V'ahavta (poem) by Aurora Levins Morales

 

Full poem here.

Say these words when you lie down and when you rise up,
when you go out and when you return. In times of mourning
and in times of joy. ...
[R]ecite them in your sleep, here in the cruel shadow of empire:
Another world is possible.

Thus spoke the prophet Roque Dalton:
All together they have more death than we,
but all together, we have more life than they.
...So instead,

imagine winning. This is your sacred task.
This is your power. ...
Lean with all your being towards that day
when the poor of the world shake down a rain of good fortune
out of the heavy clouds, and justice rolls down like waters.

Defend the world in which we win as if it were your child.
It is your child.
Defend it as if it were your lover.
It is your lover.

...

Don’t waver. Don’t let despair sink its sharp teeth
Into the throat with which you sing. Escalate your dreams.
Make them burn so fiercely that you can follow them down
any dark alleyway of history and not lose your way.
...

Hold hands. Share water. Keep imagining.
So that we, and the children of our children’s children
may live

A Small Needful Fact (poem) by Ross Gay

 

Is that Eric Garner worked
for some time for the Parks and Rec.
Horticultural Department, which means,
perhaps, that with his very large hands,
perhaps, in all likelihood,
he put gently into the earth
some plants which, most likely,
some of them, in all likelihood,
continue to grow, continue
to do what such plants do, like house
and feed small and necessary creatures,
like being pleasant to touch and smell,
like converting sunlight
into food, like making it easier
for us to breathe.

Copyright © 2015 by Ross Gay. Reprinted from Split This Rock’s The Quarry: A Social Justice Poetry Database.

See also: Frederick Douglass

"this freedom, this liberty, this beautiful and terrible thing, needful to man as air"

Song - Keep on Moving Forward/Sigamos Adelante - Emma's Revolution

 

Poem - The Sound of One Fork - Minnie Bruce Pratt

Through the window screen I can see an angle of grey roof
and the silence that spreads in the branches of the pecan tree
as the sun goes down. I am waiting for a lover. I am alone
in a solitude that vibrates like the cicada in hot midmorning,
that waits like the lobed sassafras leaf just before
its dark green turns into red, that waits
like the honeybee in the mouth of the purple lobelia.

While I wait, I can hear the random clink of one fork
against a plate. The woman next door is eating supper
alone. She is sixty, perhaps, and for many years
has eaten by herself the tomatoes, the corn
and okra that she grows in her backyard garden.
Her small metallic sound persists, as quiet almost
as the windless silence, persists like the steady
random click of a redbird cracking a few
more seeds before the sun gets too low.
She does not hurry, she does not linger.

Her younger neighbors think that she is lonely.
But I know what sufficiency she may possess.
I know what can be gathered from year to year,
gathered from what is near to hand, as I do
elderberries that bend in damp thickets by the road,
gathered and preserved, jars and jars shining
in rows of claret red, made at times with help,
a friend or a lover, but consumed long after,
long after they are gone and I sit
alone at the kitchen table.

And when I sit in the last heat of Sunday, afternoons
on the porch steps in the acid breath of the boxwoods,
I also know desolation. The week is over, the coming night
will not lift. I am exhausted from making each day.
My family, my children live in other states,
the women I love in other towns. I would rather be here
than with them in the old ways, but when all that’s left
of the sunset is the red reflection underneath the clouds,
when I get up and come in to fix supper,
in the darkened kitchen I am often lonely for them.

In the morning and the evening we are by ourselves,
the woman next door and I. Still, we persist.
I open the drawer to get out the silverware.
She goes to her garden to pull weeds and pick
the crookneck squash that turn yellow with late summer.
I walk down to the pond in the morning to watch
and wait for the blue heron who comes at first light
to feed on minnows that swim through her shadow in the water.
She stays until the day grows so bright
that she cannot endure it and leaves with her hunger unsatisfied.
She bows her wings and slowly lifts into flight,
grey and slate blue against a paler sky.
I know she will come back. I see the light create
a russet curve of land on the farther bank,
where the wild rice bends heavy and ripe
under the first blackbirds. I know
she will come back. I see the light curve
in the fall and rise of her wing.

Visitation (Poem) by Mark Doty

When I heard he had entered the harbor,
and circled the wharf for days,
I expected the worst: shallow water,

confusion, some accident to bring
the young humpback to grief.
Don't they depend on a compass

lodged in the salt-flooded folds
of the brain, some delicate
musical mechanism to navigate

their true course? How many ways,
in our century's late iron hours,
might we have led him to disaster?

