Poetry Archives

Skirt Variations.

I am skirting the issue. I should be writing about the politics of war, but my head would explode. Let’s turn to the interesting people department instead. Given that it is Women’s History month, I’ll start with a 19th century poet and union leader attuned to skirts.

The Skirt Machinist

I am making great big skirts
For great big women—
Amazons who’ve fed and slept
Themselves inhuman.
Such long skirts, not less than two
And forty inches.
Thirty round the waist for fear
The webbing pinches.
There must be tremendous tucks
On those round bellies.
Underneath the limbs will shake
Like wine-soft jellies.
I am making such big skirts
And all so heavy,
I can see their wearers at
A lord-mayor’s levee.
I, who am so small and weak
I have hardly grown,
Wish the skirts I’m making less
Unlike my own.

By Lesbia Harford

StitchesbyHB7’s Paris Skirt

Lesbia Harford was an Australian poet, lawyer and labor activist. Her father abandoned the family after bankruptcy, her mother toiling to get the 4 young siblings fed and educated. Harford was one of the first women to get a law degree at Melbourne University in 1915, where she became interested in the politics of class relations as well as feminism. She decided to work in the garment factories to understand truly the conditions of working class life, particularly among women. Despite having congenitally defective heart valves which made physical labor difficult, she went on to become a leader of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) around 1916.

She was openly bisexual, often in polyamorous relationships, and radically honest in her poetry around feminine issues that would not be discussed in public. She died from tuberculosis at age 36, her last years of life tortured by illness and dependency.

The poem struck me as both anguished and angry. Here is this small person, overwhelmed by the weight of the production task, metaphorically as well as literally. Stunted, she sews for women who are clearly of a different class, unrestrained in their consumption, free to eat and rest. Yet even these Amazon-sized women are burdened by the weight of heavy skirts, jelly-like limbs prohibiting escape.

Heaviness even when the contraptions of previous eras – the crinolines, the farthingales, the petticoats – were long abandoned. Skirt length and materials varied across time, of course, not least affected by the economics of any given era. If you look at shapes and lengths in relation to war vs. peace times, for example, you find straight correlations, with skimped materials when times are hard. Length also, eventually, became a means of protest and liberation – the mini skirts of the 1960s the most famous example.

***

Skirts were on my mind for a number of reasons. I had read about a woman who collected woolen skirts for decades from Midwestern thrift stores, up until she was 89. For the next 10 years – Audrey Huset lived until her 99th birthday – the collection of over 1000 vintage skirts was stashed in cartons in a garage. Her granddaughter, artist Mae Colburn, started to archive them in 2022, with the help of her parents, professors of costume design and photography, respectively. They sorted them according to a range of colors, plaids, and silhouettes – here is the link to the digital archive where you can be amazed at the collection.

I try to wrap my head around the motivation: how can you accumulate so much stuff, without even using the garments? Then again, I can just see the joy of the hunt, the glory of a find of an unusual specimen, the hope that these will make some warm recycled rugs in the future, the physical pleasure of touching woven wool of that period (much denser and of higher quality than what we see today.) A passion that gets you out of the house and in contact with people into your high eighties…still. Collectors are a mystery to me.

***

Then another skirt appeared on my screen. An expert knitter, designer and dancer had shared the instructions for a voluminous, long skirt she called the Paris skirt, and asked her 35.000 subscribers on Instagram (or anyone else) to knit along. There was a huge resonance, an exploding array of pictures posted of the variations generated by knitters across the globe. A new community instantly created, although I have asked myself how people who have not been knitting for ages, could afford to participate.

The pattern is not difficult. The materials required, on the other hand, are prohibitively expensive, if you do not already own a stash of remnant wool accumulated across many former projects. The mohair wool, for example, costs an average of $30 or so for 50 grams, which give you some 500 yards (the project requires over 2700 yards for larger sizes, and that does not account for knitting with double or triple strands that give the skirt some heft and bounces on the bottom.) Five different sizes of circular knitting needles required: the largest alone, US 13 mm, costs easily $27. If you had to start from scratch you could spend $300 or more, for a homemade skirt!

But again, the use of leftover materials is a sustainable practice, and the making of your own clothes a political act. Add a community that derives a sense of connectedness from the shared experience, and you have truly accomplished something. The designer herself considers knitting a form of resistance.

***

Then a book appeared in the mail, a gift from a friend who rightly anticipated my pleasure of receiving it. Loosely bound in recycled (and strangely fragrant) jeans material, it is titled Fav Pieces of, followed by some 50 names of people from across the globe. Let’s ignore the fact that the choice of font, an illegible page of contents, and an occasionally tortured introduction trying to provide intellectual heft, all scream for attention. It is, after all, published by Thaddaeus Ropac Publisher of Modern Art. (I did not yet see the book on their publications website.)

Let’s focus instead on the fabulous idea of editors Frauke von Jaruntowski and Gerhard Andraschko Sorgo, to collect essays from people with various backgrounds about their favorite piece of clothing or other adornments. And admire the range of images provided with the design, including portraits of items, owners, or both, and some contextual pictures that are meaningful, ranging from laypersons’ snapshots to serious photography.

The essays make us think about our relationship to clothes and, in turn, the ways beauty norms, body image, experienced gaze, memory, class conformity, politics, moods as well as our yearnings, influence our consumerism – or our rejection of it.

It is a fascinating read, if only for the comparison between explanatory attempts. Some people reveal intensely private information, others block with superficial description. Multiple owners describe how the item makes them feel internally for its own relevance, history or associations. Several emphasize how a given piece allows them to create a persona projected outwards. A few discuss the relevance of fashion in their lives, yet others the need for comfort, rather than public effect. Some are eloquently descriptive of beauty, others refer but to function.

Oversharing, reticence, courage to expose vulnerability, vanity, strategic self positioning, thoughtful introspection, or simple autobiographical anecdotes – all can be found between two covers.

Only two skirts made the list. One is from an exchange between designers, a hand-stitched, non-traditional patchwork quilt in return for hand painted plates. The essay informs about the history of Scottish tartans, symbol for traditional Clans. It then turns to lovely interpretation of the possible meaning of patch-worked remnants, creating a style that belongs to all. A Mix-and-Match Clan for a rootless citizenry, a remix overcoming divisions, and an important reminder that we can create something new from old. The reader truly understands why that is a favorite piece in this context.

The other skirt appears to have been protectively underused, in contrast to its oft worn twin in more muted colors, both purchased at KENZO in 1980’s London, simultaneously. The beloved bright one was a match for the buyer’s brilliant mood at the time, the darker one more likely acceptable in the owner’s day-to-day existence. A short comment on personal history that brought the good mood in the 80s in stark relief, and a cryptic snippet on how she regrets not having worn the favored piece enough, are the parentheses for the half-page long musings.

