Paschal moon: Find the truth

Today’s National Poetry Month offering comes from a young Tanzanian poet, Zuhura Seng’enge. Only out of university for a couple of years, she’s been writing poetry in both English and Kiswahili since she was 12.

The poem I’m sharing is focused on the African experience, but I believe that Americans could well benefit from following its precepts—both as a nation and as individuals. I recognize that what Seng’enge enjoins is in no way easy, but even so…

“Do Not Fear the Past”

Do not fear the past.
It is ugly
but it is ours,
Do not hold on to lies
That you were fed when you were young.
Learn the history of your people
Find the truth
to free your soul from evil
Learn the Qur-an
Learn the bible
Find the meaning of life and religion.
Do not fear the past.
It is painful
but it is real
Blood was spilt and people died
but love and unity had survived.
Learn the tongue of your ancestors
Reconnect with the roots of your blood
Find the knowledge
That was stolen
Find the life that was robbed from us.
Do not fear the past.
Embrace it
Let it teach you the wisdom of your race
Take its lessons and live by them
Own the identity that was erased.
Do not fear the past,
Do not hate it.
Do not fear the past,
Learn about it.
Let it teach you
Let it nurture you
Let it remind you, of who you are

Paschal moon: the allotment of death

One of my friends yesterday gave me stick about the poem by Hughes not being by Ted Hughes. So, what the hell.

I’m not actually a huge fan of Ted, largely because he was such an utter shite of a human being. (I have the same disdain for Fitzgerald and Hemingway, although I recognize Fitzgerald was in fact a master of language. Hemingway was just a pisher through and through, and I think his writing’s crap on top of it.)

Fun fact: my contempt for him did not stop me applying for a ticket for the memorial service held for Hughes (he died as Poet Laureate of Great Britain) at Westminster Abbey. But as it turned out, I couldn’t attend, because the sales guy I was working on a project with threw a wobbly about me leaving work for half a day.

“What does it matter?” he squawked. “He’s dead!”

(This sales guy was a piece of work. I found out later he’d been shagging the Queen of the Admins, a woman who personified the phrase “having ideas above her station”. They were both married to other people.)

Anyhow, here’s a little something from Mr. Sylvia Plath.

“Hawk Roosting”

I sit in the top of the wood, my eyes closed.
Inaction, no falsifying dream
Between my hooked head and hooked feet:
Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat.

The convenience of the high trees!
The air's buoyancy and the sun's ray
Are of advantage to me;
And the earth's face upward for my inspection.

My feet are locked upon the rough bark.
It took the whole of Creation
To produce my foot, my each feather:
Now I hold Creation in my foot

Or fly up, and revolve it all slowly -
I kill where I please because it is all mine.
There is no sophistry in my body:
My manners are tearing off heads -

The allotment of death.
For the one path of my flight is direct
Through the bones of the living.
No arguments assert my right:

The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.

Paschal moon: the rape and rot of graft

It’s hard for me to comprehend how any sentient being can look at what’s going on around us and not see the fluorescently-glaring institutional racism that infuses every aspect of our life. Even more than the Nazi torchlight rallies that are increasingly emboldened by the state of politics, I look at the fact that cops can safely arrest mass murderers—if they’re white—while black kids are riddled with police-issue bullets for Walking While Carrying Mobile Phones, and I just fucking despair.

This is the 21^st-Century version of lynching, and we don’t seem to have an Ida B. Wells to shine a light on it.

Well, we do have Langston Hughes. In previous iterations of National Poetry Month I’ve given you some of his shorter works—“Hold Fast the Dream”, “April Rain Song” and “Motto”. Today’s poem is long, I grant you, but it’s something I believe we need in this time of MAGAtry, so read it all the way to the last line.

“Let America Be America Again”

Let America be America again.
Let it be the dream it used to be.
Let it be the pioneer on the plain
Seeking a home where he himself is free.

(America never was America to me.)

Let America be the dream the dreamers dreamed—
Let it be that great strong land of love
Where never kings connive nor tyrants scheme
That any man be crushed by one above.

(It never was America to me.)