That, in those days, was how
I'd come to see the world:
dark upon dark, any sense

of spirit an embattled flame
sparked against wind-driven rain
till pain snuffed it out. I thought,

This is what experience gives us ,
and I moved carefully through my life
while I waited. . . Enough,

it wasn't that way at all. The whale
—exuberant, proud maybe, playful,
like the early music of Beethoven—

cruised the footings for smelts
clustered near the pylons
in mercury flocks. He

(do I have the gender right?)
would negotiate the rusty hulls
of the Portuguese fishing boats

—Holy Infant, Little Marie—
with what could only be read
as pleasure, coming close

then diving, trailing on the surface
big spreading circles
until he'd breach, thrilling us

with the release of pressured breath,
and the bulk of his sleek young head
—a wet black leather sofa

already barnacled with ghostly lice—
and his elegant and unlikely mouth,
and the marvelous afterthought of the flukes,

and the way his broad flippers
resembled a pair of clownish gloves
or puppet hands, looming greenish white

beneath the bay's clouded sheen.
When he had consumed his pleasure
of the shimmering swarm, his pleasure, perhaps,

in his own admired performance,
he swam out the harbor mouth,
into the Atlantic. And though grief

has seemed to me itself a dim,
salt suspension in which I've moved,
blind thing, day by day,

through the wreckage, barely aware
of what I stumbled toward, even I
couldn't help but look

at the way this immense figure
graces the dark medium,
and shines so: heaviness

which is no burden to itself.
What did you think, that joy
was some slight thing?

Poem - Blessings for the Beginning - Kari Kopnick

The things to do have been done, well, for the most part.
The people we need are in place, almost.
We are ready, or as ready as we will be.

Bless this most perfectly imperfect beginning.
May we find the right people to do the right things as we go.
May we discover that what we needed was right here all along.
And may we remember to stop and marvel at the magic of each moment as it floats by.

 Weird thing. 

My family traveled to Umeå, Sweden a year ago for a memorial for my husband's mother.

The kids, then 10 and 6, did great. But every time we passed McDonald's the call of "home" was almost undeniable.

We ate there for the first time in Stockholm, and I was thrilled to see a "Chicken and Hummus Salad" on the menu, as well as sparking water! I ate better at a McDonald's than ever before or ever since.

The salad features hummus and grilled chicken alongside black rice, edamame, and green and red cabbage. To finish off the dish, the salad is drizzled with a sweet and tangy chili dressing.

The next time the kids wanted to hit Mickey D's, they got a big YES from me.

Little did I know that I should have said yes even more than I did. I figured Sweden just got to "test" the salad until they rolled it out in the U.S. But no! Now I know McDonald's offers different menu items all over the world!

And I'm left mourning for a tasty, budget-friendly salad from a restaurant that my kids love, too.

Such a strange thing to be craving McDonald's!

As an aside, I think not only would I consider this McDonald's item as a factor in my decision to go back to Sweden, but ... it may just drive my tourism destinations in other areas.

Check out the Cadbury Creme Egg McFlurry, available only in Canada and Australia, and only at Easter:

Come on, big arches! Bring me joy in my home town!!!

Barrett died this week. He went to see his doctor because he just wasn't feeling himself, and his heart stopped on the examining table. They brought him back with a defibrillator in the ambulance.

He got a pacemaker and says he's eager for more life.

I'm 45 and barely know why I wake up every day.

I know these are not the days to measure our worth or gauge the meaning of our lives.

I am keeping my kids safe and sane and loved. I am keeping a house running. And a team at work. And helping with church.

But.

All the shoulds press so insistently, and the years of regret I am forecasting when I see how little I make of my days now. 

"Trust in the laws of accretion," Barrett said more than 20 years ago to me. And I have very little writing to show for it. Baudelaire may have called it better. I am a product of ennui. Barely dragging myself through the days and then anesthetizing myself once in bed with bad tv, a game or two, some news.

I read some. I love some. I exercise some.

I know I should do more. I feel so empty, so drained, so exhausted. Maybe I am doing all I can.

What is the most loving thing to do for myself? Forgive and let languish or push and produce?

I would love Barrett as much even if he never wrote a poem. I would adore Rini just as much if she never picked up a brush. And for years, she didn't. 

A career was plenty for many people. Why do I want a whole other life? Ah, there's the rub.

