Reasons for Optimism

Poetry, Politics
Dec 27, 2019
3 Comments

Today I offer some insights brazenly stolen from a list found in The Nation, a useful reminder that there are points of hope.

Good stuff that happened this year:

Legal Victories for the Activists Fighting for Families on the Border

Continued Progressive Investment in the Work of Stacey Abrams

The Supreme Court Saves the Census

Optimistic we’ll find the right role models

Louisiana Reelects a Democratic Governor

Democrats Take Control in Virginia

We Finally Get Closer to Passing the Equal Rights Amendment

The 1619 Project (a wide-ranging editorial package including essays, images, and reported stories, and a radical challenge to the idea that “slavery was a long time ago”; it firmly roots the United States’ societal problems and inequalities in its treatment of black people. )

The Continuation of the Demographic Revolution

Pelosi Retakes the Speaker’s Gavel

Trump Is Impeached

To read details about these hopeful signals, go here.

Or just read or listen to Amanda Gorman, who was chosen the National Youth Poet Laureate in 2017. I’m optimistic: the kids will save us. (And in honor of her being from L.A., today’s photographs were taken there, at The Broad, with an eye on optimism…)

Optimistic we can preserve Little Red Riding Hoods’s resistance

In This Place (An American Lyric)

By Amanda Gorman

— An original poem written for the inaugural reading of Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith at the Library of Congress.

There’s a poem in this place—
in the footfalls in the halls
in the quiet beat of the seats.
It is here, at the curtain of day,
where America writes a lyric
you must whisper to say.

There’s a poem in this place—
in the heavy grace,
the lined face of this noble building,
collections burned and reborn twice.

There’s a poem in Boston’s Copley Square
where protest chants
tear through the air
like sheets of rain,
where love of the many
swallows hatred of the few.

There’s a poem in Charlottesville
where tiki torches string a ring of flame
tight round the wrist of night
where men so white they gleam blue—
seem like statues
where men heap that long wax burning
ever higher
where Heather Heyer
blooms forever in a meadow of resistance.

There’s a poem in the great sleeping giant
of Lake Michigan, defiantly raising
its big blue head to Milwaukee and Chicago—
a poem begun long ago, blazed into frozen soil,
strutting upward and aglow.

There’s a poem in Florida, in East Texas
where streets swell into a nexus
of rivers, cows afloat like mottled buoys in the brown,
where courage is now so common
that 23-year-old Jesus Contreras rescues people from floodwaters.

There’s a poem in Los Angeles
yawning wide as the Pacific tide
where a single mother swelters
in a windowless classroom, teaching
black and brown students in Watts
to spell out their thoughts
so her daughter might write
this poem for you.

There’s a lyric in California
where thousands of students march for blocks,
undocumented and unafraid;
where my friend Rosa finds the power to blossom
in deadlock, her spirit the bedrock of her community.
She knows hope is like a stubborn
ship gripping a dock,
a truth: that you can’t stop a dreamer
or knock down a dream.

How could this not be her city
su nación
our country
our America,
our American lyric to write—
a poem by the people, the poor,
the Protestant, the Muslim, the Jew,
the native, the immigrant,
the black, the brown, the blind, the brave,
the undocumented and undeterred,
the woman, the man, the nonbinary,
the white, the trans,
the ally to all of the above
and more?

Tyrants fear the poet.
Now that we know it
we can’t blow it.
We owe it
to show it
not slow it
although it
hurts to sew it
when the world
skirts below it.

Hope—
we must bestow it
like a wick in the poet
so it can grow, lit,
bringing with it
stories to rewrite—
the story of a Texas city depleted but not defeated
a history written that need not be repeated
a nation composed but not yet completed.

There’s a poem in this place—
a poem in America
a poet in every American
who rewrites this nation, who tells
a story worthy of being told on this minnow of an earth
to breathe hope into a palimpsest of time—
a poet in every American
who sees that our poem penned
doesn’t mean our poem’s end.

There’s a place where this poem dwells—
it is here, it is now, in the yellow song of dawn’s bell
where we write an American lyric
we are just beginning to tell.

Optimistic we can stretch our sense of proportion beyond the electoral college….

Enjoy someone else’s perpetual optimism… I’m signing off for a week’s break. See you in January after I’ve restocked the archives!

