what if?

What if I told you that I only feel worthy if I can be of help to someone?

What if nothing anyone could say could make it better?

There are lots of details that I don't want to explain right now. Foul, I know. But there it is.

But what if there was someone who you have always wanted to declare her love for you? And what if at this point, even if she did or could, it would not change how you feel about yourself?

I am trying to help someone I care about to confront and change the agreements that have left her vulnerable to predators. 

It's hard because I am still trying to disentangle myself from similar agreements. And knowing that they exist was a good first step. But what those steps are in between knowing and renegotiating are never fully spelled out. 

So, as I try to pull back the veil for my friend, I deal with the onslaught of my own agreements - and how knowing about them hasn't easily produced the new agreements I need to live a more healthy, happy life.

I don't know where I was headed with this. Honestly, this is the third or fourth post I have started trying to process the latest trauma. 

Trauma piled on trauma - not grieving any of it fully, just makes for serious trauma responses to even the slightest situation. 

But I have had some pretty big issues to deal with lately (again). So, sometimes this has escalated to panic attacks - and sometimes to what feels like relatively insignificant stimuli.

In retrospect, I can say that I have survived all the large and small traumas ... recalling the appropriateness of the ; in our lives.

; take a breath

; feel the feelings

; hold on to see what comes next

I type all this in the full knowledge that for some folks what comes next might be worse than what is now. It might not work for all folks to take a beat. I respect that.

For me, right now, I am remembering the times when taking a breath got me to the next minute. 

HAPPY FRIDAY!

Yesterday, a FB friend posted about this phone number: 707-998-8410.

If you haven't called it, you should do it right now.

It is an elementary school's take on surviving and thriving. It's called PepTOC, a pep talk hotline done by children who are surviving and thriving through all the madness. [You can donate to the effort here if you are inclined. They are crowdsourcing funds to keep the number going.]

This is important and amazing - not only because their pure energy can be felt through the phone line. But also because according to recent studies, children (along with the elderly) have struggled during the pandemic on many fronts, but they are soooo resilient. 

That doesn't mean we shouldn't support them. It's just so wonderful that these teachers realized these kids had so much to give the rest of us. And then they gave it to us. 

As an old high school teacher of mine used to admonish when I was down, "you think you have it rough," read this. [And he was right, and only reminded me when I was on the upswing.] 

This is the opposite sentiment -- we're in this together, here's some pure joy and energy.

The ROI for dialing a number [we do this so infrequently anymore] is ENORMOUS. 

If you want to read/hear more about it, this piece by NPR is lovely. This piece is also lovely. P.S. #5 was my personal fave.

Teaser on YouTube:

If small children are not your jam, try this piece on sound art from the DF. I also found it soothing and lovely to think of city sounds as treasures.

HAPPY WEEKEND! 

octopus or vampire

Do you ever feel like someone is always asking you for something?

You are standing in a room and octopus arms are coming at you from all sides?

This is how I feel right now. EVERY DAY. Almost all day long.

It is exhausting.

My hard drive is full - I cannot contain any more useful or useless information. I am tapped. I don't have anything else to give.

Yet, my parents want me to weigh in on every single decision they need to make. AND to reserve the right to reject absolutely everything I say in response to their demand.

The dog drops the toy on my toes whether I am cooking or talking on the phone or trying to do something else. If I ignore her, she taps my foot, my leg, anything exposed, with her wet nose and then looks up at me.

Every once in a while, I can hide in the bathroom, but it only works sometimes.

I try to get a long walk in every day. It's generally the only truly alone time I have, but it is also not unfettered. The cars rev their engines at me as I cross the street even though I definitely get across the street faster than they could walking. The dogs rush me if they are allowed to be in their front yards. I greet people as I walk because it is polite, but it is another invasion of my private time.

I am exhausted.

I have nothing more to give.

We hear about the emotional vampires. But does anyone ever tells us not to give in to the marauding octopi? 

 -----

I started the day out relentlessly cheerful.

It's been a hard week ... starting with getting back to work after 8 days off. So, you know, a pile of email, and any number of "crises" that are really just the consequence of people not handling their business, literally, because work is business.

Beyond the work re-entry, home re-entry was just as bumpy. 

I returned home to find both octogenarians not feeling well. 

Part of me felt that they were just trying to make me feel guilty for taking a few days for myself.

But, the biggest part was just worried.

My dad's health worsened over the next few days ... all seemingly inexplicable symptoms. His head hurt, and then his left side below his eye was swollen, his ear hurt, and then his whole eye was swollen. 