Poem - Love Is Calling - Jess Reynolds

Love is calling for liberation.
Love is hoarse from calling,
her voice raw from the decades
she has spent chanting at protests
and speaking from pulpits
and singing the songs of freedom.
Love is weeping into a white candle
she cups in her hands at a vigil
for one more Black life lost, ripped away, gunned down, forgotten.
She is holding the hands of a grieving mother
and praying aloud for peace.
This is where Love shows up, where Love has always shown up.
She is tugging at our hands and sleeves, begging us to lay down our egos
and take up our courage
and dedicate our lives to justice.

When You Are Weary (poem) by Jess Reynolds

Waking up is enough. Putting on shoes
before you walk out on the wet leaves

that plaster the driveway is enough.
It is enough to love one person,

one dog, one tree in a neighbor’s yard,
one fifty-cent mug at the thrift store.

You turn on the radio in the car.
You let a minivan merge into your lane

during rush hour. After three weeks
of half-darkness, you change the light bulb

above your desk. It is enough to breathe,
to put your face in your cold hands

and tell your palms and the empty kitchen
that you don’t know what else to do.

You open the blinds just enough
to see if the mail carrier has come today.

You turn your head at the sound
of a musician on the street corner,

their guitar slightly out of tune.
You buy bananas at the supermarket

and eat all but one before they turn
to mush. It is enough to be here,

to drink cold water from the tap,
to fall asleep on the couch

with a cat in the crook of your knees.
It is enough to be alive.

 Sermon at First Unitarian by the Rev. Bob LaVallee

9/27/2020

Racism is not a failure of character.

[It's a failure of persistent practice.] Only consistent effort is rewarded.

When we see the divinity in everyone, we allow the divine to show up.

Our faith intentionally contraverts empires of oppression.

Anti-racism is aligning ourselves with the world as it should be and will be.

Poem - We Are Worthy - Elandria Williams

We are worthy
Not because of what we produce
But because of who we are
We are divine bodies of light and darkness
You are not worthy because of what you offer, not because of what is in your mind, not for the support you give others, not for what you give at all
We are worthy and are whole just because

In this great turning, in this great pandemic, in this radical readjustment and alignment
We are not disposable, we are needed, we are the very people that have withstood everything that has been thrown at us as a people and as Maya Angelou would say
Still I Rise

We arise from the pain
We rise from the grief
We arise from the limits people place on us and the limits we place on ourselves
We rise to be the children and the ancestors
We rise to be our true selves
Our true selves in relationship to our families and communities
Recognizing our liberating and whole selves
Honoring them and others as we strive for abundant communities, abundant lives, abundant relationships, and abundant values and cultural manifestations
We are worthiness personified

I, you, and we are worthy and deserve a life where we are not always fighting for our existence
Imagine what we could create if we were not always in the struggle
Imagine what we could envision if we could just be let to just go there
So tired of always having to resist, to fight, demanding, pushing...
To everyone that has the courage, the power, the ability to co-create what we want and need while rooting in what we can’t lose and who we are
You are the visionary
You are the hope
You are our ancestor’s dreams

No, you might not ever end up on some list somewhere
But you are on a list in someone’s heart and mind
And if it’s in how you move in the world so people can see by example
You are the embodiment of what we need
Thanks to all that are the embodiment
The embodiment not of productivity but the embodiment of radical love, care and sanctuary
It’s time
Embodiment time
Embodiment
Living one’s values out loud
Let me everyday live my values out loud
Let us everyday live our values out loud
Embodying our values
Not the productivity quotient
Beyond productivity
Past productivity
True embodiment
Life —

On the eve of Yom Kippur

 How have I failed to live up to my values?

I see the ways I have failed.

I have compassion for what I still have to learn. 

I am on the path.

I honor my journey, my awareness of where I am, where I am going, and my dedication to taking the next step.

I see the holy in myself.

I vow to begin again in love.

 This article from the Atlantic by Mychal Denzel Smith!!!

Police Reform Is Not Enough: The moral failure of incremental change

"Incremental change keeps the grinding forces of oppression - of death - in place. Actively advocating for this position is a moral failure."

This seems to be a definitive answer to the question posed by my Senior English teacher, Ms. Firstenberg, who had us read Rousseau and Hobbes (both thinking about the social contract and whether people are inherently good or inherently flawed) and then write about which one was right - the one advocating for revolution (Rousseau) or the one advocating for incremental change (Hobbes).

Other quotable from this article:

"Progress is wrestling concessions from the behemoth of systematized oppression."