***

I used to wear skirts all the time. These days, not so much. I live in the functional, no need to think, can get dirty, ready to hike, comfortable uniform of pants and sweaters. But my favorite item in my closet is indeed a skirt, and it has accompanied me through good times and bad ones, for probably 20 years or longer. It replaced an old, red, star-sprinkled favorite that somehow got lost during emigration. I wear it when I travel, when I give lectures, or when I need a boost to my sense of who I am, during tricky encounters.

I picked it for my double portrait sessions with Henk Pander when he was still alive, a project, Eye to Eye, where he painted the photographer, I photographed the artist, across weeks of sittings. The skirt felt like the appropriate feminine counterweight to the absence of feminine symbols, eradicated by mastectomies for cancer. It’s most important attribute, other than a cheerful patchwork of patterns, is that it is light and wide enough to run in. No heavy skirts, no constricting pencil shapes ever again!

Henk Pander in his studio.

The skirt is also associated with something I am occasionally proud of: resisting overconsumption, for the most part, sticking to the tried and true. (I previously reviewed fiber artists, Ophir El-Boher, who embodies that concept in her art.) Of course that, too, comes from privilege. When you have permanent space to store things forever, when you have enough clothing that any one item is not worn to threads, when you have the funds to buy good quality that lasts, it is easy to do the right thing and not yield to compulsive purchases. In that way, then, the skirt reminds me to be grateful for all the choices I have.

Music today leads us back to the top – the fate of seamstresses in an exploitative economy. A Yiddish Ballad about the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire.

Brain Balls

(556)

The Brain, within its Groove


The Brain, within its Groove
Runs evenly—and true—
But let a Splinter swerve—
'Twere easier for You—

To put a Current back—
When Floods have slit the Hills—
And scooped a Turnpike for Themselves—
And trodden out the Mills—

by Emily Dickinson

- from The Complete Poems of Emily Dickinson (1955)

As with all Dickinson poems, interpretations range widely. Is she talking about a mechanistic model of a brain here, which catastrophically stops functioning if parts of it are ruptured, never to be whole again? Is she musing metaphorically about a descent into mental illness, describing the fragility of our cognitive apparatus and our ability to maintain mental stability? Or is she referring to a sudden rush of ideas and speculations, when we are distracted from our train of thought, wildly drawn in different directions, unable to close the floodgates? You tell me.

I’ve been thinking about brains this weekend. About those that seemingly stopped running “evenly – and true – and delivered some huge cognitive dissonance instead. And about those that are not really fully formed brains, yet display a surprising amount of human brain function, set in recognizable grooves and growing towards a more and more familiar shape.

The first category arose from the 76th Berlin Film Festival, with someone who stunned with statements during the opening press conference that directly contradicted what they had said previously. Jury president Wim Enders (yes, that Wim Wenders) was asked about the “selective” solidarity shown to Gaza, Iran, Ukraine, and other war torn regions around the world, with Gaza willfully ignored. His answer?

“We have to stay out of politics because if we make movies that are dedicatedly political, we enter the field of politics,” he said. “But we are the counterweight of politics, we are the opposite of politics. We have to do the work of people, not the work of politicians.”

This is the same brain that announced 2 years ago: “The Berlinale has traditionally been the most political of the major festivals, and it is not staying out of politics now, nor will it do so in the future.”

Cognitive dissonance in the service of avoiding engagement in the genocide debate, of combating the fear of being called anti-Semitic for any word uttered on behalf of Palestinians, of yielding to the pressure of having to align with Germany’s “Staatsräson.” How does an intelligent brain cope with this?

Arundathi Roy withdrew from the festival in protest. “To hear them say that art should not be political is jaw-dropping. It is a way of shutting down a conversation about a crime against humanity even as it unfolds before us in real time – when artists, writers and film-makers should be doing everything in their power to stop it.”

I could not agree more.

***

The second category of brains are really minuscule little brain balls or so called “Human Brain Organoids (HBOs),” tiny, 3D versions of a human brain the size of a peppercorn. The unexpected discovery of these things during research with stem cells in 2011 led to a flurry of research programs, from understanding how brains develop in a fetus, to possible ways to combat cancer.

These organoids mimic the developmental trajectories, cellular composition, neural circuits, and anatomical structures of the in vivo human brain (Seto and Eiraku, 2019). Some of them develop spontaneously from cell cultures, grow on their own and have the characteristics of multiple brain regions. Others are manipulated by scientists gearing them towards specific brain functions, and still others are “assembloids, fusing various specific brain regions, or organdies from non-brain regions, like muscles or retinas.

No longer science fiction: you can take material from donors with certain neurological diseases, including microcephaly, Alzheimer’s disease, or Timothy syndrome, grow these HBOs from their stem cells, and then subject them to any imaginable medical intervention/drug/manipulation to see if you can figure out a way to combat the disease. No worry about side effects or dangers to a living person, all trials done just on these brain balls in the lab.

Researchers have lately been able to transplant these organoids into animals, mice, rats and monkeys among them, and have shown that they can restore malfunctions in those host animals – helping them to reestablish motor functions that were damaged, improve memory in those that had memory and learning difficulties, and helped with healing of the visual cortex in rats that were blind.

Scientists have even, believe it or not, been able to produce interphases with these HBOs and computer systems, allowing them to play a simplified version of computer games. Theoretically, you could build systems where these neuronal structures power computers on a large scale, making the significant energy demands from current AI systems obsolete.

A groove made from a combination of biological substance and silicone…. what could go wrong? What swerving splinters will create havoc?

One big unknown, hotly debated, is the question of HBOs developing consciousness, and the associated ethical issues.

I am not going into the whole consciousness debate today. Let me just sketch the basic definitions psychologists use to distinguish types of consciousness. One is phenomenal consciousness – having the raw experiences that go with sensations and emotions.

The other is access consciousness. An entity has access consciousness when it has access to information and in most cases can use that information in some fashion. Access is obviously a matter of degree. A thermostat has limited access – it registers the temperature and reacts accordingly, by clicking on or off. We would obviously not call that consciousness. We use the general term access consciousness only if there is a fairly broad range of access and also a broad range of ways in which that information gets used.

Consider Tina who is now aware that Thai food is extremely spicy. Her knowledge comes from just having read about the way Thai food is prepared. Or her knowledge is derived from the pain in her mouth after her first bite, reaching for a glass of milk to handle it. The former is access, the latter phenomenal consciousness.

Given those different kinds, scientists do wonder where the line is for non-human entities to display access consciousness, or for animals, who we often grant even phenomenal consciousness. The organoids have access to information and act on it in predictable fashion, in complex ways.

Once you acknowledge a form of consciousness, all kinds of ethical principles kick in. Here is the long version of the arguments applied to human brain organoids for those who are interested.

