Voices from the fringes: As we

The first peoples of the Americas became second-class citizens about 27 minutes after the arrival of Europeans, feels like. Inca, Mohawk, Ojibwe, Lakota, Azteca, Diné, Cherokee, Maya—whether complex, sophisticated societies or nomadic tribes, they all fell to the relentless onslaught of the newcomers. Guns, horses, disease, religion; the neighborhood basically was overrun and its residents driven out.

Six centuries later, the dominant culture barely notices the original inhabitants and their voices—if we listen to them—sound cracked to us. Not for lack of use, but for lack of being heard.

My poem for National Poetry Month today is from Layli Long Soldier, an Oglala Lakota who lives in Santa Fé. Poets often play with the sounds and the visuals of their works. Gertrude Stein has to be heard, for example, because on paper, her stuff just looks like a fistful of words flung across the page. (I’m thinking of her “If I told Him: A Completed Portrait of Picasso”.) One of my favorite examples of the visual playground (aside from everything e.e. cummings wrote) is from Guillaume Appollinaire; I couldn’t type “Du coton dans les oreilles”, I had to take screen grabs of it. On account of the way it appeared on the page was integral to the poet’s intent.)

In “Obligations 2”, Long Soldier is using the construction of phrases to bring the reader into the playing out of the heart. I came across this without any introductory or explanatory material, so this is solely my interpretation. But my eye instinctively saw this and began to flow not horizontally, but vertically, like a stream or a waterfall. You can read this poem many, many ways by connecting one line to another back and forth across the page.

Are we meant to embrace the future? Resist the present? Struggle to unbraid? Fail to accept? Work to find?

It all filters through grief, and then we make our way farther as we choose. And your choice may be different from mine or from Long Soldier’s. And it may change every time you read it.

 

“Obligations 2”

                                                     As we

                                         embrace          resist

                           the future       the present      the past

              we work          we struggle          we begin          we fail

 to understand       to find        to unbraid        to accept        to question

               the grief          the grief           the grief          the grief

                           we shift         we wield           we bury​

                                     into light               as ash

                                            across our faces

 

 

 

Voices from the fringes: I love you madly

It’s kind of hard to remember a time when the Motown sound didn’t permeate American life, but of course it’s only been a few decades since African American music flowed into the mainstream of White culture. Smokey Robinson would be one of the pioneers, as a songwriter, singer and front man for The Miracles. He’s been a force in the industry since the 1950s. That’s what I call a successful career.

For today’s earworm, and Day 2 of National Poetry Month, I’m giving you “You Really Got a Hold on Me”. Robinson wrote it in 1962, and it became a Top 10 hit almost immediately. The Beatles famously covered it in the following year, staying true to the bluesy beat.

As poetry, perhaps not the most compelling of entries, but of course songs combine both words and music to convey the story. In this case, the story is one everyone has experienced, probably more than once: being so overcome by passion that, well, you know…

Listening to it—after a lot of years—I think of all the slow dances, in high school gymnasiums and darkened clubs around the world over the past nearly 60 years, and it still rings true.

This version was released in 2014, on the CD Smokey & Friends. On it, Smokey’s joined by Aerosmith’s Steven Tyler.

 

Voices from the fringes: A gift for grateful beggars

Welp, it’s April, so you know what that means. Yes—a poem a day for National Poetry Month.

Thinking about this during the past month, it occurred to me that in years past, pretty much all the poems have been from majority poets. That is, even when I gave you African or Chinese or Greek or Persian writers, they were from the dominant culture within their nation. And while I tried to scatter women and non-binary among the males, it was really a smattering.

After the year of Black Lives Matter and the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes, I think it’s time for me to find voices from the fringes.

We heard from Audre Lorde three years ago, but she’s back to frame the month for us. The woman basically defined intersectional—Black, female, child of immigrants, lesbian, mother, activist, wife; a lot of boxes to tick for person who defied boxes. We’re having her “New Year’s Day”, because the last line is a corker.