Optimistic I’ll catch footage in some unexpected places…

Christmas Legend

Leave it to me, to serve you up with a snarky poem by Master Brecht on Christmas Day. The way I see it, if you are feeling elated, grateful, happy or content, then you have the leeway to think about those less fortunate than you (and the promises kept or broken by religion.) If you, on the other hand, feel lousy, there’s always downward comparison – your woes (hopefully) pale compared to those of people dying from exposure to cold.

The real topic for today, though, is not poetic musings about poverty, but how to approach getting rid of it. We might as well start with a quote from social reformer Johann Heinrich Pestalozzi, a contemporary of the French Revolution:

“Charity is the drowning of rights in the cesspit of compassion.”

I read this quote in an essay by Thomas Gebauer who is managing director of the socio-medical human rights aid organization “medico international”. He explains that poverty and social exclusion need to be targeted at their roots, which are often of a political nature, rather than having charity, both private and public, simply treat the symptoms.

You can read the long one yourself, but here is the short version: Alleviating the symptoms of poverty and hardship helps people in the short run. Securing the establishment of social and economic human rights will shift things in the long run, no longer relying on individual charitable aid (which can dry up at whim or be unevenly distributed.) A just and guaranteed distribution of social resources will counteract increasing social inequality, unfair trade relations and the absence of social security services. Access to social resources, social security and a decent standard of living should be put on legal footing, guaranteed by public socio-political institutions. For my German readers, here is an interview with him speaking to the same issue in German.

Something to be thought through. I still believe that the direct act of charity from one human to another, the dollar changing hands while the gaze and smile exchanged between eyes, matters enormously for any one individual, giver AND receiver, a reminder that we share this world.

Yes, I know, complicated musings on Christmas morning. So just sit back and let Bertold Brecht’s poem sink in. And save me a cookie – a charity guaranteed to be appreciated and not undermining world peace….. Merry Christmas!

Christmas Legend

1
On Christmas Eve today
All of us poor people stay
Huddled in this chilly stack
The wind blows in through every crack.
Dear Jesus, come to us, now see
How sorely we have need of thee.

2
Here today we huddle tight
As the darkest heathens might
The snow falls chilly on our skin
The snow is forcing its way in.
Hush, snow, come in with us to dwell:
We were thrown out by Heaven as well.

3
The wine we’re mulling is strong and old
It’s good for keeping out the cold
The wine is hot, the door is shut
Some fat beast’s snuffling round the hut.
Then come in, beast, out of the snow
Beasts too have nowhere warm to go.

4
We’ll toss our coats on to the fire
Then we’ll all be warm as flames leap higher
Then the roof will almost catch alight
We shan’t freeze to death till we’re through the night.
Come in, dear wind, and be our guest
You too have neither home nor rest.

(1923)

Here is a different, more academic translation. I think Brecht himself would have preferred the one above I chose instead, even though I could not find who translated it. Sorry for not being able to acknowledge them.

Photographs today are of budding Helebores (called Christ’s Roses in German) and other tidbits from the winter garden.

Music is the Christmas gift that keeps on giving. I think last year I posted the Harnoncourt version – today it’s Fasolis: one of the happiest, most energetic rendition of Bach’s Oratorio that you can find. It’ll counterbalance thinking about hard stuff……..

Miracle

Poetry
Dec 23, 2019
2 Comments

Yes, Happy Hanukah and yes, it involved a miracle, although it is a minor Jewish holiday, really, and one that grew out of civil war between factions of Jews, conveniently not too often mentioned.

The miracle of the title refers to a poem, though, by the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors. Her debut collection of poetry, Eyes, Stones, was selected as the winner of the 2011 Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets, she has a new book coming out in 2020, and she currently teaches poetry at Juilliard.

Her small first poetry volume addresses the Israeli Palestinian conflict, by all reports from all perspectives, acknowledging the horrors lived then and now, Jewish and Palestinian; those poems were written a decade or more ago, I wonder how she feels now. Probably longing for a miracle of a different kind. Aren’t we all.

I chose today’s poem because it values connectedness. There are so many people out there suffering more than usual during the Christmas and Hanukah season from loneliness, isolation or simply the winter blues. A good reminder to ramp up efforts to reach out. It makes a difference.

Miracle

By Elana Bell

What else to call the way the bare branches
I’d bought at the neighborhood bodega
came back to life that winter.
I’d carried them home — dry, wrapped
in paper — stuck them in the square vase,
and, as an afterthought, filled it with water.