Pandora’s box comes to mind, if you ask me. But then again, my brain is perhaps too small to calibrate the relative merits and flaws of creating brains in a dish.

Music today tells part of the story.

Photographs from the Hunting Gardens in Pasadena, CA, all about grooves.

Without End

Art, Poetry
Feb 2, 2026
0 Comments

In the Evening

By Else Lasker-Schüler, translated by Eavan Boland.

***

It was pure coincidence that I visited Cara Levine‘s exhibition Without End at the Oregon Jewish Museum and Holocaust Education Center during the same week that my kids arrived in town. They are permanently relocating as survivors of the Altadena /Eaton Fire that destroyed their house, their neighborhood, their newly planted gardens and every memento they owned from more than three generations. Not a coincidence, then, that Levine’s current work, concerned with grief elicited by climate-related natural disasters and originating in exactly those same (Palisade) fire-induced losses, intensely resonated on a personal level.

Levine’s work has focused on loss, grief and pain of all kinds across the years of her practice since she earned a BFA from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, MI (2007) and an MFA from California College of the Arts in San Francisco, CA (2012). More importantly, though, it has offered perspectives on both, the causes of losses and communal ways in which healing can be implemented. Put differently, the work is not exclusively focused on individual experience, but on unveiling the collective circumstances that are producing loss, as well as offering tools to overcome trauma.

Before I get into the specifics, let me emphasize what I consider the strongest aspect of her work before us.

Real grief strikes down to the bone. There are no layers, no occlusions, no obscurations that it does not penetrate – they all become irrelevant. Levine’s sculptures and installations have that same directness: what you see is what you get. In our world where art often takes pride in obscurity, the need for deciphering, the veiled references, the analyses left to those in the know, her work will have none of that. Language is explicit, forms are defined, function leaves no room for interpretation. The art directly communicates shared human experience, and the artist is on an equal level with the viewer, no hierarchical distancing allowed. This, of course, is the basic element of communal experience, a focus of Levine’s makings, just as much as the individual’s grief.

***

I first came across Levine’s projects in 2022, when I was writing about the waves of eco-anxiety and post traumatic stress disorder of climate catastrophe survivors seen by clinical psychologists. Therapists face both increasing number and intensifying depth of anxiety disorders related to climate change. Data from the general population confirmed the trend. “A 2020 poll by the American Psychiatric Association showed that “more than two-thirds of Americans (67%) are somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change on the planet, and more than half (55%*) are somewhat or extremely anxious about the impact of climate change on their own mental health.”

What could be done before you need to find a therapist? Some political moves might help activists. Science is contributing tools to fight collective helplessness. And then there is art: Levine and other contributing artists invited people to participate in physically digging a hole to throw in their grief. For seven days, echoing our Jewish custom of sitting Shiva after a death – a time when community meets and supports the mourner – a large hole was dug in Malibu. The project happened on the grounds of the Shalom Institute campus which was devastated by the Woolsey Fire of 2018, an early taste of the fiery destruction to come. It struck me at the time that digging that hole might be one of the ways in which we could dig ourselves out of one: forming alliances (the contributors ranges from Chumash tribal leaders to cantors from local Synagogues) would provide an exit to suffering grief in isolation. Alerting community to the causes of wild fires might also lead to collective action to tackle climate change denials.

A video of the project can be watched at the current exhibition. So can a subset of exhibits from Levine’s project alerting us to the number and types of deadly shooting of unarmed civilians.

***

This is not a Gun (TINAG) was triggered by an article in 2016 Harper’s Magazine that depicted objects held by unarmed victim of police shootings. The artist carved replicas of these innocuous objects, and workshop participants created ceramic models while discussing topics of racism and police brutality often associated with these kinds of shootings.

One of the most famous of these cases happened in New York City in 1999, when unarmed 23-year-old Guinean student named Amadou Diallo was struck with 19 of 41 rounds fired by four New York City Police Department plainclothes officers. They were charged with second-degree murder and subsequently acquitted at trial in Albany, New York on the grounds that they had a reasonable expectation to be endangered and drew a gun first in self defense.

Since then, long-term data collection revealed the fact that these shootings disproportionally victimize Blacks and other people of color. But there is also research evidence that Blacks and Whites both misperceive something innocent to be a weapon more often, if the object is held by a Black rather than a White person. In other words, all of us are likely to exhibit modern racism or implicit racism – automatic, unconscious, unintentional – still being tied to a culture that routinely links the idea of Blacks with the idea of deviant behavior, or a set of ideas, mostly bad, that concern violent crime, poverty, hyper sexuality or moral corruptness.

You might not act on those beliefs, you might deny them, but the associations are carried by most of us through permanent exposure to the linkage of Black to negative or threatening concepts, whether we are aware of it or not, whether we have the best of intentions and the most egalitarian politics. (For a more detailed discussion see my review here.) Projects like Levine’s draw attention to the stereotypes (and for that matter the historical burden of racism) with the hope of motivating people to intercept their own mental associations.

Acknowledging the existence of racism, explicitly or implicitly expressed, and the hold it has on our society is the necessary antecedent to fight it. I can scarcely imagine a more timely reminder given what is unfolding in our communities at this very point in time, regardless of the color of unarmed victims of state violence.

***

The new work in this exhibition centers around containers of sand, intended to be deposits of what we release into them – drawing our sorrows, by hand or dowel. For those dealing with climate-related losses a lasting memento is offered – “silver linings” made of pewter filling in the contours of a sand drawing (by appointment, see the OJMCHE website)

They will be given to the participants and a replica stored in the artist’s collection. Examples from prior studio work are on display.

Sands shift, patterns will disappear, but the act of thinking what to depict and the physical act of drawing might very well form a containment that holds the grief momentarily outside of ourselves. Only to return.

Without end. As the aptly chosen exhibition title suggests.

Maybe the healing comes not from the unrealistic termination of the pain, but the insight that we walk on shared ground, sand before us containing multitudes, a communal experience. Certainly in the case of our own family’s post-fire trajectory, community sustenance made all the difference. The help – emotional, physical, financial, spiritual – being extended from the farthest corners was medicine. Solidarity as a first hand experience.

But maybe it is also a time to put the aspect of healing on a slow burner, and instead increase the heat of resistance against forces that create avoidable losses in the first place. Climate change denial is just one of the aspects of hostility towards science that we are currently experiencing, but one that has huge implications for the planet at large. Our time is running out to implement the necessary changes that can prevent the worst suffering for millions of people killed or ravaged by loss through climate catastrophes.