My mom remembered him saying something about feeling he had been bitten by a bug. He could neither remember being bitten or having said anything about it.

So, in case anyone was wondering, memory issues of octogenarians make them very unreliable narrators of most things except their childhood memories (which of course are also unreliable but in a different way). My dad is especially unreliable because he hates doctors and hates demonstrating any weakness... so it is very difficult to get him to say how he actually feels. So much so that I have to rely on his blood pressure spiking to know he is in pain.

Monday night we ended up in the ER. Even though during the day he felt fine because, of course, I asked him how he felt, several times.

You don't know me, so  you will just have to trust me that I spend most of my waking hours trying to keep my parents healthy. And I have done a good job, if I do say so myself.

But this time, the roadblocks we have faced trying to get him care and figuring out what exactly is going on have made me feel like a failure.

Worse - I feel like the universe is telling me that I am not good at caring for him. It is not an emotion based on reality. I get that. But I am exhausted. And I am my only cheerleader, so when I lose hope, it is a big deal.

I spent the bulk of the day at the edge of tears with breaks to speak sternly with many people standing between me and actual health care professionals. Let's just say they know at this point that I have zero fucks to give.

I feel like I am ending the day defeated.

This is distressing on so many levels. 

I have tried to bring my vacation vibes back into my "real" life. I have held my head high through several days of really challenging issues (I didn't even enumerate the work woes here). 

But now I feel defeated. 

I feel like I need to just say, I give in. I give up.

Why does the universe feel the need to beat me up and put me in my place all the time? That's what I need to know. It feels like there is no need to keep trying to hold my head up when I just get whacked back into submission.

Poetry Month, Ada Limon: she must be reading my mind

 Give Me This
~Ada Limón

I thought it was the neighbor’s cat back
to clean the clock of the fledgling robins low
in their nest stuck in the dense hedge by the house
but what came was much stranger, a liquidity
moving all muscle and bristle. A groundhog
slippery and waddle thieving my tomatoes still
green in the morning’s shade. I watched her
munch and stand on her haunches taking such
pleasure in the watery bites. Why am I not allowed
delight? A stranger writes to request my thoughts
on suffering. Barbed wire pulled out of the mouth,
as if demanding that I kneel to the trap of coiled
spikes used in warfare and fencing. Instead,
I watch the groundhog closer and a sound escapes
me, a small spasm of joy I did not imagine
when I woke. She is a funny creature and earnest,
and she is doing what she can to survive.

Copyright © 2020 by Ada Limón. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on September 16, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

work

I have been doing some personal work over here.

It doesn't feel like I am getting anywhere on this work.

It's not to do list kind of work, well, maybe it is.

It is hard.

Exhausting.

Overwhelming.

It is work.

Most days I only have the strength left to pull myself into bed... even though what I really need to do is debrief.

I don't want to talk, so there is no relief there.

Writing would be a good outlet, but it makes the work even more real and thus scarier and more overwhelming.

I keep hoping that I will turn a corner on the work and it will feel lighter, more purposeful or even just done. I'd take partially done.

Instead, it feels like the pushing up the boulder and having it come crashing back on me.

Only it is larger every time it rolls back over me, flattening me.

I don't even have the emotional or physical energy to wander out in search of beauty.

I am just tired.

And tired of being tired.

And sad.

And tired of being sad.

they say, I hear...

 They take advantage of my strength.

So sure are they that I will always bend and never break

So sure are they that I have infinite capacity to give, they take and take and take.

Even better, they criticize what I give. If only you...

I learned the hard way that I have to stand up for myself.

But when I do, I get labeled the asshole.

Ok, I'm an asshole.

Now what?

The truth is I cannot bend anymore.

I am at the breaking point, and they are still arguing about whether or not I gave enough, or in the right way, or if it doesn't matter because I wasn't smiling while I did it.

ok.

-------------------

Just be happy.

You can choose to just be happy.

Subtext: you're doing it wrong.

Ok, maybe that's not what they meant, but I am here to tell you, that's what I heard.

You see someone exhausted from life

What do you do?

Offer some more things that person should do

Offer a platitude, tomorrow is another day

You don't want to know what I think when I hear that.

-------------------

Shattered.

Broken into a million pieces.

No strength left to pick up each piece and try to fit it together - even if making a new picture is the only way out of the darkness.

Exhausted. Overwhelmed. Done.

I am not just frustrated, I'm tired of trying to make it all work.

This broken clock is not even right twice a day.

