There's the bride and her groom
dancing in the middle of the square—
her dress sewn with a little lace
but never a seed pearl, his sheer
white tunic concealing no weapon.
The rented band makes merry
music out of tin instruments,
and the corner store brisk
trade in coconut liquor and safety
pins, as guests begin to paper
their clothes with bills and
notes. Soon they're plated
and leaved in this flimsy armor.
Soon they'll undress in the dark,
shocked at how naked it feels
under the mercurial moon,
out in the windswept open.
Terpsichorean
Up, and to the office, where we sat all the morning, and home to dinner, and then to the office again, being pretty good friends with my wife again, no angry words passed; but she finding fault with Mercer, suspecting that it was she that must have told Mary, that must have told her mistresse of my wife’s saying that she was crooked. But the truth is, she is jealous of my kindnesse to her. After dinner, to the office, and did a great deale of business. In the evening comes Mr. Reeves, with a twelve-foote glasse, so I left the office and home, where I met Mr. Batelier with my wife, in order to our going to-morrow, by agreement, to Bow to see a dancing meeting. But, Lord! to see how soon I could conceive evil fears and thoughts concerning them; so Reeves and I and they up to the top of the house, and there we endeavoured to see the moon, and Saturne and Jupiter; but the heavens proved cloudy, and so we lost our labour, having taken pains to get things together, in order to the managing of our long glasse. So down to supper and then to bed, Reeves lying at my house, but good discourse I had from him: in his own trade, concerning glasses, and so all of us late to bed.
I receive fresh intelligence that Deptford and Greenwich are now afresh exceedingly afflicted with the sickness more than ever.
angry at my crooked foot
the dancing moon
in my glass
Erasure haiku derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 7 August 1666.
History Means to Spare None of Us
What did we know of the angel,
how it decided which of our houses
to mark with chalk, and which with
the blood of an animal that bleated
six times before being led to slaughter?
What did we know of angels in the first
place, when our mothers raised us to avert
our eyes as we passed beneath the trees
at dusk, when babaylan taught us to listen
for the breathing of kapres lighting
enormous cigars? If the angel marked us
safe, we knew it wasn't so much
because we were exceptionally good
or favored. Perhaps the animal bleated
three times instead of five or six.
Perhaps hot ashes from the kapre's cigar
fell into the well instead of on our
thatched roofs. And it doesn't matter
if you are the mayor's son or the black-
smith's daughter: the dark cloud gathering
at the foothills isn't a storm coming,
isn't a pestilence of locusts. It's just
ordinary smoke rumbling history's
reproach. It doesn't condone stasis
or equilibrium; it loves the sound of wind
stirred up by giant wings, the way it breaks
the cardinal points from a compass rose.
In response to Via Negativa: Improvisational.
Improvisational
Up, and to the office a while, and then by water to my Lady Montagu’s, at Westminster, and there visited my Lord Hinchingbroke, newly come from Hinchingbroke, and find him a mighty sober gentleman, to my great content. Thence to Sir Ph. Warwicke and my Lord Treasurer’s, but failed in my business; so home and in Fenchurch-streete met with Mr. Battersby; says he, “Do you see Dan Rawlinson’s door shut up?” (which I did, and wondered). “Why,” says he, “after all the sickness, and himself spending all the last year in the country, one of his men is now dead of the plague, and his wife and one of his mayds sicke, and himself shut up;” which troubles me mightily. So home; and there do hear also from Mrs. Sarah Daniel, that Greenwich is at this time much worse than ever it was, and Deptford too: and she told us that they believed all the towne would leave the towne and come to London; which is now the receptacle of all the people from all infected places. God preserve us! So by and by to dinner, and, after dinner in comes Mrs. Knipp, and I being at the office went home to her, and there I sat and talked with her, it being the first time of her being here since her being brought to bed. I very pleasant with her; but perceive my wife hath no great pleasure in her being here, she not being pleased with my kindnesse to her. However, we talked and sang, and were very pleasant. By and by comes Mr. Pierce and his wife, the first time she also hath been here since her lying-in, both having been brought to bed of boys, and both of them dead. And here we talked, and were pleasant, only my wife in a chagrin humour, she not being pleased with my kindnesse to either of them, and by and by she fell into some silly discourse wherein I checked her, which made her mighty pettish, and discoursed mighty offensively to Mrs. Pierce, which did displease me, but I would make no words, but put the discourse by as much as I could (it being about a report that my wife