An installation of imprinted birchwood panels on some sort of infinity loop names types of loss, predominantly private causes, but also some of the general political challenges we face, from the legality of immigrants, the divisiveness in our society, to the lack of protecting our earth. I found myself longing for stronger words, in visually more prominent positions. The TINAG project was so courageous and openly political. Why not here? We live in an age of multiple mass extinctions around the world, at a time when authoritarian or even fascist history repeats itself in a variety of disguises across nations. This is a time of pandemics, starvation and withholding of medical or economic aid that dooms hundreds of thousands of people. Horror without end.

How do you draw a representation of genocide in a sand installation? The birchwood would have held the word.

***

What held grief was a dream catcher high up, pretty easy to miss, commemorating the untimely death of artist Peter Simensky, chair of the Graduate Fine Arts MFA program at California College of the Arts, Levine’s friend and mentor, to whom this exhibition was dedicated. For those unfamiliar with this unusually creative, political and perceptive artist, here is a link to an exhibition booklet from a previous memorial exhibition at Reed College’s Cooley Gallery and here is a link to his website.

I could not discern if one element of the dream catcher was indeed made out of pyrite, a kind of rock central to Simensky’s last artistic endeavors, Pyrite Radio works. Doesn’t matter. Whatever form his signal takes, I believe it will contain pride and joy at what is on display in the gallery below, the courage not to walk away from grief included.

Without End – Recent work on Grief by Cara Levine

Until May 31, 2026

OJMCHE

724 NW Davis Street
Portland, OR 97209

Wednesday – Sunday: 11 – 4

A Prayer under Eucalyptus Trees.

Poetry
Jan 26, 2026
1 Comments

I am not the praying kind, but you can hear me occasionally mumbling to the universe in general, sometimes begging, sometimes announcing gratitude. Last week I could not help but whisper to the trees around me, ” I am so, so grateful.”

It was on a hike with my son in the Robert Sibley Volcanic Regional Preserve, located in the Oakland Hills of the East Bay region of San Francisco. A skyline path around the rim of the volcano offers breathtaking views. A bit later you descend into a forest with ancient redwood trees, brooks meandering, occasionally forming small pools. Monarch butterflies flit around, in January! Eventually you climb back up, a steep, steep ascent through stands of eucalyptus trees, those best smelling of all invasive plants.

I could not help but think back to another time when we walked under eucalyptus trees in a park not far from the current one. Walk is a generous word – my son moved forwards on crutches with superhuman determination to get back on his feet. Finally out of a wheelchair after a catastrophic paragliding accident on the cliffs of the Pacific, multiple surgeries for broken back and other shattered bones behind him, he was set on regaining his mobility. Then, we lasted for probably 20 minutes, my silent prayer, “Let him walk pain free again.”

Now, we hiked for almost 2 hours, the only thing confining the length of the hike or slowing his step being his huffing and puffing mother.

There are temptations that parents face when confronting a suffering child: (false) promises of improvement (when you have no clue if, or when, or how complete healing might happen) and comparisons to one’s own list of life’s disaster and ways of overcoming them. Either one might make you feel better, but betray and/or burden the child. I don’t know if or how much I yielded to those temptations 6 years back. The months spent with him during recovery are a blur for the most part, hard memories tentative and quickly pushed away when reemerging. But I do know that I tried not to yield.

I was surprised when I came across the poem below, by a poet whose intellect, politics and endurance I admire. It features a mother squarely beseeching, no, scolding her son not to take the easy way out, given that she herself is persisting in her struggles. Here was a parent not shy to admonish, to lay out her exertions as a demand that they would not be in vain.

Likely these lines should not be read as announcing a debt (worst kind of parenting), but read as a model (hopeful kind of parenting.) Not as an obligation, but as a desire to convey strength.

Life will hold other challenges for our children, and maybe one day I will not bet able to shut my mouth and instead utter the last line of Hughes’ poem not exactly under my breath. “And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.”

It will come from love, though, and the unending desire to protect your own from harm. However many times I have seen this young phoenix rising from the ashes, I still have written in my heart: “Don’t you fall now.”

A prayer, not a demand.

Mother to Son

Well, son, I’ll tell you:
Life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.
It’s had tacks in it,
And splinters,
And boards torn up,
And places with no carpet on the floor—
Bare.
But all the time
I’se been a-climbin’ on,
And reachin’ landin’s,
And turnin’ corners,
And sometimes goin’ in the dark
Where there ain’t been no light.
So boy, don’t you turn back.
Don’t you set down on the steps
’Cause you finds it’s kinder hard.
Don’t you fall now—
For I’se still goin’, honey,
I’se still climbin’,
And life for me ain’t been no crystal stair.

By Langston Hughes

Here’s the music….

On the Road.

Poetry
Jan 19, 2026
2 Comments

I am traveling, just like the snow geese.

A friend reminded me of this poem, fit for Martin Luther King Day. Even more meaningful in this year of 2026, when powerful forces try to turn the clock back on history. There is no question in my mind that our response to the attempts to weaken or abolish the achievements of both, the Civil Rights Movement, and peace keeping organizations across the globe, are well served by Angelou’s reminders below.

We can rise, if we summon the courage.

Still I Rise

You may write me down in history
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?
Why are you beset with gloom?
’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells
Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,
With the certainty of tides,
Just like hopes springing high,
Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?
Bowed head and lowered eyes?
Shoulders falling down like teardrops,
Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?
Don't you take it awful hard
’Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines
Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,
You may cut me with your eyes,
You may kill me with your hatefulness,
But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?
Does it come as a surprise
That I dance like I've got diamonds
At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame
I rise
Up from a past that’s rooted in pain
I rise
I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,
Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear
I rise
Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear
I rise
Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,
I am the dream and the hope of the slave.
I rise
I rise
I rise.

By Maya Angelou

Source: The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou (1994)

Here is the poet reciting her words.

Here it is underlined with music.

Entering 2026

Art, Poetry, Politics
Jan 5, 2026
2 Comments

What to write for the first column of the New Year, a year that started with fresh horrors on top of the old ones? I was determined about one thing: it should be something positive, following the oft mentioned abolitionist Mariama Kaba’s instructions toward hope as a discipline, a practice. I wanted content that inspired hope, then, before landing on all the evil currently unleashed onto our world. I also wanted something close to my main interests of science, nature, art and politics. The latter two won out, with a little help from my friends.

Two of them seeded the idea: one gave me a book about artists and resistance under fascism, as a Hanukkah present. The other pointed out Mamdani’s inauguration as new Mayor of New York City. It contained a plethora of cultural references linked to artists and art that fight for a better future or strengthens the belief that all of us can be agents towards that goal.

I will focus today on the inauguration because it affects us here and now in our own cultural milieu. The general history of artists resisting fascism will take more time to learn about and digest, will return to it at some later point. Not that I understood all of the contemporary inauguration references either. I had to dig to make sense of some of them, derived from and directed at a younger generation that has been successfully awakened to participate in politics. Happy to share this new knowledge!