O, let my land be a land where Liberty
Is crowned with no false patriotic wreath,
But opportunity is real, and life is free,
Equality is in the air we breathe.

(There's never been equality for me,
Nor freedom in this "homeland of the free.")

Say, who are you that mumbles in the dark?
And who are you that draws your veil across the stars?

I am the poor white, fooled and pushed apart,
I am the Negro bearing slavery's scars.
I am the red man driven from the land,
I am the immigrant clutching the hope I seek—
And finding only the same old stupid plan
Of dog eat dog, of mighty crush the weak.

I am the young man, full of strength and hope,
Tangled in that ancient endless chain
Of profit, power, gain, of grab the land!
Of grab the gold! Of grab the ways of satisfying need!
Of work the men! Of take the pay!
Of owning everything for one's own greed!

I am the farmer, bondsman to the soil.
I am the worker sold to the machine.
I am the Negro, servant to you all.
I am the people, humble, hungry, mean—
Hungry yet today despite the dream.
Beaten yet today—O, Pioneers!
I am the man who never got ahead,
The poorest worker bartered through the years.

Yet I'm the one who dreamt our basic dream
In the Old World while still a serf of kings,
Who dreamt a dream so strong, so brave, so true,
That even yet its mighty daring sings
In every brick and stone, in every furrow turned
That's made America the land it has become.
O, I'm the man who sailed those early seas
In search of what I meant to be my home—
For I'm the one who left dark Ireland's shore,
And Poland's plain, and England's grassy lea,
And torn from Black Africa's strand I came
To build a "homeland of the free."

The free?

Who said the free? Not me?
Surely not me? The millions on relief today?
The millions shot down when we strike?
The millions who have nothing for our pay?
For all the dreams we've dreamed
And all the songs we've sung
And all the hopes we've held
And all the flags we've hung,
The millions who have nothing for our pay—
Except the dream that's almost dead today.

O, let America be America again—
The land that never has been yet—
And yet must be--the land where every man is free.
The land that's mine--the poor man's, Indian's, Negro's, ME—
Who made America,
Whose sweat and blood, whose faith and pain,
Whose hand at the foundry, whose plow in the rain,
Must bring back our mighty dream again.

Sure, call me any ugly name you choose—

The steel of freedom does not stain.
From those who live like leeches on the people's lives,
We must take back our land again,
America!

O, yes,
I say it plain,
America never was America to me,
And yet I swear this oath—
America will be!

Out of the rack and ruin of our gangster death,
The rape and rot of graft, and stealth, and lies,
We, the people, must redeem
The land, the mines, the plants, the rivers.
The mountains and the endless plain—
All, all the stretch of these great green states—
And make America again!

Paschal moon: they shall not break

My friend David and I never discussed poetry—he left a comment on the post a few years ago on Carl Sandburg’s “Shovel Them Under”, and I have a vague recollection of some social media post he made that he labeled as a poem, but consisted of repeating the word god about 30 times. So I know he did read the stuff, but I don’t know how much it appealed to him.

I do know that he did not believe in the immortality of the soul, so he’d probably wave off my National Poetry Month entry for today, but it’s my choice to let Dylan Thomas give me a modicum of comfort when I think of my loss.

“And Death Shall Have No Dominion”

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead man naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
Under the windings of the sea
They lying long shall not die windily;
Twisting on racks when sinews give way,
Strapped to a wheel, yet they shall not break;
Faith in their hands shall snap in two,
And the unicorn evils run them through;
Split all ends up they shan't crack;
And death shall have no dominion.

And death shall have no dominion.
No more may gulls cry at their ears
Or waves break loud on the seashores;
Where blew a flower may a flower no more
Lift its head to the blows of the rain;
Though they be mad and dead as nails,
Heads of the characters hammer through daisies;
Break in the sun till the sun breaks down,
And death shall have no dominion.

Paschal moon: easily reducible adolescences

It’s true that when we hear the words “Poets of World War I”, we typically don’t think of women. Partly, of course, because women were for the most part kept away from the front, so whatever they wrote about was de facto about their life waiting at home. But because that’s how they experienced the war, that perspective is still valid.