And, finally, when I feel like I cannot go on one more day, you care, kind of... 

I am only worthy of compassion or empathy if I am a pool of water on the floor

or a glass shattered beyond repair.

You could have listened any of the million times I told you explicitly or implicitly that I was drowning.

But you waited until I could not go on to demand that I must.

And I am supposed to be what? grateful?

I'm not, but I am an asshole, so it is not surprising.

Poetry Thursday - for Tim and my mom and their promesa

When I Became La Promesa
~Peggy Robles–Alvarado

For every unexpected illness that required medical insurance,
every second-trimester miscarriage, every chaos unemployment
caused, every looming eviction, every arrest warrant gone
unanswered, the women in my family made promesas to plaster
cast statues worshipped in overcrowded apartments with rum
poured over linoleum, nine-day candles coughing black soot
until the wick surrendered, Florida water perfuming doorways
and the backs of necks.

Promesas: barters/contracts with a God they didn’t vow to
change for but always appeased/ bowls of fruit/ paper bags filled
with coconut candy and caserolas de ajiaco/ left at busy intersections,
an oak tree in High bridge park, the doorway of the 34th precinct,
and when mar pacifico and rompe saraguey refused to grow on
Washington Heights windowsills, the youngest became part of
the trade.

Unsullied and unaware: cousin Mari pissed about having to dress
in green and red for twenty-one days to keep Tío Pablo out of jail/
Luisito scratching at an anklet made of braided corn silk to help
Tía Lorna find a new job/ and my hair not to be cut until Papi’s
tumor was removed.

Gathered in tight buns or sectioned pigtails, falling long past my
waist when asymmetrical bobs were in fashion, unaware my crown
had the necessary coercion to dislodge a mass from a colon, I grabbed
my older brother’s clippers, ran thirsty blades across my right temple
to the back of my ear, massaged the softness that emerged as strands
surrendered on bathroom tiles. My desire to mimic freestyle icons,
whose albums my cousins and I scratched on old record players,
wagered against Papi’s large intestine.

My unsteady hand: a fist
in the face of God.

Copyright © 2020 by Peggy Robles–Alvarado. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 6, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Not Poetry Thursday, Mary Oliver's Wild Geese - because we all need this reminder

Wild Geese
~Mary Oliver

You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting -
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.

I have been moved to tears over the simplest things for the past few weeks - and it is mostly because I am carrying so much for myself and others right now. Not to say that they tears were not appropriate ... but I haven't been allowing myself to feel my own pain, so it spills out when I see that of others.

I do not have to be good or walk on my knees -- or hold in my pain. 

Neither do you.

Wishing you space to feel all the feelings in safety.

Poetry Thursday, Self care and boundaries are hard...

Time-Lapse Video of Trans Woman Collapsing Inward Like a Dying Star
~Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

I beg for invisible fire.

Every night I pray to love,
please invent yourself.

I imagine a place after this place
and I laugh quietly to no one
as the hair on my chin
weeds through old makeup.

When I go to sleep
I am vinegar inside clouded glass.
The world comes to an end
when I wake up and wonder
who will be next to me.

Police sirens and coyote howls
blend together in morning’s net.
Once, I walked out past the cars
and stood on a natural rock formation
that seemed placed there to be stood on.
I felt something like kinship.
It was the first time.

Once, I believed god
was a blanket of energy
stretched out around
our most vulnerable
places,

when really,

she’s the sound
of a promise
breaking

Copyright © 2020 by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 14, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

“Many of my poems involve figures who are desperately attempting to invent a means of survival under conditions that seem determined to prevent them from surviving. This poem is concerned with what happens when performing the daily magic of saving oneself becomes too tiring, so that the only remaining option is to scream out the pain, loneliness, and desperation, and allow the collapse to happen. This is a cry for help, one that enacts, through its own existence, proof of self-love and a desire to keep living, despite everything.”

—Joshua Jennifer Espinoza

Saying Goodbye

 I started this post a million years ago.

Ok, not a million years, but a long time ago, probably May.

And I kept looking at it sitting there in the draft folder. Taunting me.

I feel like grief is all around me. All the time. Like a pack of wolves hunting down my soul.

I should try to readjust my attitude about grief. I SHOULD not be afraid of it. I should welcome it into my house and ask it if it wants to stay a while. But I don't have my own house, that's another story for another time, so, yeah, no visitors.

As a result of this game of chicken I have with grief, it roars into my life sometimes like a motorcycle gang disrupting my pretending that every thing is alright.