(Snapshots are from NYC some years back. The people make the city in all its glorious diversity.)

First, though, let’s look at some of the more familiar appearances during the inauguration. Actor and LGTBQ rights activist Javier Muñoz sang the national anthem. He is best known for starring and co-creating the role of “Alexander Hamilton” in Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. That musical was, of course, about the American Revolution and Hamilton’s role in it, casting founding father roles with non-white actors. The creator and the producer of Hamilton recently canceled the show in reaction to the Trump takeover of the Kennedy Center. It was scheduled to run between March 3 and April 26, 2026, to commemorate the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Mandy Patinkin sang “Over the Rainbow” along with a Staten Island elementary school chorus. It is a song of wanting and longing for a better future, written by a Jewish composer and a Jewish lyricist. Composer Harold Arlen was born in Buffalo, NY in 1905, to a Jewish cantor. Lyricist Yip Harburg (Isidore Hochberg) was born in 1896 on the Lower Eastside, to Yiddish speaking Orthodox Jews who had emigrated from Russia. Harburg was a close friend of Ira Gershwin since his schooldays and, according to his son, a “democratic socialist, [and] sworn challenger of all tyranny against the people”. He championed racial, sexual and gender equality as well as union politics, and was an ardent critic of high society and religion. Harburg’s song Brother, can you spare a dime is almost as familiar as Over the Rainbow. Both artists are definitely cultural touchstones for a demand for a more just world.

Lucy Dacus performed the labor anthem “Bread and Roses.”

I found the lyrics in the Jewish Women Archives, spelling out the 1911 poem by Jewish writer, editor and Jungian analyst James Oppenheim. It was based on a famous line by Rose Schneiderman, a Jewish Labor Union Leader.

Oppenheim was the founder and editor of The Seven Arts, a progressive magazine declaring “it was is not a magazine for artists, but an expression of artists for the community.” It published, among others, Theodore Dreiser, Robert Frost, Kahlil Gibran, D. H. Lawrence, Amy Lowell, and Paul Rosenfeld.

For her part, Rose Schneiderman was instrumental in the fight for unions and parity for women. She worked and organized from the tender age of 13, became vice president of the New York Women’s Trade Union League and she helped organize the Uprising of the 20,000 for the International Ladies Garment Workers Union in 1909. Her friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt and their conversations on labor issues led to Franklin Delano Roosevelent appointing Schneiderman in 1933 to the National Labor Advisory Board, where she fought to include domestic workers in social security and argued for wage parity for women workers.(Ref.) The Bread and Roses reference pertains to the need for subsistence (bread), but also the need for other support (roses,) including better schools, recreational facilities, and professional networks for trade union women.

The theme of inclusivity and fighting for a better future was central to the inaugural poem Proof by Cornelius Eady, reciting his poem here. He dedicated it to all of his students currently particularly affected by the hatred and revulsion expressed by the administration for all that is deemed “DEI.” The poet ends with “proof” that our hopes can become reality if we pursue large goals unimpeded b lack of imagination.

Proof.

You have to imagine it.
Who said you were too dark, too large, too queer, too loud?
Who said you were too poor, too strange, too fat?

You have to imagine it.
Who said you must keep quiet?
Who heard your story, then rolled their eyes?
Who tried to change your name to invisible?

You’ve got to imagine.
Who heard your name and refused to pronounce it.
Who checked their watch and said, “Not now.”

James Baldwin wrote, “The place in which I’ll fit will not exist until I make it.”

New York City of invention, roiling town, refresher and renewer.
New York City of the real will.
The canyons whisper in a hundred tongues.

New York, where your lucky self waits for your arrival,
Where there is always soil for your root.

This is our time.
The taste of us, the spice of us,
the colors and the rhythms and the beats of us,
In the echo of our ancestors who made certain we know who we are.

City of insistence.
City of resistance.

You have to imagine an army that wins without firing a bullet,
A joy that wears down the rock of “no,”
Up from insults,
Up from blocked doors,
Up from trick bags,
Up from fear,
Up from shame,
Up from the way it was done before.

You have to imagine that space they said wasn’t yours.
That time they said you’d never own.
The invisible city lit on its way.

This moment is our proof.

By Cornelius Eady.

And finally, a cultural reference by the new Mayor himself. Mamdani cited the rapper Jadakiss (of the trio LOX.) “We will, in the words of Jason Terrance Phillips, better known as Jadakiss or J to the Muah, be “outside.”

What does that mean? I learned that the phrase “I’m outside,” “means having street credibility and being present in one’s community, often used to assert authenticity and connection to one’s roots. It became a cultural catchphrase representing a commitment to being engaged and visible in the real world.” (Ref.)

Being present in our community: how is that for a start to 2026, a resolution that focuses on us being in this together rather than alone. It certainly has helped a progressive candidate unafraid to confront the Goliath(s) of structural obstacles, racist individuals and institutions, malignant narcissists, billionaires guarding their turfs, and corrupt agencies he now has to run, to secure a position of power. How much he will be able to transform his proposals into reality will depend on how much support he can garner along the way. He faces formidable resistance against his plans that serve the interests of the many, rather than the profits of the few.

Here is Mamdani’s full speech after being sworn in as Mayor.

For me, the selections of these particular songs and poems signified two important points: people have lived through difficult times in this country, whether the plight of European (and other) immigrants, the starvation of farming families in the dustbowl, the workers without rights, the women as second class citizens, the non-White population exposed to Jim Crow. Hard times arch across history, not exempting the present. Importantly, though, these pieces of art speak to meaning or even victories born from activism – progress has happened, through labor and union movements, through the civil rights movement, through women liberation movements.

Yes, the powers that be ardently want to turn back the clock. But prior generations have modeled for us that we can fight for our rights and win. The vast coalition supporting the new Mayor of New York did well to remind us of that. Onwards!

Music is a Bread and Roses version sung by Joan Baez chosen for the video commentary on women’s existence.

Possibilities

Walk with me. Today the universe sent a graffiti message to find the birds, so we shall.

It will be the last stroll of 2025, a year full of challenges and sorrows, but also joy from unanticipated quarters.

Rather than listing the highs and lows of 2025 as do so many other retrospectives, I want to focus on one thing: let us continue to fight indifference in 2026. I know I have harped on this all year long, but it is important enough to reiterate in this last YDP of the year.

Wood Duck

There are many meanings of being indifferent. Here are some gleaned from the Thesaurus:

not mattering one way or another (what others think is altogether indifferent to them.)
of no importance or value one way or another ( they talked about indifferent things.)
being neither excessive or inadequate (hills of indifferent size.)
being neither good or bad (in the sense of mediocre work.)
marked by no special like or dislike (indifferent about the task they were given.)
marked by lack of interest or concern (indifferent to suffering or injustice.)

It is, as you likely anticipated, the last option I am after, the ongoing struggle with apathy.