In past years I’ve given you examples from Eleanor Farjeon and Anna Akhmatova. Today I’ve got a little something from the poet-painter Mina Loy, born in 1882 in London, resident of most of the artistic centers of Europe before moving to the United States in 1916. Modernism, futurism, Dada, feminism, surrealism, post-modernism, conceptualism—Loy threw herself into all the major movements of the times.

Loy considered herself more a visual artist than a poet, but she knew her way around a page. “The Dead” was written in 1920, and for someone who didn’t have first-hand experience of the war, she certainly captured its aftermath, using all the modernist imagery then available.

“The Dead”

We have flowed out of ourselves  

Beginning on the outside 

That shrivable skin          

Where you leave off        

Of infinite elastic        

Walking the ceiling          

Our eyelashes polish stars            

Curled close in the youngest corpuscle             

Of a descendant

We spit up our passions in our grand-dams            

Fixing the extension of your reactions             

Our shadow lengthens    

In your fear        

You are so old   

Born in our immortality            

Stuck fast as Life             

In one impalpable            

Omniprevalent Dimension             

We are turned inside out 

Your cities lie digesting in our stomachs                     

Street lights footle in our ocular darkness            

Having swallowed your irate hungers             

Satisfied before bread-breaking    

To your dissolution          

We splinter into Wholes          

Stirring the remorses of your tomorrow             

Among the refuse of your unborn centuries            

In our busy ashbins         

Stink the melodies           

Of your         

So easily reducible          

Adolescences    

Our tissue is of that which escapes you             

Birth-Breaths and orgasms           

The shattering tremor of the static        

The far-shore of an instant            

The unsurpassable openness of the circle    

Legerdemain of God       

Only in the segregated angles of Lunatic Asylums

Do those who have strained to exceeding themselves             

Break on our edgeless contours   

The mouthed echoes of what        

has exuded to our companionship

Is horrible to the ear        

Of the half that is left inside them.

Gratitude Monday: progress

It’s been a week since the surgery on my wrist; I’ll be back at work, in the office starting today. TBH, I don’t know much I can do, but I sort of feel like I need to show my face to remind people that they should still sign off on my pay checks. I joined a conference call on Friday, but I couldn’t take notes (no writing at all with my wrist, and pecking on a keyboard doesn’t feed the note-taking bulldog), and the Microsoft Lync conference system served up the worst audio since the old half-duplex days, so I didn’t get much out of that.

I’m still unable to eat anything that involves cutting; yesterday I cooked up some wild rice to have with grilled chicken breast, but I shredded the latter after grilling it. Whacking up the mushrooms and shallots to go in the rice was…interesting. I’m glad there’s no one around to watch me eating.

Interestingly, this happened to the hand that had the IV feed—don’t think I’ve ever seen bruising this bad, but it doesn’t involve a lot of pain.

In fact, I’ve not needed to crack open the Percocet—I take some pain meds as a preemptive strike before going to bed, because it turns out that hitting the thumb in either direction at night will jerk you out of sleep in an New York instant. But mostly the past week has been a lot of slow movement and realizing how much stuff of daily life requires having an opposing thumb on my dominant hand.

Tomorrow I see the surgeon for the post-op check. I think he’s going to swap out this cast for something that’ll stay on for a few weeks. I’m grateful that so far it’s been a matter of inconvenience, and I’m looking forward to steady improvement.

Paschal moon: an infinite and endless liar

We don’t know exactly when William Shakespeare was born, in 1564, but he was baptized on 26 April, and baptisms were typically done back then within a couple of days of birth, in case the infant didn’t survive. So it’s possible that today is the 454^th anniversary of his birth. It is the 402^nd anniversary of his death. And since it’s not possible to get through National Poetry Month without something from the heavy artillery of English letters, today’s a good day for Will.