Last week was the week leading up to the anniversary of my brother's death. 8 years. 

EIGHT YEARS?! How does that even happen?

And I was shoveling food and stomping around until I realized the 19th was just around the corner.

UGH.

Knowing it was going to be a rough one no matter what I did, I tried to plan a quiet weekend with lots of walking by myself.

It would have worked, too, if the stars had not aligned to take RBG from our world on the 18th.

I am trying REALLY hard, after days of sulking, to think FIRST of the tremendous gift it was to have her in our world for so long. But, I fail, often, and slink back into the terrible hole her loss has created in our world. 

Saying goodbye is hard - and this has been a rough year for everyone - and I am only human.

I started this draft (a million years ago) because I THOUGHT, maybe this is the year that grief won't be so hard. 

I was wrong, or grief is horrible, or 2020 sucks. Or all of that is true.

I am going to have a weekend away - and I haven't had any time to worry about the ramifications of interacting with people (masked, of course) because I have been all wrapped up in this grief. So, maybe not having time to be anxious is a silver lining?

I am trying, I swear.

Not Poetry Thursday, for Greg

Hummingbird
 ~Robin Becker

I love the whir of the creature come
to visit the pink
flowers in the hanging basket as she does

most August mornings, hours away
from starvation to store
enough energy to survive overnight.

The Aztecs saw the refraction
of incident light on wings
as resurrection of fallen warriors.

In autumn, when daylight decreases
they double their body weight to survive
the flight across the Gulf of Mexico.

On next-to-nothing my mother
flew for 85 years; after her death
she hovered, a bird of bones and air.

Copyright © 2017 Robin Becker. Used with permission of the author.

Poetry Thursday, on perspective and supposed clarity it brings

From “Perspective is Supposed to Yield Clarity”

~Dawn Lundy Martin

She said, I wish I prayed, I would pray for you. And,

we all wanted a shape of prayer in our brains, taking over

instead of it chomping on itself. Stupid little elf. God has

never come to me. We surrender in the teeming utterance

of materials soaked with sentences already made in air

and by machines. The country says Freedom, crushed under

its own dream weight. I did not make up this song. Design

Within Reach is having a “Work from home sale.” The coming

apart, the giant laceration across the sky, we all feel it. Look

at the fire, look at it, like all the rage of all the smallest beings.

Copyright © 2020 by Dawn Lundy Martin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 6, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, free

 fleeing

~Kara Jackson

everything i do comes down to the fact that i’ve been here before.

in some arrangement of my atoms i was allowed to be free

so don’t ask me when freedom is coming

when a certain eye of mine has seen it,

a cornea in a convoluted future recalls my freedom.

when asked about the absence of freedom, the lack of it

i laugh at the word absence, which always suggests

a presence that has left. but absence is the arena

of death, and we call the dead free (went on to glory), what

is the absence of freedom but an assumption of it?

i have never longed for something

which was not once mine. even fiction is my possession,

and flight is an act of fleeing as much as an act of flying.

Copyright © 2020 by Kara Jackson. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on August 3, 2020, by the Academy of American Poets.

This, too, is grief

When you lose someone you love, you expect grief. 

Ok, maybe you don't have a full grasp of how grief will be like a tidal wave until it isn't - and sometimes still because it cuts you at your knees or sucker punches you in the gut when you least expect it.

But grief as desperately wrenching as it is in its rawest form - that deep hole in your heart, is not only sadness and anguish.

Of course, everyone has heard of the stages of grief, which by the way were meant to describe a patient coming to terms with her/his own death not that of those bereaved. There is anger. There is denial. All of that along side, in between and at disparate times with the sadness and anguish.

I cannot speak to acceptance - unless you are talking about finally agreeing that your loved one is, indeed, dead - as in not coming back. Maybe. But I think lots of people forestall denial by assuming that they will be reunited at some point in the future or the after world. As I do not hold on to that hope, my denial did have to come to an end - but it lasted a good, long time - when I still saw my sister from the corner of my eye, driving by, escaping death even if it meant abandoning us as well.

But grief is also the aftermath.

This is the part that I don't think people talk about.

It has been a horrible place for me - and I imagine that it is for others as well.

Your life is reconfigured. You are told about the new normal when people can be honest about the fact that it does not get better, just different.

But I was wholly unprepared for the devastation that has been the aftermath in my family.

It's not like a war torn landscape with craters were there used to be houses. That seems so bleak and drastic ... but, sometimes, it really does feel that way.