Kestrel

I do not want to be unconcerned, incurious, aloof, detached, disinterested or all the other synonyms that come to mind (or appear on the Thesaurus page, as the case may be.)

I don’t want ANYONE to be that way, because we are in this TOGETHER, in need of the strength of collective action.

What is “This” I am referring to, you ask? I am thinking of a world that is coming apart at the seams, in need of accelerated stitching to prevent dissolution, moral as much as physical.

A world where some not only hold on to existing inequality, but think it is a G-d-given right, with a biblically defined hierarchy of White over all darker shades, male over female, rich over poor. A world that desires inequality to continue or even be expanded.

A world where climate change, spread of disease and death are hastened by anti-science policies, removal of aid, eugenics, greed and war.

A world where the tools of promoting differentiated thinking – education, a free press, mechanisms to increase differences of opinion, including free speech – are systematically removed and broken.

A world where diversity is despised instead of celebrated.

Indifference will make it possible for this world to exist, something we should oppose at all cost. It might be an uphill struggle, but, as Miles Davis reminds us in today’s music, “So What?”

Crow eating mouse….

***

Grateful that a friend sent out the poem below. As so often with Szymborska, she uses the first person singular approach to establish a direct connection to the reader. (I had posted another of her poems like that here.) SHE has all those preferences, what about yours? SHE questions established truths and mainstream narratives, what about you? SHE made choices, isn’t it your turn?

Not only does she invite us into a mindset that alternates between the small and the large, interior and exterior worlds, the philosophical and the mundane. She reminds us that we have agency – we can make up our minds about what we believe and care about, instead of being indifferent. We have options, even if the powers that be try to convince us that we have run out of them (or our state of overwhelmed fatigue insinuates the same). There are possibilities, if we only think a little harder, accept being governed by reason, avoid being stymied by borrowing trouble.

Meadow Lark. A rare find at this time of year.

What this poem provides for me is the permission to contain sometimes contradictory multitudes, as long as I care and make choices, all of which is in my power. More importantly, it makes me aware of the need for action to follow from belief, given that she lists numerous morally consequential preferences that don’t exist in a void, but require positioning.

Let us remind each other of this in 2026.

Possibilities

I prefer movies.
I prefer cats.
I prefer the oaks along the Warta.
I prefer Dickens to Dostoyevsky.
I prefer myself liking people
to myself loving mankind.
I prefer keeping a needle and thread on hand, just in case.
I prefer the color green.
I prefer not to maintain
that reason is to blame for everything.
I prefer exceptions.
I prefer to leave early.
I prefer talking to doctors about something else.
I prefer the old fine-lined illustrations.
I prefer the absurdity of writing poems
to the absurdity of not writing poems.
I prefer, where love’s concerned, nonspecific anniversaries
that can be celebrated every day.
I prefer moralists
who promise me nothing.
I prefer cunning kindness to the over-trustful kind.
I prefer the earth in civvies.
I prefer conquered to conquering countries.
I prefer having some reservations.
I prefer the hell of chaos to the hell of order.
I prefer Grimms’ fairy tales to the newspapers’ front pages.
I prefer leaves without flowers to flowers without leaves.
I prefer dogs with uncropped tails.
I prefer light eyes, since mine are dark.
I prefer desk drawers.
I prefer many things that I haven’t mentioned here
to many things I’ve also left unsaid.
I prefer zeroes on the loose
to those lined up behind a cipher.
I prefer the time of insects to the time of stars.
I prefer to knock on wood.
I prefer not to ask how much longer and when.
I prefer keeping in mind even the possibility
that existence has its own reason for being.

By Wislawa Szymborska

Translated by Stanislaw Baranczak and Clare Cavanagh

Happy New Year. Much gratitude that you all have come along for the ride so far.

Downy Woodpecker

Steadfastness.

“A Third Way: Between mute submission and blind hate – I choose the third way. I am ṣāmid. – Raja Shehadeh, A Journal of Life in the Westbank (1982).

I am writing this on the last day of Hanukkah, the Jewish celebration of a miracle during ancient times of war (between two Jewish factions, no less.) It is a minor holiday for us, in contrast to Christmas for others, coming up in a few days. The promise of peace through a newly born savior is central to Christianity, even though one might wonder about the seeds of conflict already inherent in the Christmas story per announcement in Luke 2:14 : “Glory to God in the highest heaven, and on earth peace to those on whom his favor rests.” Favoring one set of people over others is a recipe for conflict, in my opinion, and currying favor in order to be in the desirable in-group has often implied exclusion of others. But I digress.

Today’s thoughts are about peace, the absence thereof, and the steadfastness of those who try to dream about a just world amidst war and violence, including the anti-Semitic mass murder in Australia last week and the ongoing genocidal actions in Gaza for the last 2 years.

There is a term in Arabic, Sumud, which means “steadfastness” or “steadfast perseverance”. In one interpretation, it encompasses everyday nonviolent resistance against injustice imposed on you. Sumud is an alternative to and rejection of passive submission to oppression and dispossession. It became an important aspect of Palestinian existence under Israeli occupation, summarized early by Edward Said as work which “becomes a form of elementary resistance, a way of turning presence into small-scale obduracy.” (Ref.)

Folks at the Arab Educational Institute in Bethlehem defined the sumud concept as, “on the one hand, [relating] to a vertical dimension, ‘standing strong’ on the land, having deep roots. On the other hand”, sumud indicates “a horizontal time dimension – an attitude of patience and persistence, of not giving up”, despite the odds. (Ref.) I chose photographs of roots and trees for this reason today.

A person who practices sumud is called ṣāmid, and I can think of no better example right now than Ahmed “Muin” Abu Amsha, a musician, sound engineer, composer, and music educator from Gaza. He has steadily worked with children under the onslaught of bombs and drones, teaching them music that incorporated the sounds of the drones, making something terrifying into something beautiful. He insists that music is just as important as finding shelter and food, a steadfast focus on something more than war. His choir, Gaza Birds Singing, has provided meaning for so many youths living under excruciating existential threat. Watch for yourself.

Sumud is also the title of a new, short film by documentary film maker Jan Haaken, featuring a Portland anesthesiologist who regularly travels to Gaza to provide assistance to a medical system under systematic attack, and Omar El Akkad, a now Portland-based author whose most recent book, One Day, Everyone Will Have Always Been Against This, won the 2025 National Book Award for non-fiction.

Truth be told, I had to force myself to watch these 27 minutes, given how overwhelmed I feel by my mix of emotions every time I think of Gaza. The sorrow over the Israeli victims of the Hamas attacks; the subsequent killing, maiming and psychological torture of Palestinian men, women and children for two full years. The horrid and completely counterproductive Israeli response, with our tax dollars supporting an indiscriminate war against civilians. The lack of will of the political establishment around the world to put an end to the slaughter. The undeniable fact that the current “cease fire” is a sham, with more than 360 Palestinians, mostly kids and the elderly, killed since it was announced 10 weeks ago. I just want to hide my head in the sand.