I don’t know when I noticed the pale
pink shoots sprouting from the submerged
ends: wild, reaching roots, like ginseng, or the hair
on an old woman’s chin. Then tiny green
leaves began to appear at the tips,
curling over themselves with the sheer effort
of growing.

I’d thought they were dead.

And now I recall being in the choke
of a fog I did not have a name for
and didn’t think I’d survive. I could try
to describe it for you now: the nights
I woke with my pulse pounding through,
the heaviness of each breath,
how the effort of being inside my body
felt like burning —

But what I really want to tell you is this:
how, in the parch of that long drought,
the people I loved kept bringing me water.

Water.

Though I turned my back, and did not answer
to my name, though I flung the cup away —

Let me say it plain: I wanted to die.
But something in me, some tiny bulb
still alive under all that rotted wood,
kept drinking, kept right on drinking.

Music today is a mix, dependent on your mood.

For the traditional ones: Gnesin’s Variations on a Jewish Theme

For the pensive ones: Bloch’s Sacred Shttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Agd4lN35ICwervice

For us anxious ones: the perfect eerie tones of Copeland’s Vitebsk.

You got three nights of Hanukah covered right there! Stay tuned. And now go, get some chocolate gelt for your’s truly….

From word to image

Language, Poetry
Dec 6, 2019
0 Comments

Earlier this week I wrote about metaphors as a subtle way of manipulating people into supporting or refusing certain actions. Today, for our last bit on language, I want to look at metaphors that appear in poems, directly or indirectly influencing how you appreciate a text – IF you understand the metaphors, that is.

The reason I am interested in this is, in some ways, selfish. I use a lot of metaphors in my own visual art, and am often called on to explain what I mean. I always wonder if the images themselves are not strong enough for appreciation, but need spelling out – and if and how that will alter the way people perceive them. I also worry that all my esoteric bits of knowledge just need a space to play, completely confusing the hell out of an image, never mind the people who view it. (Which reminds me: My calendar for next year, using the metaphor of whaling as a warning of the consequences of ruthless environmental exploitation, can still be ordered. All proceeds ($30) go to Street Roots. It might not arrive in time for the holidays, but definitely in time for January 1st.)

I am sure, there is a whole literature on metaphoric use in poetry; I have not read it. I realize, however, that for most poems I read, I do NOT get the myriad clues of higher learning or meaning strewn about. It is almost like they are messages for a group of the initiated, who pride themselves of being clever enough to get all the hints. The rest of us can just enjoy the language or a general mood. Here is an example (the link gets you to the original German version. I offer my translation below – the original is in rhyme which I could not capture in English.)

The Game is over

The poem was published in 1956 by Ingeborg Bachmann, a darling of the post-war literary scene, who tragically died in her late 40s when, while smoking and falling asleep in bed, she accidentally set herself on fire. She was the young token female poetess in the German-speaking landscape, coming to early fame with her poetry, even though her 2 prose books were substantively stronger.

So what do I get out of the poem? A sister speaking to her brother, conjuring up childhood games and enchantments, images and memories of times at play. For every positive thing, there is a warning of impending loss or doom. No choice, either, we “have to go to sleep, the game is over -” childhood ends. Glimpses of joy soon turning to a sense of sadness. Fond elicitation of how we all used to play, back there in the 1950s before we had to grow up. A bitter taste in your mouth that dangers abound and magic childhood words will be forgotten.

And what did I miss? Man, about everything of importance. The floating on a raft through the sky bit turns out to be a reference to the Isis and Osiris myth, the ancient narrative of sibling incest and undying love. The tents in the desert, the sand in your hair refer back to both, Bachman’s own figment of a novel, Franza, that deals with secretive sibling love, ending badly in Egypt, and also to Paul Celan’s poetry – he was her lover on and off, with the doomed affair not able to bridge the chasm between her parent’s Nazi past and his parents death in the camps. Never mind his marriage, and his desperation, leading to early suicide.

The petal alighting on her seal? Turns out the seal (Siegel) is a different name for a word describing the female sexual organs of plants – I leave the rest to your imagination, and your attention drawn to the fact that darling brother becomes Darling in the last stanza, with the parents aghast. Don’t have to be a psychoanalyst for that one.

Does this added knowledge enhance your reading of the piece? Or complicate it? Does our lack of the relevant education which would unlock the metaphors mean we’ll never “get” poetry? Is it enough to just look at the “pictures” presented by the metaphors?