said was made of herself and meant by Mrs. Pierce, that she was grown a gallant, when she had but so few suits of clothes these two or three years, and a great deale of that silly discourse), and by and by Mrs. Pierce did tell her that such discourses should not trouble her, for there went as bad on other people, and particularly of herself at this end of the towne, meaning my wife, that she was crooked, which was quite false, which my wife had the wit not to acknowledge herself to be the speaker of, though she has said it twenty times. But by this means we had little pleasure in their visit; however, Knipp and I sang, and then I offered them to carry them home, and to take my wife with me, but she would not go: so I with them, leaving my wife in a very ill humour, and very slighting to them, which vexed me. However, I would not be removed from my civility to them, but sent for a coach, and went with them; and, in our way, Knipp saying that she come out of doors without a dinner to us, I took them to Old Fish Streete, to the very house and woman where I kept my wedding dinner, where I never was since, and there I did give them a jole of salmon, and what else was to be had. And here we talked of the ill-humour of my wife, which I did excuse as much as I could, and they seemed to admit of it, but did both confess they wondered at it; but from thence to other discourse, and among others to that of my Lord Bruncker and Mrs. Williams, who it seems do speake mighty hardly of me for my not treating them, and not giving her something to her closett, and do speake worse of my wife, and dishonourably, but it is what she do of all the world, though she be a whore herself; so I value it not. But they told me how poorly my Lord carried himself the other day to his kinswoman, Mrs. Howard, and was displeased because she called him uncle to a little gentlewoman that is there with him, which he will not admit of; for no relation is to be challenged from others to a lord, and did treat her thereupon very rudely and ungenteely. Knipp tells me also that my Lord keeps another woman besides Mrs. Williams; and that, when I was there the other day, there was a great hubbub in the house, Mrs. Williams being fallen sicke, because my Lord was gone to his other mistresse, making her wait for him, till his return from the other mistresse; and a great deale of do there was about it; and Mrs. Williams swounded at it, at the very time when I was there and wondered at the reason of my being received so negligently.
I set them both at home, Knipp at her house, her husband being at the doore; and glad she was to be found to have staid out so long with me and Mrs. Pierce, and none else; and Mrs. Pierce at her house, and am mightily pleased with the discretion of her during the simplicity and offensiveness of my wife’s discourse this afternoon. I perceive by the new face at Mrs. Pierces door that our Mary is gone from her.
So I home, calling on W. Joyce in my coach, and staid and talked a little with him, who is the same silly prating fellow that ever he was, and so home, and there find my wife mightily out of order, and reproaching of Mrs. Pierce and Knipp as wenches, and I know not what. But I did give her no words to offend her, and quietly let all pass, and so to bed without any good looke or words to or from my wife.
in the dead town
and all the infected places
I make words out of
other times and doors
other discourse and hubbub
other wonder
and the same
reproaching quiet
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 6 August 1666.
Light-seekers
~ after "Buscando Luciérnagas Una Noche de Enero,"
("Looking for Fireflies on a January Night"),
Armando Valero (oil on canvas)
It's light we crave at all costs,
the kind that flickers in the belly
under a fringe of fern without need
for battery-powered torches. Its beams
don't register well in a landscape
of surveillance, in a climate of constant
sweep and search. Not even the jewel
on your wife's earlobe, not even the gold
cufflink at your wrist knows how to call it
out of hiding. Sunrise is soft but not
its friend. Its messengers emerge
only when the sun disappears behind that
curtain at the edge of the sea. Watching
them, watching for them, instinctively we hold
our hands below our hearts, guarding the space
where our own fire must kindle and burn.
Vacant
(Lord’s day). Up, and down to the Old Swan, and there called Betty Michell and her husband, and had two or three a long salutes from her out of sight of ‘su mari’, which pleased me mightily, and so carried them by water to West minster, and I to St. James’s, and there had a meeting before the Duke of Yorke, complaining of want of money, but nothing done to any purpose, for want we shall, so that now our advices to him signify nothing. Here Sir W. Coventry did acquaint the Duke of Yorke how the world do discourse of the ill method of our books, and that we would consider how to answer any enquiry which shall be made after our practice therein, which will I think concern the Controller most, but I shall make it a memento to myself.