I did watch, though, and learned a lot, much of it new to me, including the report of the anesthesiologist on the systematic nature of the injuries they encountered with victims all waiting in lines at food distribution centers. But much of the film also gave me renewed hope that there are people out there who can and will help, with their courage, their wisdom, their insights and longing for justice, to move ahead. These are, of course, people who need us, in return, to join for collective actions that might have an impact on ending the war. In an earlier print interview, author Omar El Akkad outlined his observations and recommended action, asking: “How does one finish the sentence: ‘It is unfortunate that tens of thousands of children are dead, but …’”

Pondering this sentence might be a first step towards overcoming the tendency to avoid facing what is going on in the Middle East, a tendency otherwise fueled by the need to keep one’s peace of mind somewhat intact in the face of the onslaught of bad news in our world. If we want to be agents of peace, we likely need to leave our clinging to peace of mind behind. Period. It’s our turn to embrace the concept of steadfastness, not as cultural appropriation but as an expression of solidarity with victims everywhere.

If you are interested in screening this documentary with a group of friends or colleagues for free, you can go to the website. In the lower left corner is a red square where you can apply for a free link to see the film.

***

People who decry the extent of Palestinian suffering are constantly challenged to justify themselves, particularly so if they are Jewish. Anyone standing in solidarity with Palestinians is tagged as suspicious, as if support for this devastated population necessarily involves anti-Semitism. This challenge, though, is incoherent, and there should be no obstacle to asserting two simple concepts at once: a respect for Jewish lives and a respect for Palestinian lives; a rejection of anti-Semitism, and an abhorrence of the indiscriminate killings of Gazan civilians. Why do I have to defend myself for these simple, humanistic statements? Why do I have to justify them and defend myself against the bizarre notion that these views are anti-Semitic?

Just look at the table of contents of the current issue of Jewish Currents, the award-winning quarterly of politics, culture, and ideas. There you will find a plethora of reports and analyses authored by people raising their voices against those who have distorted all discussions of the war in Gaza and the future for a Palestinian homeland, deliberately (and falsely) equating anti-Zionism with anti-Semitism, and falsely condemning calls for Palestinians statehood as anti-Semitic. Amid the horrors of the reality in Gaza, it is dismaying that so much time and energy are now spent defending against how the notion of anti-Semitism is instrumentalized to push through political projects that are rooted in very different considerations.

A poignant summary comes from Will Saletan at The Bulwark, noting how supporters of contemporary Zionism, ever more exclusionary and territorially expansive, play into the hands of anti-Semitic terrorists like the Bondi Beach murderers.

“Supporters of Israel have shifted their position again. Any endorsement of Palestinian statehood, they contend, is an invitation to antisemitic violence.

This is a false and dangerous argument. If you tell people that accepting Palestinian statehood is tantamount to promoting or provoking the murder of Jews, you’re erasing the nuances that make coexistence possible. You’re conflating Palestinian autonomy with opposition to Israel. You’re conflating opposition to Israel with hostility to Jews. And you’re conflating hostility to Jews with murder.

All of these conflations serve the interests of antisemitic terrorists. Their goal is to polarize the issue. They want to equate supporting Palestine with killing Jews. Prominent supporters of Israel are now, in effect, endorsing that equation.“

***

I started with references to the sound of drones, and I will end with another one.

Let me close with a poem by Mosab Abu Toha, who received the Pulitzer Prize for Commentary with essays published in the New Yorker this year (2025). His first volume of poems won the American Book Award, the Palestine Book Award and Arrowsmith Press’s 2023 Derek Walcott Poetry Prize.

Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear

For Alicia M. Quesnel, MD

I
When you open my ear, touch it
gently.
My mother’s voice lingers somewhere inside.
Her voice is the echo that helps recover my equilibrium
when I feel dizzy during my attentiveness.

You may encounter songs in Arabic,
poems in English I recite to myself,
or a song I chant to the chirping birds in our backyard.

When you stitch the cut, don’t forget to put all these back in my ear.
Put them back in order as you would do with books on your shelf.

II
The drone’s buzzing sound,
the roar of an F-16,
the screams of bombs falling on houses,
on fields, and on bodies,
of rockets flying away—
rid my small ear canal of them all.

Spray the perfume of your smiles on the incision.
Inject the song of life into my veins to wake me up.
Gently beat the drum so my mind may dance with yours,
my doctor, day and night.

BY MOSAB ABU TOHA

Music today is more by the Gaza Birds Singing – here, here and here.

The entire album, Wings over Wire, can be found on Bandcamp for a pittance. All proceeds for purchase go to the Gaza Bird project.

Go on, sing!

Culture, Music, Poetry
Dec 15, 2025
1 Comments

The essay below was written before the horrific events of the last days, the mass shootings at Brown University and Bondi Beach, the stabbing of a righteous couple. I wondered this morning, if it would be frivolous to post it. But it ends with thoughts of having to create light when there is none, reminders of making a world shine during difficult circumstances. I think that core message is what we need. So here goes….

_____________________________

Hah! The universe tells me to think, not mope.

I had barely started to whine about the fact that I miss live singing, both as a participant and a listener, when, within 24 hours, interesting pieces about singing popped up in my news feed, in publications as diverse as The Guardian, Nature and High Country News.

It began with listening to Bach’s Christmas Oratorio, familiar from childhood. In retrospect, it seems as if we sang not just in this season but all the time in the 50s and 60s – in class rooms, at services, at demonstrations, at parties, on school field trips in the busses, and eventually at live performances. Belting out the newest hits from the Beatles or the Kinks, Procul Harum, the Stones, Joan Baez, Joni Mitchell, Bob Dylan, Traffic, Jonny Halliday and Gilbert Bécaud, you name it. Informed by listening to Radio Caroline or Radio Luxembourg under the covers on contraband tiny transistor radios, strictly prohibited in my boarding school. No matter how much I loathed being stashed there, when we sang, a sense of community took over.

(Portraits today of people of that – my – generation. I always wonder what someone’s musical taste might be, why I stereotype many of them as (Grateful)Deadheads, and if I’ll ever find a match to my idiosyncratic musical preferences.)

Later I joined choirs, until chemo wrecked my voice; then regularly attended choral concerts, until the Covid pandemic shut down my ability to be in close proximity to large crowds. These days what goes for singing is croaking along to my Bandcamp collection in the privacy of my car on solo rides to my nature outings. Oh well. Could be worse.