Poem - Little Lesson on How to Be - Kathryn Nuernberger

The woman at the Salvation Army who sorts and prices is in her eighties
and she underestimates the value of everything, for which I am grateful.

Lightly used snow suits, size 2T, are $6 and snow boots are $3.

There is a little girl, maybe seven, fiddling with a tea set. Her mother
inspects drapes for stains.

Sometimes the very old and lonely are looking for an opening.

She glances up from her pricing and says something about the tea set
and a baby doll long ago.

I am careful not to make eye contact, but the mother with drapes has
such softness in her shoulders and her face and she knows how to say
the perfect kind thing—“What a wonderful mother you had.”

“Yes, she was.”

Why do children sometimes notice us and sometimes not?

From the bin of dolls: “What happened to your mother?”

“She died.”

The woman at the Salvation Army who sorts and prices is crying a little.
She seems surprised to be crying. “It’s been eighty years and I still miss her.”

When my daughter was born I couldn’t stop thinking about how we were going to die. If we were drowning, would it be better to hold her to me even as she fought away or should I let her float off to wonder why her mother didn’t help her? What if it’s fire and I have one bullet left? I made sure my husband knew if there were death squads and he had to choose, I’d never love him again if he didn’t choose her. If I’m lucky, her crying face is the last thing I’ll see.

The mother with drapes is squeezing her daughter’s shoulder, trying to
send a silent message, but children are children. “Why did she die?”

“She was going to have a baby and—And she died.”

“But she was a wonderful mother.”

I’m holding a stack of four wooden jigsaw puzzles of farm animals,
dinosaurs, jungle animals, and pets. Each for a quarter.

“It’s silly how much I still miss her.” She takes out a tissue and wipes
her eyes and then her nose.

When my grandmother threw her sister, Susie, a 90th birthday party, one hundred people came, including 5 of the 6 brothers and sisters. At dusk only a few of us were left, nursing beers with our feet kicked up on the bottom rungs of various walkers.

Susie said then to my grandmother, “Can you think of all the people
watching us in heaven now? And our mother must be in the front row.”

Grandma took her sister’s hand. “Our mother—Estelle.”

“Yes—her name was Estelle. I forgot that.”

They looked so happy then, saying her name back and forth to each
other. Estelle. Estelle.

Poem - Self-compassion - James Crews

My friend and I snickered the first time
we heard the meditation teacher, a grown man,
call himself honey, with a hand placed
over his heart to illustrate how we too
might become more gentle with ourselves
and our runaway minds. It’s been years
since we sat with legs twisted on cushions,
holding back our laughter, and today
I found myself crouched on the floor again,
not meditating exactly, just agreeing
to be still, saying honey to myself each time
I thought about my husband splayed
on the couch with aching joints and fever
from a tick bite—what if he never gets better?—
or considered the mess of the next election,
or remembered in just a few more minutes,
I’d have to climb down into the cellar and empty
the bucket I left beneath a leaky pipe
that can’t be fixed until next week. How long
do any of us really have before the body
begins to break down and empty its mysteries
into the air? Oh honey, I said—for once
without a trace of irony or blush of shame—
the touch of my own hand on my chest
like that of a stranger, oddly comforting
in spite of the facts.

Quote - prayer

Prayer doesn't change things;
prayer changes people,
and people change things.

- Adapted from quotes by Mother Theresa / Joyce Meyer

Poem - Translations - Kathryn Nuernberger

I want to believe we can’t see anything
we don’t have a word for.

When I look out the window and say green, I mean sea green,
I mean moss green, I mean gray, I mean pale and also
electrically flecked with white and I mean green
in its damp way of glowing off a leaf.

Scheele’s green, the green of Renaissance painters,
is a sodium carbonate solution heated to ninety degrees
as arsenious oxide is stirred in. Sodium displaces copper,
resulting in a green precipitate that is sometimes used
as insecticide. When I say green I mean
a shiny green bug eating a yellow leaf.

Before synthetics, not every painter could afford a swathe
of blue. Shocking pink, aka neon, aka kinky pink,
wasn’t even on the market. I want to believe Andy Warhol
invented it in 1967 and ever since no one’s eyes
have been the same. There were sunsets before,
but without that hot shocking neon Marilyn, a desert sky
was just cataract smears. I want to believe this.

The pale green of lichen and half-finished leaves
filling my window is a palette very far from carnation
or bougainvillea, but to look out is to understand it is not,
is to understand what it is not. I stare out the window a lot.
Between the beginning and the end the leaves unfolded.
I looked out one morning and everything was unfamiliar
as if I was looking at the green you could only see
if you’d never known synthetic colors existed.

