Here’s an interesting pattern I saw on the putting green (? I assume that’s what this is?) I pass on one of my morning walk routes.
Not sure what caused these—at first I thought it was the
push-jobber they use to collect all the golf balls that are left overnight
after a day’s worth of putting. But possibly one of the mowers?
I dunno—I just thought it was interesting.
©2024 Bas Bleu
This bench is along one of my walking routes.
I’m not sure whose property it sits on—whether the
townhouse cluster that would be to the right and behind me or the golf course onto
which it looks out. I suspect the former, although there's a community path separating the bench and cluster, so it would be their landscapers' responsibility to trim the area.
But I don’t think anyone’s going to be watching the sunset
from it anytime soon. It's actually looking like the kind of setting where unwary sitters disappear unexpectedly.
"I dunno, Muriel. I ain't seen those kids since they went out to watch them golfers tee off on the 9th hole..."
©2024 Bas Bleu
A few weeks ago, a neighbor brought me a pastry, which was lovely. But what sent me over the moon was that it was in a Paris Baguette bag. Because that meant PB has made it to the ‘hood.
Back when I lived in the Valley They Call Silicon, I was a
regular at the Santa
Clara PB. It was my preferred coffee shop for lingering over a coffee,
writing and people watching. My status was so well established that as soon as
I opened the door, Kenyon, the manager, had someone start my decaf latte. The
pastries were extra primo good, too.
I’ve not found anything close to PB, either in the District They Call Columbia or the People’s Republic, so I was profoundly grateful to learn that an actual PB has opened in Herndon. As soon as I could, I tracked it down.
It was interesting to me that it’s located on the ground
floor of a block of mid-rise apartments—first to fill the space that will be
all-food all-the-time, apparently. Like you might find in a city, instead of an
ex-urb next to a highway. Whatever—I was just happy to see it.
Right after I found the place, I mentioned it to my yoga
instructor, showing her a couple of pix after an in-person lesson. Not 20
minutes after she left my house, I got this text (and then follow-up):
Well, I mean—just look:
So my gratitude today is knowing there’s a Paris Baguette
nearby—but not as close as the Santa Clara one was, so I won’t be tempted to
pop by every day.
I was chatting yesterday with a friend and former colleague. He was part of the first shock wave of 12,000 employees laid off in January of last year from the Megalithic Software Company (I was let go in May). We meet once a week to check in, give encouragement and have some laughs.
But I realized as we were talking about the job market that
I feel a greater sense of destabilization than just looking for a job. We’re
seeing concerted, credible attacks on the institutions of government and
democracy and I’m suddenly conscious of how much is riding on this election
cycle, and how tenuous is my conviction that the center will hold. It’s not
just the student demonstrations, or even the police riot responses (although
they’re certainly top of mind); it’s that millions of people would rather solidify
their own immiseration than vote for a candidate with a D after his/her name.
The noseless face-spiting crowd want the whole thing, and they’re
willing to do anything to get it. And our institutions were not shaped to deal
with this level of fuckery.
So—today I’m turning to one of my most stalwart sources of comfort, Sweet Honey in the Rock. Let’s have “We’ll Understand it Bye and Bye”. Bernice Johnson Reagon's voice anchors this like a rock. We all could use that in these times.
©2024 Bas Bleu
On my walks last week I discovered that the Sidewalk Chalk Artist has returned, with expanded coverage.
©2024 Bas Bleu
For May Day, I think I’m just going to give you a selection of April flowers from the People’s Republic. It’s either that or a screed on the need for unions to restore balance against the capitalist oligarchs, and—TBH—I’m just a bit too tired for that.
©2024 Bas Bleu
We need someone with gravitas to close out National Poetry Month, and I can think of no one better qualified for that than William Butler Yeats. Because you know how I love Yeats.