Well, someone made pictures out of them (which is where I got to thinking about this poem in the first place and then spending hours as a detective trying to get the bits and pieces of the puzzles from various sources.) Anselm Kiefer created a whole cycle of paintings, dedicated to Bachman, some including snippets from her poems, in our case the lines “your and my age, the age of the world” written next to or on the depicted pyramids. If you had never heard of the poem you would not get the hints in the painting either…..

In the end it comes down to this, I think: if you want to communicate with everyone, use the words and the images that are common good. Enough of them around. If you want to impress the learned set, go right ahead and make it complicated. Leave clues that only the initiated know how to decipher, upon which they feel victorious and in turn judge you to be a precious artist. And now let me go to make a really straightforward montage. How about an apple and a snake?

Photographs are from THE coolest exhibit of a model train set at the Washington State Historical Society in Tacoma. As a sister without brothers I never had the pleasure of that toy. Then again, the boys I knew were really not allowed to play much with them either – an honor reserved for their fathers…..

Music today is a childhood favorite – Ravel’s fairy tales for children….

Crisp

Nature, Poetry
Nov 22, 2019
4 Comments

Just so you see the rest of my week’s ambling, here are photographs of yesterday’s walk at the Sandy River Delta, a half hour’s drive from Portland.

Not a cloud in the sky, thin, cool air, the mountain visible and the dog happy. The human too. Color palette went from red to gold to blue, reflecting sun off the water. Hard, clear November light.

I am pairing this with a poem by Thomas Hood (1799–1845) titled No! or alternatively November about this month. Unless you think he saw into a future where global warming has brought dystopia on all of us, here is a hint.

Hood wrote from London, a city heated by coal during the first cold waves of November. The sulphuric smog, paired with fog rolling in, obscured everything, made it hard to breathe, and blocked out traffic, including movement of needed goods.

November

No shade throwing on my part – just a reminder, sensed during every minute of that walk, that we still inhabit a beautiful world an need to fight hard to keep it.

Music today is about the last of the falling leaves.

If in doubt, take a walk

So ok, I was muttering. Venting, really. Blabbering. One of those days when everything that could irritate did irritate. R e a l l y irritate.

No, I was muttering: like unintelligible speech, multitudinous murmurs, mysterious tongues – a living, walking Longfellow oak in human form…. might as well go for a walk and join my brethren.

Eliot’s Oak

by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Thou ancient oak! whose myriad leaves are loud
With sounds of unintelligible speech,
Sounds as of surges on a shingly beach,
Or multitudinous murmurs of a crowd;
With some mysterious gift of tongues endowed,
Thou speakest a different dialect to each;
To me a language that no man can teach,
Of a lost race, long vanished like a cloud.
For underneath thy shade, in days remote,
Seated like Abraham at eventide
Beneath the oaks of Mamre, the unknown
Apostle of the Indians, Eliot, wrote
His Bible in a language that hath died
And is forgotten, save by thee alone.

Photographs, then, of today’s oak trees in Tualatin, where I didn’t care that I have no clue who the Eliot is in this poem that I dimly remembered.

I stopped muttering, when the birds took over with their various honking, trilling, whistling, or whatever bird sounds come out of sparrows, flickers, waxwings, shrub jays, bald eagles and geese. Let’s just all agree on mysterious tongues….

Well, and then, of course, I went home and had to look it up. Who was this Eliot?

“Plant explorer Ernest Henry Wilson (1876-1930) also photographed many famous North American oaks, such as the Eliot Oak. The Eliot Oak stands “a few rods east of the Unitarian Church in S. Natick [Massachusetts].” It is a very old white oak that possibly dates to at least the 1650s, and according to one legend that gives rise to its name, the Reverend John Eliot (1603-1690) preached to Indians beneath its canopy. Professor Stowe, in an address on the 200th anniversary of the town of Natick, described Eliot as “a man of great versatility, and very superior intellectual power. Doubtless he had his equals, but never a superior in Christian zeal and goodness.”

The famous poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807–1882) personified and commemorated this oak in his “Sonnet on Eliot’s Oak” (1877). These verses emphasize the human traits of the oak, as its leaves murmur loudly with “sounds of unintelligible speech,” that nonetheless communicate the word of God and the wonders of his natural world just as the preacher Eliot presumably did. Also, the final lines acknowledge Eliot’s authorship of the Algonquin Bible, the first Bible printed in America and written in the Algonquin language.” (Source: arboretum/Harvard/edu)

Can I take off and go back to muttering now?