I’ve drawn into myself people say.
We understand, they say.

There are people who only have words for red
and black and white, and I wonder if they even see
the trees at the edge of the grass
or the green storms coming out of the west.
There are people who use the same word for green
and red and brown, and I wonder if red
seems so urgently bright pouring from the body
when there is no green for it to fall against.

In his treatise on color Wittgenstein asked,
“Can’t we imagine certain people
having a different geometry of colour than we do?”

I want to believe the eye doesn’t see green until it has a name,
because I don’t want anything to look the way it did before.

Van Gogh painted pink flowers, but the pink faded
and curators labeled the work “White Roses” by mistake.

The world in my window is a color the Greeks called chlorol.
When I learned the word I was newly pregnant
and the first pale lichens had just speckled the silver branches.
The pines and the lichens in the chill drizzle were glowing green
and a book in my lap said chlorol was one of the untranslatable
words. The vibrating glow pleased me then, as a finger
dipped in sugar pleased me then. I said the word aloud
for the baby to hear. Chlorol. I imagined the baby
could only see hot pink and crimson inside its tiny universe,
but if you can see what I’m seeing, the word for it
is chlorol. It’s one of the things you’ll like out here.

Nineteenth century critics mocked painters who cast shadows
in unexpected colors. After noticing green cypresses do drop red
shadows, Goethe chastised them. “The eye demands
completeness and seeks to eke out the colorific circle in itself.”
He tells of a trick of light that had him pacing a row of poppies
to see the flaming petals again and figure out why.

Over and over again Wittgenstein frets the problem of translucence.
Why is there no clear white?
He wants to see the world through white-tinted glasses,
but all he finds is mist.

At first I felt as if the baby had fallen away
like a blue shadow on the snow.

Then I felt like I killed the baby
in the way you can be thinking about something else
and drop a heavy platter by mistake.

Sometimes I feel like I was stupid
to have thought I was pregnant at all.

Color is an illusion, a response to the vibrating universe
of electrons. Light strikes a leaf and there’s an explosion
where it lands. When colors change, electromagnetic fields
are colliding. The wind is not the only thing moving the trees.

Once when I went into those woods I saw a single hot pink orchid
on the hillside and I had to keep reminding myself not to
tell the baby about the beautiful small things I was seeing.
So, hot pink has been here forever and I don’t even care
about that color or how Andy Warhol showed me an orchid.
I hate pink. It makes my eyes burn.

Harold & the Purple Crayon (Poem) by D. Gilson

Berkeley psychologists told Harold
his anger was justified. What parents
let their child go for a midnight walk
under no moon? I couldn’t have
been more than four, Harold told
the doctor in her crisp beige office.
Doctor, could it ever be OK
for a four-year-old to eat nine
different types of pie? Harold asked her.
Call me Lisa, the doctor replied.
Everyone knew Harold could draw.
By sophomore year, he was critiquing
grad students. By twenty, Harold knew
exactly when to quote Sontag. Standing
in front of a professor’s latest pastel
of Mojave succulents: This just makes me think
how in place of a hermeneutics, we need
an erotics of art. Harold’s professors
would hum & nod their dragon heads
(though none of them understood, exactly,
what Harold said). By senior year, Harold
became distant, his work increasingly angry:
apple trees, their fruit rotting in monochrome
purple, under the notable lack of a moon.

Poem - Where the Wild Things Go - D. Gilson

The night Max wore his wolf suit
made him infamous, bred the child star
never sent to bed. Middle school,
Max started drinking. Not in my house,
his mother begged, No, no, no, wild thing.
Max reminded her who bought
this condo, who paid for her meds.
Freshman year, Max raved. Roared
his terrible roar, rolled, and almost
wound up in a warehouse dead.
Where, oh where, do the wild things
go? To rehab in high school.
To college on residual book sales.
Max kept his head down. Laughed
at drunken frat boys. Bro, let the wild
rumpus start. Max said, No thanks,
and volunteered for the Peace Corps
instead. Two years in Kenya, one
in Belarus, the president thought
Max might be of some use. Max
moved to Washington, appointed
at the State Department a cultural
attaché. One important day Max wore
his wolf-gray suit, then drove home
well past rush hour in a freak snow storm.
Max drove on the deserted beltway,
thought it his throne. Yes, Max belted,
this is where the wild things roam.