.
I watch how you go outside with a saucer of milk
and put it down as if you didn’t care,
but each day move it an inch nearer the door.
.
The black cat’s glaring eyes have a baffled look.
There’s something about you she cannot understand.
You’ve activated her curiosity.
But still she crouches watchful under the bushes
until you glance away and fuss with your pipe,
and then she dashes across and gulps and laps,
the fur around her neck bristling with suspicion,
peering up at you several times a minute,
relieved and yet puzzled by such indifference,
as though she missed the thrill of flight and escape.
.
Today, for the first time, you turned. I watched you stare
at those yellow, survivor’s eyes and the cat stare back
a moment before she swerved and ran to safety.
But then she stopped, and doubled round and half
gave in, and soon, as I know well, you’ll have
that cat, body pressed down on the earth, ecstatic,
stretching her limbs, and completely at your mercy.
.
“Animal Tamer” from New & Collected Poems, © 2010 by Ruth Fainlight – Bloodaxe Books
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1940 – Sherko Bekas born in Sulaymaniyah, Kurdistan Region in Iraq, the son of poet Fayaq Bekas, who died when Sherko was 8, plunging the family into extreme poverty, but with great difficulty, he managed to graduate from high school. He was 17 when one of his poems was published in Zhin newspaper. In 1965, Bekas joined the Kurdish liberation movement and worked at the movement’s radio station, The Voice of Kurdistan. Best known for his 1968 collection, Tirîfey Helbest (Tirifey Poetry), and the long 1991 poem, Butterfly Valley, his response to Saddam Hussein’s deadly chemical attacks which killed over 100,000 Kurds and destroyed 3,000 Kurdish villages. In 1987, he was awarded the “Tucholsky scholarship” of the Pen club in Stockholm, where he died in exile of cancer in August 2013. He is widely regarded as the greatest Kurdish national poet.
Gods
by Sherko Bekas
.
In the year of ’88
All the gods
Could see
The villagers’ bodies
Spitting as they burned,
But none moved.
Only to light
The cigarettes on their lips
Did they incline their heads
To those fires.
.
“Gods” © by Sherko Bekas, translation © 2018 by Alana Marie Levinson-LaBrosse and Halo Fariq, appeared at the July 2018 online post of World Literature Today
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1956 – Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick born in Dayton, Ohio to a Jewish family; American academic scholar in gender studies, critical theory, and a pioneer in queer studies. She was also a poet. She earned an undergraduate degree from Cornell, then a masters and Ph.D from Yale in English. Though married from 1969 until her death, she and her husband mostly lived apart. She taught at Hamilton College, Boston University, and Amherst College. She was the Newman Ivey White Professor of English at Duke University, and a Distinguished Professor at City University of New York. She died of cancer at age 58 in April 2009.
The Use of Being Fat
by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick
.
I used to have a superstition that
there was this use to being fat:
no one I loved could come to harm
enfolded in my touch —
that lot of me would blot it up,
the rattling chill, night sweat or terror.
.
I’ve learned that I was wrong.
Held, even held
they withdraw to the secret
scenes of their unmaking
But then I think
it is true they turn away inside.
It feels so like refusal
maybe still there is something to my superstition.
.
“The Use of Being Fat” from Fat Art, Thin Art, © 1994 by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick – Duke University Press
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May 3
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1912 – May Sarton born Eleanore Marie Sarton in Wondelgem, Belgium, the only child of a chemist and science historian father and an English artist mother; prolific American poet, novelist, and memoirist; Her parents fled with their two-year-old daughter when the Germans invaded Belgium in 1914, first to Britain, and then to America, where her father taught at Harvard. May Sarton became an apprentice at the Civic Repertory Theatre, founded by the legendary actress Eva Le Gallienne. Later, Sarton founded her own company, the Associated Actors Theatre, but it failed in 1935. She then made her living from writing and teaching writing. Sarton wrote 19 novels, 17 books of poetry, and 15 nonfiction works – including her bestselling Journal of a Solitude. Her last poetry collection, Coming Into Eighty, published after her death from cancer at age 83 in July 1995, won the Levinson Prize.
A Durable Fire
by May Sarton
.
For steadfast flame wood must be seasoned,
And if love can be trusted to last out,
Then it must first be disciplined and seasoned
To take all weathers, absences, and doubt.
No resinous pine for this, but the hard oak
Slow to catch fire, would see us through a year.
We learned to temper words before we spoke,
To force the Furies back, learned to forbear,
In silence to wait out erratic storm,
And bury tumult when we were apart.
The fires were banked to keep a winter warm
With heart of oak instead of resinous heart,
And in this testing year beyond desire,
Began to move toward durable fire.
“A Durable Fire” from May Sarton, Collected Poems, 1930-1993, © 1993 by May Sarton – W.W. Norton & Company
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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Sekhmet, Goddess of War