Thence walked to the Parish Church to have one look upon Betty Michell, and so away homeward by water, and landed to go to the church, where, I believe, Mrs. Horsely goes, by Merchant-tailors’ Hall, and there I find in the pulpit Elborough, my old schoolfellow and a simple rogue, and yet I find him preaching a very good sermon, and in as right a parson-like manner, and in good manner too, as I have heard any body; and the church very full, which is a surprising consideration; but I did not see her.
So home, and had a good dinner, and after dinner with my wife, and Mercer, and Jane by water, all the afternoon up as high as Morclacke with great pleasure, and a fine day, reading over the second part of the, “Siege of Rhodes,” with great delight. We landed and walked at Barne-elmes, and then at the Neat Houses I landed and bought a millon, and we did also land and eat and drink at Wandsworth, and so to the Old Swan, and thence walked home. It being a mighty fine cool evening, and there being come, my wife and I spent an houre in the garden, talking of our living in the country, when I shall be turned out of the office, as I fear the Parliament may find faults enough with the office to remove us all, and I am joyed to think in how good a condition I am to retire thither, and have wherewith very well to subsist. Nan, at Sir W. Pen’s, lately married to one Markeham, a kinsman of Sir W. Pen’s, a pretty wench she is.
nothing to signify nothing
I make a meme
simple yet right
like an evening in the country
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Sunday 5 August 1666.
Self-portrait, with What Remains
So much counting through the years, a tally
written then erased then rewritten on the sky's
flimsy paper. How much do I owe now, in the fourth
decade, in the fifth? The jasmine, too, has lost
count. A torrent of white blooms presses against
the fence, as if to say even the slightest skins
collect to make a weight that history registers.
Later, when the vine is cleared away, its dark
imprint remains on the surface: surely no one
can deny it once had a fragrant body, a shape.
Rush hour
Up, and to the office, where all the morning, and, at noon to dinner, and Mr. Cooke dined with us, who is lately come from Hinchingbroke, who is also come to town: The family all well. Then I to the office, where very busy to state to Mr. Coventry the account of the victuals of the fleete, and late at it, and then home to supper and to bed.
This evening, Sir W. Pen come into the garden, and walked with me, and told me that he had certain notice that at Flushing they are in great distraction. De Ruyter dares not come on shore for fear of the people; nor any body open their houses or shops for fear of the tumult: which is a very good hearing.
inching to town
all of us
into the lush body
of tumult
Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Saturday 4 August 1666.
In the Hold, We Raise Our Voices
In between worlds, I don't remember
anymore which mountain holds my heart,
which meadow. The rain spreads
like a scroll; and tree-shapes seep
through fog, brush-inked as on
a silk banner. I used to know
how many boats were tethered to the dock,
how many times temple bells pealed
at dusk. Distance has become
our mother, which is not the same
as indifference: no, distance
is a vestibule that someone
has soundproofed, and we sit shoulder
to shoulder along its length, mouthing
cries toward rows of high windows.
Poetry Blog Digest 2019: Week 32
A personal selection of posts from the Poetry Blogging Network and beyond. Although I tend to quote my favorite bits, please do click through and read the whole posts. This week, poetry bloggers seemed to be channeling the general unease of the political moment and the restlessness of the soon-to-change season. There was an elegiac mood to many of the posts I read, but there were still flashes of humor, and as Sarah Stockton observed, creativity is a potent antidote to futility.
First was this from 1984: “The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect.” In 1984 not only is history rewritten daily but language itself is being narrowed, and as language narrowed, thought itself stultified. Thinking and language is, for us, our wag-tongued species, inextricable. “Every year fewer and fewer words, and the range of consciousness always a little smaller.”
I have always loved words, even as a little tiny kid would leaf through a book on the family shelf called How to Build a Better Vocabulary. Words were as magic as magic, and as delightful in the mouth as chocolate chip cookies, as cake with candles. And I can almost remember a visceral sense of my mind expanding as I encountered new words that struck me, words that opening up new worlds, new ways of thinking.
I just read Robert MacFarlane’s Landmarks, a wonderful book about books and words, specifically words of regional dialect that describe things specific to regional experiences: how the fog creeps across the moor, the way certain rock formations sparkle, how the regular passage of a small animal through a hedge creates a hole. Worlds and worlds, words and worlds.