I was squarely reminded of that, when I read about people who have made it their business to sing to people on their deathbeds. The assumption is that it calms the dying, and allows them to cross the threshold, accompanied by soft, slow melodies and harmonies sung by up to 4 practiced people who travel to homes and hospices. Importantly, they only sing their own compositions, assuming that more familiar tunes would “keep” you from letting go, clinging to or (re)living the past. Hmmm.

I am firmly convinced that we have no agency in the choice of timing our exit, as I have discussed previously, and so nothing we do or don’t do, will have any influence. But would a music lover feel more comfortable with simplistic, if sweet tunes by these threshold choirs, than the familiar sounds of, say, a Mahler or Schubert song cycle? For that matter, would one feel comfortable with strangers in the room (though still better than the traveling harpists so prevalent in local hospitals…)? You can read all about the choirs here.

***

As it turns out, not surprisingly, hard times, punctuated by traumatic events like 9/11 or the pandemic, have an impact on songs. Interesting research, recently published in Nature, analyzed 50 years of song development (1973 – 2023) for the lyrics of songs on the US Hot 100 Billboards. (Heads up for sampling bias: certain genres are not reflected in these charts, from rap to early punk, which was censured, just think Ramones or Sex Pistols. Reggae and Latin music was extremely popular but did not make it into these charts since at the time based in club culture.)

But for the general popular music we see clear trends: across time, themes of stress and negativity increased, while simultaneously the lyrics got less and less complex. Across the same 50 years, rates of depression and anxiety increased, as did the negative tone in the media and fiction books, amidst recent drops in IQ and PISA test scores.

Preferences in music consumption could mirror what is going on in the surrounding culture and one can speculate about what emotional regulation we choose in response to what is happening around us. We can select music that aligns with our current affective state (stressed), or we can listen to music that brings us closer to a goal state (happy) – in short, we can regulate our moods by choosing particular musical coping mechanisms. The research here was interested if that happens in ways we can predict for society as a whole, particularly during periods of traumatic events.

As it turns out the prevalent mood congruent trends were NOT amplified during 9/11 or Covid; in other words, people did not listen more to upsetting music when they felt particularly frightened. If anything, people chose to listen to more positive music instead, modulating their mood perhaps in ways that allowed them to make it through these hard times.

The complexity of lyrics – or absence thereof – is currently affected by yet another variable: the arrival of AI on the scene. Here is Timothy Snyder’s description of the AI renditions of classic Christmas songs, musical score intact, lyrics changed, as experienced in a coffee shop just a few days ago. In his inimitable prose:

My guess would be that someone, somewhere, entered an instruction to generate winter and Christmas songs that avoided “controversial” subjects such as divine and human love. And so we get mush. In a reverse sublimation, the sacred becomes slop. …

The carols bear a message about love, one that that no machine will understand, and that those who profit from the machine perhaps do not want us to understand. Love begins humbly, takes risks, recognizes the other, ends in pain, returns as song. And begins humbly again.

As always, his essay is worth a quick read.

***

Let’s end on a more positive note, though, keying in on A or C major (preferred keys by Earth, Wind and Fire, one of my favorites, as it turns out.)

I found the poem below about singing songs that are also centered on love, incredibly perceptive as well as motivating. The poet Valencia Robin was a recipient of a National Endowment of the Arts Fellowship, her poems have appeared in a wide-range of journals, anthologies and podcasts including The Best American Poetry, The New York Times, Poetry Daily. Here she cites a quite familiar line from The Essential Earth Wind and Fire, album 2002, track 9 All About Love, a song that inspired the poem:

“And if there ain’t no beauty, you gotta make some beauty,”

Have Mercy,

Listen to me Y’all……

Ars Poetica

I woke up singing
my favorite song as a kid
and I mean, really singing,
catching myself all morning,
asking myself what it means,
a reminder perhaps
that we can be strange
— we wake, we sing,
we wonder why we’re singing,
we realize how seldom we have a song
in us anymore, remember how we
used to play/be Aretha and Anita
or Earth, Wind and Fire — Maurice
bringing it, sending us on one of the few oldies
where the words ‘right on’ don’t sound silly,
standing in the middle of the room
giving our all to the olive-green sofa
and wood paneling, mama at work
— we even had his little laugh down
and when’s the last time we believed
what we were saying so completely,
all that 70’s positivity, all that gospel
pretending to be the devil’s music
— and is that what ruined us, why we’re so bad
at real life — practically screaming the last line,
And if there ain’t no beauty, you gotta make some beauty,
deciding without even knowing we’d decided
that that — Lord help us — was the dream.

by Valencia Robin.

It’s still the dream. And about time, that poems titled Ars Poetica don’t just give a nod to Horace (he wrote the very first poem with that title about the craft of writing poetry), but acknowledge the likes of Maurice White whose poetic lyrics motivated and uplifted generations.

And now excuse me while I slink off to hum this and grab the camera to make some beauty out of a dreary winter landscape. You can come along, if you sing!

Song for the Rainy Season

Nature, Poetry
Dec 11, 2025
2 Comments

Looking at the wondrous waterfalls and an old, abandoned house at the White River in WA earlier this fall, I was reminded of Bishop’s poem Song for the Rainy Season. The poem’s short lines and enjambment establish a kind of breathless rhythm, matching my breathless climb back up from the river, once I had explored the ruins. The poet describes the beauty of a wet landscape with a home embedded within, in the tropical forests of Brazil where she lived for some 15 years. The rainy season has arrived here in the Pacific Northwest and adjacent High Desert regions as well, and before you rush to wish for a return of the dry, read the 6th stanza. Some of the magic and coloring will all dry up….

Song for the Rainy Season.

Hidden, oh hidden
in the high fog
the house we live in,
beneath the magnetic rock,
rain-, rainbow-ridden,
where blood-black
bromelias, lichens,
owls, and the lint
of the waterfalls cling,
familiar, unbidden.

In a dim age
of water
the brook sings loud
from a rib cage
of giant fern; vapor
climbs up the thick growth
effortlessly, turns back,
holding them both,
house and rock,
in a private cloud.

At night, on the roof,
blind drops crawl
and the ordinary brown
owl gives us proof
he can count:
five times–always five–
he stamps and takes off
after the fat frogs that,
shrilling for love,
clamber and mount.

House, open house
to the white dew
and the milk-white sunrise
kind to the eyes,
to membership
of silver fish, mouse,
bookworms,
big moths; with a wall
for the mildew’s
ignorant map;

darkened and tarnished
by the warm touch
of the warm breath,
maculate, cherished;
rejoice! For a later
era will differ.
(O difference that kills
or intimidates, much
of all our small shadowy
life!) Without water

the great rock will stare
unmagnetized, bare,
no longer wearing
rainbows or rain,
the forgiving air
and the high fog gone;
the owls will move on
and the several
waterfalls shrivel
in the steady sun.

By Elizabeth Bishop