Not Poetry Thursday but we need some, so here you go

The Optimist

~J. W. Hammond

Who would have the sky any color but blue,

     Or the grass any color but green?

Or the flowers that bloom the summer through

     Of other color or sheen?

How the sunshine gladdens the human heart—

     How the sound of the falling rain

Will cause the tender tears to start,

     And free the soul from pain.

Oh, this old world is a great old place!

     And I love each season’s change,

The river, the brook of purling grace,

     The valley, the mountain range.

And when I am called to quit this life,

     My feet will not spurn the sod,

Though I leave this world with its beauty rife,—

     There’s a glorious one with God!

This poem is in the public domain. Published in Poem-a-Day on July 11, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, with a little history lesson

Governor’s Mansion Hands

~Sean Hill

                              —Milledgeville, Georgia 1858 (note 1)

The hand(note 2) in which the laws of the land(note 3)

were penned was that of a white man.

Hand, servant, same as bondsman, slave,

and necessarily a negro(note 4) in this context,

but not all blacks were held in bondage

though bound by the constructed fetters

of race—that expedient economic tool

for making a class of women and men

kept in place based on the color writ

across their faces—a conservative notion

for keeping power in the hands of the few(note 5).

It kept the threat held over the heads of all

negroes, including those free blacks,

who after the coming war would be

called the formerly free people of color

once we were all ostensibly free.

Hands, enslaved, handled clay

and molds in the making of bricks

to build this big house for the gathering

of those few men with their white faces

who hold power like the end of the rope.

Hand, what’s needed to wed, and a ring

or broom. Hand, a horse measure, handy

in horse-trading(note 6). We also call the pointers

on the clock that go around marking time

in this occidental fashion, handy for business

transactions, hands.

Notes

1 Milledgeville, my hometown, touts itself as the Antebellum Capital and it was that, but it was also, for the duration of the Civil War, the Confederate Capital of Georgia, and where Joseph Emerson Brown, the governor of Georgia from November 6, 1857 till June 17, 1865, lived with his family in the Governor’s Mansion. Governors brought enslaved folks, folks they held as property, from their plantations to work as the household staff at the Governor’s Mansion.

2 Hand as in handwriting, which is awful

in my case, so I type, but way back when,

actually, only 150 years ago—two long-lived

lives—by law few like me had a hand.

3 What’s needed is a note on the laws that constructed race in the colonies and young states, but that deserves a library’s worth of writing.

4 Almost a decade after reading the typescript of a letter written by Elizabeth Grisham Brown, Gov. Joseph Emerson Brown’s wife, I finally got to read the original letter written in her hand; I got to touch it with my hand. I got to verify that she’d written what I’d read in the typescript. I’d thought about this letter she wrote home to her mother and sister at their plantation for near a decade because of its closing sentences: “Hoping you are all well, we will expect to hear from you shortly. Mr. Brown and the children join me in love to you all.” And caught between that and her signing “Yours most affectionately, E. Brown” she writes “The negroes send love to their friends.” Those words in that letter struck me when I first read them and have stuck with me since. There is so much there that speaks to the situation those Black folk were in then and the situation Black folk are in now. I intend for the title of my next book to be The Negroes Send Love to Their Friends.

5 And this arrangement also served the rest

who would walk on the white side of the color

line, so they would readily step at the behest

of that narrative of race and their investment

in what is white and Black.

6 Prospective buyers would inspect Negroes like horses or other livestock and look in their mouths.

Copyright © 2020 by Sean Hill. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on July 9, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Poetry Thursday, life right now for a lot of people

Every Verb is a Lesson in Longing or Dread

~April Freely

Dear Reader, it wouldn’t be a lie if you said poetry was a cover

for my powerlessness, here, on this plane

having ticked off another day waiting for her diagnosis to rise.

As the air pressure picks up, I feel the straight road

curved by darkness, where the curve is a human limit,

where the second verb is mean, the second verb is to blind.

On the other line, my mother sits on her bed

after a terrible infection. Her voice like a wave

breaking through the receiver, when she tells me

that unlike her I revel in the inconclusivity of the body.

+

At the end of the line, I know my mother

accumulates organ-shaped pillows after surgery.

First a heart, then lungs.

The lung pillow is a fleshy-pink. The heart

pillow, a child-drawn metaphor. Both help her expectorate

the costs to the softer places of her body.

After each procedure they make her cross,

the weight of the arm comes down. These souvenirs

of miraculous stuffing other patients on the transplant floor covet,

the way one might long for a paper sack doll made by hand.