“New Year’s Day”

The day feels put together hastily
like a gift for grateful beggars
being better than no time at all
but the bells are ringing
in cities I have never visited
and my name is printed over doorways
I have never seen
While extracting a bone
or whatever is tender or fruitful
from the core of indifferent days
I have forgotten
the touch of sun
cutting through uncommitted mornings
The night is full of messages
I cannot read
I am too busy forgetting
air like fur on my tongue
and these tears
which do not come from sadness
but from grit in a sometimes wind

Rain falls like tar on my skin
my son picks up a chicken heart at dinner
asking
does this thing love?
Deft unmalicious fingers of ghosts
pluck over my dreaming
hiding whatever it is of sorrow
that would profit me

I am deliberate
and afraid
of nothing.

 

 

Consider the trees

March is going out like a lamb here in the District They Call Columbia. Today I’m concentrating on flowering trees—not cherry trees, but still gorgeous.

Feast your eyes on these:

I do not know what this tree is, but it's certainly glorious:

As are the tulip trees:

Thanks, Nature!

 

The light in all of us

When you end a yoga session, you put your hands together in front of your heart, bow slightly and say, “Namaste.” The other day my instructor reminded me that “namaste” means, “The light in me honors the light in you,” and it got me thinking.

Here’s what I like about this: to do this, you have to first recognize and acknowledge the light in yourself—“The light in me”. I have to say that there have been times when I’d have been hard-pressed to find light anywhere in my vicinity and certainly not in myself. Saying “namaste” means that—for at least the moment—I recognize and acknowledge and honor it.

And then you have to recognize and acknowledge the light in the other person(s). And sometimes this can be difficult. (Not WRT my yoga instructor, obvs, but just thinking of “other people”.) You accept that every single person has something of light within them, even if they’re doing everything possible to be nothing but darkness. You’re looking for the light so you can acknowledge and honor it.

I realized recently that this is not my default setting. (I was chatting with a colleague about a work situation, and I said, “[Other colleague] assumes good intentions. I want to think I assume good intentions, but it turns out I assume jackasses.”) I have a tendency to dismiss possible good, especially when I am presented with irrationality, hate, anger, racism, misogyny, stupidity, bloodymindedness and about a squillion other high crimes and misdemeanors. I confess that I don’t know that looking for light beyond or through all that crap will provide a return on the effort, but it might be interesting to test the theory.

This is something I can work on—looking for and honoring the light; both in myself and in others. And I wonder...if more of us tried looking for the light, perhaps—I mean, just maybe—it would bring more of it into the world?

 

 

Gratitude Monday: the weekend

I got the second dose of the Pfizer BioNTech vaccine Saturday morning. (Thursday afternoon, while on a call with colleagues, we were sharing our weekend plans. I kvelled, “I’m getting my second dose!” And then wondered out loud, “Who’d have thought, 14 months ago, that the highlight of anyone’s weekend would be getting a shot?”)

The post-injection waiting period cat herder instructed us second-dosers, “Don’t make any brunch plans for tomorrow; have brunch today. Your body’s going to know you’ve had this shot and it’s not going to be happy. Those of you getting your first dose can have brunch tomorrow.” So I did my grocery shopping on the way home and spent most of Saturday getting chores done.

Yesterday I lay in bed listening to the rain and birds, telling myself, “Today you should take it easy. Post-vaccine crater.” But eventually I got up, made a mini brunch and—when nothing happened—I did some writing, finished folding the laundry and went out for a walk, during which I rescued a few of the approximately eleventy-three squillion earthworms littering the sidewalk and road. I also shot some pix.

For lunch, I had homemade matzoh ball soup, brought over to me on Saturday by my yoga instructor, which was precisely the thing for a rainy day and which would have cured any post-vaccine lurgy if it had attacked me. (Also, it was still, technically, the first day of Pesach.) And it was delicious.

So my gratitude, as you’ll imagine, today is for being fully vaccinated, no major side effects, clean clothes, matzoh ball soup and a springtime walk.