Marilyn McCabe, You Can Leave Your Hat On; or, Rethinking Writing and Editing
Shelter is always a two-way street, turning on the hinge of hospitality/prison. In the ancient world, Greek hospitality served the purpose of putting the wandering stranger under control. So it was in 1939 when the Spanish and Catalan Republicans fled Franco’s conquest and thought they were coming to a friendly country. But the country wasn’t friendly. It treated the wretched refugees whose numbers and socialist ideas were threatening, with lack of food, water and medical help. So it was with Jews who thought they were fleeing from Germany and other countries to a safe zone, “free France.” They were housed in Rivesaltes barracks “safely” until Vichy cut a deal with Nazis to keep their territory soldier free and delivered 2,251 Jews to Drancy and eventually to Auschwitz. (Another half were helped to escape.) Gypsies were brought from the north of France and detained as undesirables.
The list goes on with successions of needs of a state’s questionable history – Algerians who fought for the French became hot potatoes, wanted nowhere, not thanked for their help, housed here until society repositioned them.
Rivesaltes also rings bells as the site of the Perignan airport – a small, Lego-like structure which is the windiest airport in France. Riversaltes also the name of a wonderful sweet wine. Oh, the multivalence of words! Shelter, internment camps, hospitality centers, and all these hedgings speak of the uncertainties, fissures and failures of society to rest, humanely, with the familiar other.
Jill Pearlman, Refugees: The Tragedy of Frenemies
“Admit that Mexico is your double, that she exists in the shadow of this country, that we are irrevocably tied to her. Gringo, accept the doppelganger in your psyche. By taking back your collective shadow the intracultural split will heal.” (page 108)
“This land was Mexican once/ was Indian always/ and is./ And will be again.” (page 113)
“So this is what happened to someone living at the border like me: My ancestors have always lived with the land here in Texas. My indigenous ancestors go back twenty to twenty-five thousand years and that is how old I am in this country. My Spanish ancestors have been in this land since the European takeover which pulled migration from Spain to Mexico. Texas was part of a Mexican state called Tamaulipas. And Texas, New Mexico, Arizona, and part of California and Colorado, were part of the northern section of Mexico. It was almost half of Mexico that the U.S. cheated Mexico out of when they bought it by the treaty of Guadalupe-Hidalgo. By doing so they created the borderlands.” (Interview, page 274)
The above quotes are from Gloria Anzaldúa’s Borderlands/ La Frontera: The New Mestiza, Fourth Edition. The book was first published in 1987; I encountered it a couple of years later, in graduate school, although I can no longer find my first copy. I’ve been meaning to reread it, because I’m advising a senior who wants to make it part of her thesis next year.
This was definitely the week. I’m sickened by U.S. gun violence and epidemic hatred without having a new or insightful word to say about them, but it felt just slightly sanity-restoring to spend time with Anzaldúa. After all, how can there be a “Hispanic invasion,” as the Texas shooter alleged, in a place to which the U.S. government has only the most recent and most dubious of many claims? Aside from the book’s reminders about history, it’s also big-hearted and wise and full of insights about language, culture, queerness, trauma, depression, artistic process, sacredness, and dreams. Plus, I loved remembering my twenty-something astonishment at its hybrid of prose and poetry: holy shit, you can do that?!
Lesley Wheeler, A slightly terrifying amount of reading
If you’re ever stuck for something to do with a damaged book, try cutting up some of the text and interspersing it with a couple of other sources to create a found poem. [Click through to view an example. —Dave]
Julie Mellor, The Observer’s Book of Birds
I’m re-sharing some of my collage poems from the recent past. These were written for an Instagram competition (#aquietpassionpoetrycompetition) run by The Poetry School and Soda Pictures (‘A Quiet Passion’ was their biopic of Emily Dickinson released two years ago). The judges stated that they wanted to see “poems which use the concentrated visual qualities of an Instagram post to deliver a punch as strong as an Emily Dickinson line.” [Click through to view the collages.]