Or listen to some Wagnerian forest murmurs?

To Autumn

Nature, Poetry
Oct 11, 2019
1 Comments

John Keats (1795-1821)

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
  Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
  With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
  And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
    To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
  With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
    For summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
  Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
  Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;
Or on a half-reap’d furrow sound asleep,
  Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook
    Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:
And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep
  Steady thy laden head across a brook;
  Or by a cider-press, with patient look,
    Thou watchest the last oozings, hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
  Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,–
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
  And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
  Among the river sallows, borne aloft
    Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;
  Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft
  The redbreast whistles from a garden-croft,
    And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Written September 19, 1819; first published in 1820. This poem is in the public domain.

And here is, in addition to the bounty, to the wistfulness of October…..

Wake-Up Call

Poetry, Politics
Aug 22, 2019
3 Comments

My Work is Loving the World

Mary Oliver

My work is loving the world.
Here the sunflowers, there the hummingbird –
equal seekers of sweetness.
Here the quickening yeast; there the blue plums.
Here the clam deep in the speckled sand.

Are my boots old? Is my coat torn?
Am I no longer young and still not half-perfect? Let me
keep my mind on what matters,
which is my work,

which is mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.
The phoebe, the delphinium.
The sheep in the pasture, and the pasture.
Which is mostly rejoicing, since all ingredients are here,

Which is gratitude, to be given a mind and a heart
and these body-clothes,
a mouth with which to give shouts of joy
to the moth and the wren, to the sleepy dug-up clam,
telling them all, over and over, how it is
that we live forever.

This is the first poem in Mary Oliver‘s collection Thirst, titled, “The Messenger.

I encountered it at a writing workshop for houseless vendors at StreetRoots this week. Mary Oliver had been previously introduced to me by the workshop leader who continually excels in expanding my horizons and I took to this poem in no time. Hey, gratitude for nature! Up my alley. Loving the world? A familiar task. Mouth shouting joy – my readers are my witness!

And then a participant pointed out, with anguish bordering on rage, that it was not their job to love the world. A world that mistreated them, rejected them, punished them, tortured them, deprived them and excluded them. A world where safety was non-existent, food unreliable, pain untreated. Where admiration of nature was not exactly high on the list when you could but fear the elements. Where the very idea of living forever is blacked out by the worry about living for another day.

You know that feeling when heat creeps up your neck, into your cheeks, the blushing that interferes with breathing? That was me: caught in my bubble of middle-class existence, originally not even tangentially aware how gratitude of the kind the poet references is linked to privilege. The privilege to have time to notice, room to appreciate, means to express and capacity to love nature within my safe surroundings.

I am not saying that homelessness precludes gratitude. On the contrary, I am often floored when seeing the generosity of spirit expressed by the folks I’ve gotten to know. I am more concerned with the demand characteristic or the taking for granted in my own head that the world is to be loved.

Mary Oliver’s work might have been to love the world. (She died this January – a remembrance from the New Yorker is in the link.) My work right now is to become more aware of how automatically we apply standards that seem self-evident to us – gratitude for nature! – but which are wholly inappropriate for those whose very existence is under attack. And then my work is to fight the causes for the differences in standard. Actually: the work of all of us. 38.000 houseless people in our city deserve that.

Photographs today are from another habitable building making room for another luxury hotel in downtown Portland.

Music today is from an interesting cross-over album Now and Then Music from the Great Depression(s) 2010/1929 ( to which we might add 2020, I gather.)

The Aftermath

Poetry, Politics
Aug 6, 2019
2 Comments

The National Center for PTSD estimates that 28 percent of people who have witnessed a mass shooting develop post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and about a third develop acute stress disorder.

Research also suggests that mass shooting survivors may be at greater risk for mental health difficulties compared with people who experience other types of trauma, such as natural disasters.

The American Psychological Association summarized data and suggested treatment approaches last year here. The focus is not just on disorders following trauma. Psychologists are also eager to study other questions about survivor well-being, including how such experiences—particularly at a young age—shape one’s sense of safety and self-efficacy. We have, in other words, no clue yet about the long-term effects of massacres in our schools, churches, synagogues, night clubs, shopping malls and Garlic Festivals. And we have not even begun to look at the long term consequences for those who are not immediate, but related victims, the families, the clergy, the teachers and friends of those killed or maimed.