Technically billed as a comedy, All’s Well That Ends Well is…oh, I dunno. It’s a comedy inasmuch as the stage in Act V is not awash in blood and piled with corpses. But it’s a whole rigmarole of class differences, snobbery, conquests on the battlefield and in the bed, unrequited love, rampant testosterone, craven servants and a lot of stuff that even on my most disbelief-suspending days I still have trouble swallowing.

One of the things I have the most trouble with is the plot point around the notion that in the dark all cats are equally grey, that a man can’t tell one woman from another when he’s in bed. Amongst other things, am I meant to conclude that, in the rush of passion, men lose their sense of hearing? Or is it that virgins being ravished by coup-counting cads are universally silent?

Then there’s the whole idea that any woman with the gumption of Helena (in this case) would want to be married to a cad like Bertram, who can’t even be arsed to bed her because of her “low station” (which doesn’t seem to bother him in other instances, of which she is abundantly aware).

Any roads, that’s the basic plot, but one of the subplots revolves around a loudmouthed, arrogant servant called Parolles, who reminds me of most of the GOPigs, as described here in Act III, Scene vi, by various lords to Bertram:

Bertram:

Do you think I am so far deceived in him?

Second Lord:

Believe it, my lord, in mine own direct knowledge,

without any malice, but to speak of him as my

kinsman, he’s a most notable coward, an infinite and

endless liar, an hourly promise-breaker, the owner

of no one good quality worthy your lordship’s

entertainment.

See what I mean? I'm planning on working some of these into daily conversations.

If that’s not poetic enough for you, we’ll have one of the sonnets. This is one I find particularly comforting at the mo.

“XXX”

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought

I summon up remembrance of things past,

I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,

And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:

Then can I drown an eye, unus'd to flow,

For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,

And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,

And moan th' expense of many a vanish'd sight;

Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,

And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er

The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,

Which I new pay as if not paid before.

   But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,

   All losses are restor'd, and sorrows end.

Paschal moon: Everyday odysseys

Let’s step out of the ordinary for National Poetry Month today. Assuming, of course, that there is such a thing as “ordinary’ poetry.

In the world of creativity, Kate Tempest is a triple threat: poet, musical artist, playwright. Every poet has his/her voice; Tempest’s is gripping, eloquent and very East London. In short, extraordinary. My discovery of her—I don’t even know how it happened—was literally of her voice, as she recited “from Brand New Ancients”, so that’s what I’m sharing with you.

In the old days,
the myths were the stories we used to explain ourselves

but how can we explain
the way we hate ourselves?

The things we’ve made ourselves into,
the way we break ourselves in two,
the way we overcomplicate ourselves?

But we are still mythical.

We are still permanently trapped
somewhere between the heroic and the pitiful.

We are still Godly,
that’s what’s made us so monstrous.
It just feels like we’ve forgotten
that we’re much more
than the sum of the things that belong to us.

Every single person has a purpose in them burning.
Look again.
Allow yourself to see them.

Millions of characters
Each with their own epic narratives
Singing, ‘it’s hard to be an angel
Until you’ve been a demon’.

We are perfect because of our imperfections,
We must stay hopeful,
We must be patient;

When they excavate the modern day
They’ll find us,
The Brand New Ancients.

All that we have here
Is all that we’ve always had.

We have jealousy,
tenderness,
curses and gifts.

But the plight of a people who have forgotten their myths
and imagine that somehow
now is all that there is –
is a sorry plight

all isolation and worry
but the life in your veins
it is Godly, heroic.
You were born for greatness.
Believe it,
know it –
take it from the tears of the poets.

there’s always been heroes,
there’s always been villains,
the stakes may have changed
but really there’s no difference.

there’s always been greed
and heartbreak and ambition.
jealousy, love,
trespass and contrition,

we’re the same beings that began,
still living,
in all of our fury and foulness and friction.
Everyday odysseys.
Dreams vs decisions.
The stories are there if you listen.

The stories are here.

The stories are you
and your fear and your hope is as old
as the language of smoke,
the language of blood,
the language of languishing love,

the Gods are all here.
Because the Gods are in us.

But I think you should hear this in Tempest’s actual voice, in addition to her voice on the page, so have a listen to this.

See what I mean about “extraordinary”?