Josephine Corcoran, Collage Poems
Years ago, my aunt gave me a stack of cool victorian cabinet cards she’d been sent from relatives in Nebraska, where she and my mother were born. There were some young pics of my grandmother in the 20’s and 30’s among them, but most of the people were unrecognizeable and unknown..maybe a trace of resemblance at most–a set of brow, a curve of lip that echoed through my great grandmother, but little else. She gave them to be to do “something artsy” and they eventually, without their actual heads, became he unusual creatures pieces. At first, I debated collageing on the photos themselves. On one hand, it would ruin them. On the other, no one much cared, least of all my aunt..The originals, tucked somewhere in my studio even now, will one day be inconsequential to whoever stumbles across them. I wound up reproducing them on cardstock and then working with them. But it scarce matters. Ultimately, they’ll ed up in the trash sooner or later.
Kristy Bowen, detritus
The strange thing about being childless I suppose is knowing that my legacy, whatever that is, dies with me. Some day, I’ll grow old and die and people, probably strangers, will throw the bulk of my things in the trash –the poems, the artwork, the random bits of my life I’ve collected. This makes me hurt. it makes me heavy in a way I can’t quite put my finger on. My dad & sister were pretty quick about dealing with my mother’s things after her death–alarmingly so, but it was probably necessary mental health-wise–the closet full of clothes, her jewelry box, a linen closet stuffed with half burnt candles and semi-filled bottles of lotion. Her presence is still very real in the house–the art she chose for the walls, the furniture, the photos, her dishes. . But at the same time, she is also more absent–and in a way that has nothing to do with her physically missing. But who can hold on to ghosts? Or maybe ghosts are all we have?
Not sure what I fear more:
that your house will feel the same
or that it won’t. The wheelchair
and hospital machines will be gone, butthe books in the library will still
be arranged by color, abstract
modern art constructed from their spines’
gradations. The heavy crystal bowlsof roasted nuts for cocktail hour
will still adorn the living room
where you used to hold court with
vodka soda and lime in hand, whereyou let us take a family photo
that last Shabbat. I was shocked
you let us bring out the camera:
your hair was wild, unwashed.You smiled as though nothing hurt.
Rachel Barenblat, Return
I said that her poem ‘unnerves and confronts’; I think I should qualify that. It’s not confrontational, it doesn’t insist. What Ann Gray does is to look unwaveringingly at her own trauma. There are three key verbs. I wanted. I was afraid. I watched. While she stands by the body of the man she loves the morgue attendant watched me through the window. He’s separated from the human story by glass, and by his bureaucratic routine that demands she uses the official, distancing, dehumanising formula
John Foggin, Poetry that really matters: Ann Gray (Part Two)
“He said take as long as you want, but he watched me
through a window and everything I wanted seemed
undignified and hopeless”
Meanwhile, what she ‘wants’ is to touch, and to touch passionately, but she’s afraid to hurt this man who can never hurt again. He’s gone, essentially, and separate. It makes me think of the agony of the dead miner’s wife in Lawrence’s ‘Odor of crysanthemums’. It’s this absolute honesty that told me I want to read and hear more and more of Ann Gray. So we will.
As writers, we are not limited by the boxes we fit into or those we don’t. The pot of opportunities does not have to be finite if we’re willing to push ourselves and try new things. More jobs can be created, more books published, more awards, grants and residencies offered if a greater interest is shown by poets, poetry readers and book buyers. If you don’t exactly fit the brief, be brave and try anyway. Always follow the guidelines and ask if you have any uncertainties, of course, but sometimes you might be the unexpected that gets noticed because you’ve approached things a little differently.
Gerry Stewart, Taking Yourself Out of the Box
Don’t build. Just find intact
(albeit cracked and leaky)
a house that’s there already,one that’s rooted
firm and knows its skin;
that’s free of painand ghosts, with trees
and half-forgotten gardens,
mossy cold-frames, twistedvines and sudden sundials
in the long, uncultivated
grass. Then let us blowlike puffball parachutes
in a random wind,
the achene fruitthat falls and germinates
Dick Jones, How to Build a School
when and where
it will.
You will study the maps,
Kristin Berkey-Abbott, Summer Publications
make a plan, pack
the right clothes, only to find
yourself in a different country,
the one you didn’t know
you needed to explore.
It is here you find the answers
to the unspoken questions.
Here is the journal written
in a language you can’t understand.
Here the box of letters
written between two souls
you do not know.