In the past I’ve given you the apocalyptic and the
historical (“Second
Coming” and “Easter, 1916”), and one related to the First World War (“An
Irish Airman Foresees his Death”). I’m going to dial it back to
the eternal subject of poetry, love—the positive and the not-so-positive.
Yeats had a powerful passion for a woman named Maud Gonne—I
mean, he was hopelessly in love with her. And she spurned him. As in, he
proposed marriage to her four times over a period of ten years, and she turned
him down every time. Even worse, she married the Irish nationalist John
MacBride, who was an abusive drunk.
(After MacBride was executed by the British following the
Easter Uprising in 1916, Yeats tried one more time. With the same result.
Oh—and then he proposed to Gonne’s 22-year-old-daughter, who also refused him.
Look, artists, poets—whaddya gonna do?)
Yeats had other affairs, and following his rejection by
Gonne mere et fille, he married Georgie Hyde Lees (whom he met through
one of his lovers). They had a happy marriage, with two children, but I’m
thinking it wasn’t that full-bore heart-wrenching feeling he had for Gonne.
It’s hard, after all, to sustain that kind of thing over time.
So it’s no real surprise to me that Yeats cautions us
against rushing wholeheartedly into love. Even though, of course, he was unable
to follow his own advice.
“Never Give All the Heart”
Never give all the heart, for love
Will hardly seem worth thinking of
To passionate women if it seem
Certain, and they never dream
That it fades out from kiss to kiss;
For everything that’s lovely is
But a brief, dreamy, kind delight.
O never give the heart outright,
For they, for all smooth lips can say,
Have given their hearts up to the play.
And who could play it well enough
If deaf and dumb and blind with love?
He that made this knows all the cost,
For he gave all his heart and lost.
And on that bittersweet note, National Poetry Month comes
to an end. I hope you’ve enjoyed it as much as I have.
©2024 Bas Bleu
My gratitude today is National Poetry Month. For the past 11 Aprils, I’ve stepped away from whatever was going on in my life—although not from what was going on in the world—to explore poetry as a means of understanding, well, everything and anything.
Poetry helped me deal with four years of the kleptocracy
that was the last presidential administration. It gave me hope during the first
year of the pandemic. It presented a framework for the Russian invasion of
Ukraine. This year, it reminded me there’s more to life than a job hunt.
And National Poetry Month introduced me to new
poets, just as it strengthened my bonds with old friends.
All of this is cause for deep gratitude.
Today’s entry for National Poetry Month comes
from Seámus Heaney. Eight years ago I gave you his heartbreaking “Requiem
for the Croppies”, and mentioned his linguistic mastery, which included
lyrical translations from Irish, Latin and Greek. For this round, I’ve chosen
“The Cure at Troy”, which is Heaney’s take on Sophocles’ Philoctetes.
All you need to know about Philoctetes is that
he was one of the approximately 72 squillion suitors for Helen, and thus
honor-bound to help Menelaus retrieve her from Troy. He was stranded on the
island of Lemnos on the way (different versions give different reasons, but all
seem to involve some kind of suppurating wound whose putrescence offended the
Greeks). After many years of siege, the Greeks were told they wouldn’t win the
war until they possessed the weapons of Heracles, which were…on Lemnos. As you might
imagine, Philoctetes (reduced to a solitary animal-like existence in the
intervening time) wasn’t exactly overjoyed at the prospect of handing over the
sacred weapons to the very men who’d abandoned him (he was particularly pissed
off at Odysseus), but Heracles appeared and told him to give up the artifacts
and his wound would be healed by Asclepius, and he would become a great hero, a
key driver of winning the war. (Some versions have him killing Paris, the
little toerag who started the whole thing; others put him in the actual Trojan
Horse. Either way he was instrumental in driving a stake through it.)
So there are a lot of symbolic moving parts to
this one—the festering wound that won’t heal and leads to the debasement of a
warrior; only by a series of redemptive decisions is he given a permanent cure,
which leads to the end of a long, exhausting war.