I found the poem below just as striking, if not more so, than reading the statistics and all they imply.

Ceremonias De La Superviviencia

By Baruch Porras-Hernandez

at the movies my eye on the Exit sign
on the aisles the doorways the space
between the seat in front of me and my legs
how far could I crawl
before I die?

wednesday   after it happened
I went to a work event at a gay bar     I stood
near the exit when I could   when I couldn’t
I stood near a window   I made sure I could
open and fit through    made sure I could
jump out and land on the roof
of the building next door
just in case
after the event
my coworker was leaving
thought about hugging him     but I don’t
I   waived       asked myself
is this the last time I’m going to see him?

two weeks after the massacre
my partner is getting ready to attend Pride
I am staying home

I watch him pick out his outfit I sit
quietly on the couch    when he is dressed
he holds me    I hold him a little longer
ask myself
is this the last time I’m going to see him?
he leaves       I feel as if I should go with him
just in case

has I love you      always meant
I would   die   holding you
for people    like us?
has I love you
    always tasted like     two boys
    scared to form the word    amor
with their lips      terrified to say things
like belleza    te quiero
libertad
    would you die
holding me?

when it happens if it happens
do we run towards the fucker together?
do we die in each other’s arms?

I will be your shield
will you be mine?

I’ve never used my body as a shield
is this what true love is? is this what queer love is?

if our genes    our DNA
truly hold onto memory
then we remember our ancestor’s gay love
remember our ancestor’s queer communion
the ceremony of maricones before us
their trauma    their struggle
and if that is in us    then so is their survival!

to all the fuckers out there ready to shoot us down
we will survive you we have survived fires
we have survived camps
we have survived plagues and

we will survive you

I’m sitting at work everyone
has moved on to the next tragedy
Nice Quetta Baghdad Istanbul

my eyes focus on the exit sign
then the door the front lobby
then back to the exit sign
the door

the space between my cubicle
and the door

the exit sign
the door.

Or this short clip on Grieving in a fishbowl.

Hope comes from the strength demonstrated by individual survivors: just look at how the young people of the Parkland murders are present in public debate and refuse to be cowed in face of personal attacks and the relentless re-triggering of the trauma with each new attack. Then there are the parents of Joaquin Oliver, one of the Parkland victims, being in El Paso to unveil a memorial at the day of the terrorist act. Manuel Oliver has worked on almost 20 public murals – walls of demand – since the shooting, trying to raise consciousness. I stand in awe.

https://articles.aplus.com/a/manuel-oliver-walls-of-demand-parkland-one-year-later?no_monetization=true

Photographs today are from Texas, during a road trip 6 years ago.

Music today is a clip of Yo Yo Ma playing Bach at a TexMex Bordercrossing and then, to soothe our heavy souls, the entire six suites.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nu9MDqGhIak

Go On

Poetry
Aug 1, 2019
1 Comments

Every green room of the forest planted:
Trillium and quince, alder and salmonberry, …
—Robert Sund

You could go on, I know—
green room to green room,
names scrolling off your tongue
like bark from madrona trunks.
Snowberry and salal, Douglas fir and elderberry.
Have I told you cedars are my favorites?

I see more rust-colored cedar boughs;
“flagging,” a mutual friend explains.
For me a new meaning.
Things are changing, but this flagging—
natural, this time of year.
Nothing to worry about.
Have I told you I’m feeling my age,
am more prone to cliché?
Natural, this time of life.
Weakness and pain in my right arm
is new to me. Go on. I’ll sit here
and rest, with the old meaning—
in this warming up, drying out rust-colored room.

I’m sorry for harm I’ve caused.
Why do you think I started walking,
breathing in the ragged poison bouquet
of particulates and exhaust?
Here, spiderwebs are mostly intact
and blackberries flourish.
At the tip of my old hiking boot, holey,
a beetle evades my attention, strolls
under a leaf from a trailing blackberry vine,
hides. For me a new beetle;
no name scrolls from my tongue.

I lift the leaf, only to say,
Hi. I haven’t seen you before. You’re safe.
I’m uninterested in causing further harm.
Should I buy new hiking boots? It depends.
Have I told you our time together
has been holy, a benediction?
Go on. There is nothing to fear. Don’t worry.
Know I loved you. Go on.