I took a bunch of pictures of roses at twilight with a flash, and got really interesting results. The best nature picture we got was this great blue heron at the penguin exhibit, and we got a flyby by a bald eagle on the way in to the zoo, too. There’s also a patch of wildflowers inside the raptor exhibit. We also had a close encounter in our own driveway with a great horned owl, which hooted at us with much urgency from a neighbor’s pine tree! Too bad no picture of that guy – it was definitely too dark by then. The garden smelled amazing at night – something beyond the roses must be a night-bloomer. The rose garden, usually almost done by August, was still in full bloom thanks to the little bits of rain we’ve gotten this August, in between the wildfire smoke and blazing hot days we’ve been having. Like the garden, in August, I’m definitely better at nighttime, out of the sun. Glenn always jokes that I’m really a vampire (I am allergic to garlic, the sun, and hate mornings) but there is something – biorhythms? poetness? – I am always at my best after dark.
Jeannine Hall Gailey, Poetry News in August, Fiolet & Wing and Poetry Prompts Contributor Copies, and Night Zoos, Birds, and Roses
Night. A waxing half-moon over the Sacramento Valley. 2 AM, nearly moonset. Somewhere close by, a great-horned owl announces its territory. Perhaps it is declaring its life, its joy, as in, “I’m here. I’m alive.” At my desk by the open window, I wait a moment, and the owl calls again. “I’m here, too, my friend.” I say it aloud in the dark room, but the words only fall to the floor and lay there like frightened puppies.
James Lee Jobe, prose poem – ‘Night. A waxing half-moon over…’
Wagging is an art.
Dogs do it well with their tails.
You don’t have a tail, one would hope,
so a finger must do.
Wagging with any other
body part will get you in trouble.And last but not least, what’s at stake.
Romana Iorga, Finger-wagging
Who gets the prize, takes
home the spoils, writes the poem.
Who’s crowned and whose
head must fall. Hint:
too often it’s one and the same.
In other words, you.
When I was younger I thought writer’s block was a lack of will, a kind of cowardice even, certainly my fault in some character defect kind of way. Now, after some long years of learning not to judge myself so hard, I experience writer’s block as something else- the body, mind and spirit telling me there is not enough, right now, to give. Just that. No judgement, no blame, just self-compassion, although there is still plenty of sorrow at times, and a kind of existential loneliness.
There’s another kind of writer’s block though: adversary-silencing. This has its own pain scale, from Enthusiasm to Despair. Sometimes it seems the world is conspiring to silence the voices of compassion and kindness. The voices of vision and hope, of calls for reparation and change. It’s shaming and discouraging and the most toxic of all, it can contribute to our own internal silencing. On days when I’m ok physically, I can still stop myself from writing a poem, or an essay, because who am I to say anything at all, or it has all been said, or what I write will be wrong or worse of all, no one will ever care whether I write or not. This is a mindset brought on by the assaultive effects of bullying, gaslighting, and fear. And the outcome is soul hurt and mental pain.
Yet, because at this point in my life I finally have the time, the means, and the luxury to spend my energy on more than the basics of survival (as so, so many do not), I must evolve beyond the comforts of privilege I might prefer to cling to. Push past the silencing effects of mental, physical, and emotional violence happening on so many levels in our country, in our world. Sometimes that means being justly and painfully held accountable for what I believe and say (thank you especially, wise millennials, for teaching me so much). We (and by we, I mostly mean white people) are rightly being called to change at this crucial time in our human community. We all suffer when we let complacency or even despair, kill our gift of creativity.
Creativity, when practiced with a good heart, is a potent catalyst for change, no matter who is doing the work, or who the gatekeepers are, or who is sanctifying it. Creativity is a potent antidote to futility. That is something we can bring to the world, that is how we keep going, and that is how we can find a way to persevere and even to laugh sometimes in the face of the reductive absurdity of white privilege and fear; ours, or someone else’s. Creativity, at its best, seeks to alleviate suffering and to free all of us. So at least for today, I will take a minute to locate myself on the pain scale, even if I am so far up the scale that all I can do is think about what I might write if I had the energy to do so. Or perhaps I can’t think at all, but can just be a part of all creation. That’s ok too. I will at least try to remember to bow with respect to my own and the world’s beautiful and powerful resilience, and go on.
Sarah Stockton, The Energy Scale of Creativity
The blessing
Tom Montag, THE BLESSING
of this poem,
he said, is
when it’s done
it stays done.