Heaney wrote his version in 1990 as a tribute
to Nelson Mandela, and an indictment of apartheid. (Its relevance to the
situation in Northern Ireland is also obvious.) Note that—like Mandela—Heaney
urges the reader to move beyond revenge, to the “further shore” with “cures and
healing wells.” But he also speaks of the "longed-for tidal wave of justice" that is building. I believe these are thoughts we should keep before us in these
times.
“The Cure at Troy”
Human beings suffer,
They torture one another,
They get hurt and get hard,
No poem or play or song
Can fully right a wrong
Inflicted and endured.
The innocent in gaols
Beat on their bars together.
A hunger-striker’s father
Stands in the graveyard dumb.
The police widow in veils
Faints at the funeral home.
History says, don’t hope
On this side of the grave.
But then, once in a lifetime
The longed-for tidal wave
Of justice can rise up,
And hope and history rhyme.
So hope for a great sea-change
On the far side of revenge.
Believe that further shore
Is reachable from here.
Believe in miracle
And cures and healing wells.
Call miracle self-healing:
The utter, self-revealing
Double-take of feeling.
If there’s fire on the mountain
Or lightning and storm
And a god speaks from the sky
That means someone is hearing
The outcry and the birth-cry
Of new life at its term.
©2024 Bas Bleu
Rita Dove, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, was the first African-American to be named Poet Laureate by the Library of Congress. In addition to poetry, she has written a play, a novel and numerous collections of essays. Several of her poems have been set to music. She’s taught creative writing at a number of universities, including the University of Virginia since 1989.
I chose “American Smooth” for today’s National Poetry Month entry because I found out that she and her husband of 45 years, Fred Viebahn, are avid ballroom dancers. This poem perfectly captures that magic of the waltz or the foxtrot.
“American Smooth”
We
were dancing—it must have
been a foxtrot or a waltz,
something romantic but
requiring restraint,
rise and fall, precise
execution as we moved
into the next song without
stopping, two chests heaving
above a seven-league
stride—such perfect agony,
one learns to smile through,
ecstatic mimicry
being the sine qua non
of American Smooth.
And because I was distracted
by the effort of
keeping my frame
(the leftward lean, head turned
just enough to gaze out
past your ear and always
smiling, smiling),
I didn’t notice
how still you’d become until
we had done it
(for two measures?
four?)—achieved flight,
that swift and serene
magnificence,
before the earth
remembered who we were
and brought us down.
©2024 Bas Bleu
Eleven years ago I gave you a poem by Iraqui-American poet Dunya Mikhail. (Wow—I’ve been doing National Poetry Month for 11 years?!) I’d heard her read “The War Works Hard” on NPR years before and bought her first collection that same day. It was one of the four books I carried with me when I moved to Seattle that were meant to tide me over until my shipped household goods arrived.
A Chaldean
Catholic and a critic of the regime of Saddam Hussein, Mikhail fled Iraq in
1995 at age 30, eventually settling in Michigan, where she works as a lecturer
in Arabic at Oakland University.
“Another Planet”
is from The War Works Hard, which was published in 2005. But its themes
and wishes are eternal. That’s poetry’s job—to remind us of how much or little
we’ve progresses.
“Another Planet"
I have a special ticket
to another planet
beyond this Earth.
A comfortable world, and beautiful:
a world without much smoke,
not too hot
and not too cold.
The creatures
are gentler there,
and the governments
have no secrets.
The police are nonexistent:
there are no problems
and no fights.
And the schools
don’t exhaust their students
with too much work
for history has yet to start
and there’s no geography
and no other languages.
And even better:
the war
has left its “r” behind
and turned into love,
so the weapons sleep
beneath the dust,
and the planes pass by
without shelling the cities,
and the boats
look like smiles
on the water.
All things
are peaceful
and kind
on the other planet
beyond this Earth.
But still I hesitate
to go alone.
Tr: Kareem James Abu-Zeid
©2024 Bas Bleu