Though the stuffing is just wood shavings, one lies

with the doll tight at the crick of an elbow at night.

Copyright © 2020 by April Freely. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 29, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

Asian Pacific Heritage Month Poetry Spotlight #APHM (oops... saved from the draft folder)

Redacted from a Know-Your-Rights Training Agenda—
 ~Cynthia Dewi Oka

That a potholed street in the middling borough of Collingswood, New Jersey bears the name Atlantic, after an all-consuming body of water.


That all-consuming is Atlas’ curse to bear the heavens on his shoulders.

That after the fall of the gods, half of the heavens is darkness.

That inside the car speeding down the street, I believe I am safe from being halved.


That “I” am not a white box, but a body of water.

That white is a pattern of boys who expect to live long enough to become men.


That some of these boys are whistling by on their bikes, and behind them, clear as a dream, welcome candles in the windows framed by blooms of vervain.

That “welcome” means I thought I was not afraid of the dark.

Since the jade scrubs of the cancer ward.

Since the florescent grid of the factory and the vista of small bones in my father’s collar while I was interpreting for the twenty-something-year-old white citizen,

                                 “Tell your dad he can quit or I can fire him.”

Grief had already burst its cocoon; it ate him like an army of moths from the inside.

That brown men and women kept stitching jackets under the heavens of the machines.

Welcome.

That a moth is trapped in the car with me – it will die, but I do not want to practice florescence alone.

Like a first language bleeding hearts call, speaking truth to power.

I don’t know how they don’t know that power doesn’t care.

That watching fires go out will become a pattern.

That fire is everywhere, and therefore, cheap.

That the hole in my foundation is all-consuming and at its bottom a frangipani tree opens its yellow hands.

That POLICE ICE is printed in yellow or white on the jacket of the night.

That the night walks freely among the ranks of the sun.

That a body of water parted once like a red skirt then sealed over the armored horses of Egypt.

That Whitney Houston is a bone blasting

out the car windows.

That tonight, the night after, the night after that, for as long as the distance between god and a pothole, a moth’s flight will spell,

                                 “They are coming for you.”

Copyright © 2018 Cynthia Dewi Oka. Used with permission of the author.

not Poetry Thursday, but still POETRY

Ghazal !يا لطيف (Ya Lateef!)
~Marilyn Hacker

A lot more malaise and a little more grief every day,
aware that all seasons, the stormy, the sunlit, are brief every day. 

I don’t know the name of the hundredth drowned child, just the names
of the oligarchs trampling the green, eating beef every day,

while luminous creatures flick, stymied, above and around
the plastic detritus that’s piling up over the reef every day.

A tiny white cup of black coffee in afternoon shade,
while an oud or a sax plays brings breath and relief every day. 

Another beginning, no useful conclusion in sight‚—
another first draft that I tear out and add to the sheaf every day. 

One name, three-in-one, ninety-nine, or a matrix of tales 
that are one story only, well-springs of belief every day.

But I wake before dawn to read news that arrived overnight
on a minuscule screen , and exclaim  يا لطيف every day.

Copyright © 2020 by Marilyn Hacker. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 9, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

I loved this explanation from the poet: “I’m very fond of the ghazal form, because of its combination of unity—the qafia (rhyme) and radif (repeated word or phrase) are a ‘fixed’ element, while the couplets themselves can go off in any direction. Usually the poet includes their name, or a version of it, in the last couplet. I also love the ghazal because of other poets who practice it: Agha Shahid Ali, Zeina Hashem Beck, Mimi Khalvati, Shadab Zeest Hashmi, Suzanne Gardinier, Karthika Nair, among them. An American critic wrote, perhaps misinformed, that that last couplet was meant to include one of the ninety-nine names of God in Islam. ‘Lateef’—the kind or gentle one—is one of those names, but ‘Ya Lateef’ is a common exclamation, equivalent to ‘Good God!’ (in exasperation), or even ‘Oi veh is mir…’ Today, there is an overwhelming reason to say a collective and worldwide ‘Ya lateef,’ while the oligarchs golf in their compounds, for as long as they still can.”

So Much in so Few Words, not Poetry Thursday

Tender Buttons [Mildred’s Umbrella]
 ~Gertrude Stein

A cause and no curve, a cause and loud enough, a cause and extra a loud clash and an extra wagon, a sign of extra, a sac a small sac and an established color and cunning, a slender grey and no ribbon, this means a loss a great loss a restitution.

This poem is in the public domain.