On the eve of a turning page of American history, it feels important to keep looking back. History has a certain weight and inevitability… We lived through it. No matter what various heads of state try to delete, they can’t erase family stories, personal recollection nor every diary and attic stored record. We are here. We remain. We persist.
Spring without flowers
Still comes, days bright and warming:
Know winter passes.
“Madea! You can’t go to the store like that!”
Our small mouths hung open, aghast. Our grandmother’s smile was pure amusement, toothsomely sweet as the Louisiana cane that papa brought us from the neighbor’s field.
“No?” she asked in her slow drawl, willing to be led by our whimsies. “Well, if y’all take ’em out, y’all gonna put ’em back up again, y’hear?” We promised faithfully that we would take care of everything, and spent some part of each day on every vacations, whether visiting her home in one-stoplight-Patterson, or she visiting our more metropolitan corner of West Coast suburbia, carefully taking out our mother’s mother’s curlers, brushing her black-brown hair into soft curls, and carefully rerolling it on our return from wherever the day had taken us. No one in our experience went out in public wearing rollers, and we didn’t know what to think of her, the sheer scarf she wore no cover to the shame. What was Madea saving up her “good hair” for, if not to be seen in public? We weren’t old enough to understand her timeline, and the years where women took out their rollers and put on a pleated dress at 5pm – when the patriarch’s work day was done, and theirs was merely continuing. We just thought she had a lot of outfits, so she liked to change in the afternoon. If we’d had as many nice shoes and dresses – and those hats she wore to church, and those gloves – we would have changed clothes, too. Wouldn’t you?
Madea – [ˈmədēˈä] – ma’deah, my dear. You smiled so often at your guileless granddaughters. I wonder what else of your many faces we failed to see.
that is what this is
she, the angel of the house
curls up in limbo
rolling out the shopping cart
stalks through earthbound paradise
(The B&W curlers photograph is from the book “Growing Up Female: A Personal Photo-Journal”, published in 1974 by American photographer Abigail Heyman. Click to embiggen.)
A collection of nostalgia fills the words, My Country, ‘Tis of Thee. Despite a tune shared with the British anthem, the song resonates, and raises longing eyes to the horizon of our imagination, in memory of a collective past most did not share. Not the land where all our fathers died. Not all descended from prideful pilgrims. Still we have craved the intimation of freedom, a definition of ‘belonging’ expanding to include us as we struggle to fit our picture into the American album. This is Nye’s shared world – not one of rejection but of acceptance, of mamool shortbread, and powdered sweetness dusting open palms.
hold a moment more
the shape of home, of ‘country’
a sapling stretching
in deep-rooted certainty
of endless ripples of rings
Last week I used the phrase “sickly uncertain” to describe the feelings of this current moment, and that resonated strongly with several others. Uncertainty is something most humans avoid and yet, so much of our lives are made up of it. We’re unsure even how to react there’s days. And yet, we are surrounded by so many people just now who seem to dwell in certainty – certain that they are right, are making the right choices, and are leading us to the best possible future for the most people. Of course our children should be raised like theirs. Of course we believe like they do. Of course this is how it should be.
If only we were certain they were right.
not faith: certainty
that DIY deity
gaslighting us all
let’s call it’s ‘discord’
since ‘diversity’ is bad:
divergent voices
bring each note to the table
each in turn, we still make song
Poetry Peeps! You’re invited to our challenge for the month of May! Here’s the scoop: We’ll be in conversation with Elizabeth Bishop’s “Letter to N.Y. in the form of a golden shovel, as created by poet Terrance Hayes. Of course, your choice of line from the many is entirely up to you. Once you’ve chosen, you have a month to craft your creation(s), then share your offering on May 30th in a post and/or on social media with the tag #PoetryPals. We hope you’ll join the conversation!
This has been a poetry-rich month already, so moving to look at something old in a new way was a pleasure. The Poetry Seven deliberately chose ekphrastic for April’s challenge, intending it to be easier for the many of us writing daily poetry. The only rule was that our poem had to be in conversation with a vintage photo – and we made no rules about what “vintage” meant, as it means something different to all of us.
I felt as if I’d cheated a bit by prepping ahead for this challenge. Part of my NPM practice has been creating weekly collages of Americana – photographs, posters, and bits of ephemera representative of America to me while writing short poems as an attempt to process our current… moment. I had access to myriad pictures this month, and enjoyed taking the time to really look at them. The photograph I chose is for this poem is from May, 1943, taken in a Harlem, NY neighborhood by the brilliant photographer Gordon Parks for the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information. The Library of Congress has myriad of Mr. Park’s FSA/OWI photographs in their Flickr collection, and I find that sifting through them is an experience like looking at old family albums. You don’t know who any of those people are, and your mother can only remember it was her mother’s second or third cousin’s auntie, and not a single name, but regardless, you retain a sense of connection. Once upon a time, these people lived lives like yours, put things out to thaw in the morning for dinner later, exclaimed over the first strawberries of the season, muttered over weeds, took out the trash, tightened their shoelaces. Once upon a time, their lives were like your life, and so on and so on it will go, until one day the vintage image in the photograph will be one of you, and your people, and your time. There is a true sense of connection in all of our stories.
I especially appreciate that Parks spend a lot of time photographing the ephemera of segregation that are recorded in a lot of other images from this time. You don’t see a focus on Whites Only signs or anything like that. Most of that he obfuscated by photographing ordinary people… living their ordinary lives. His images aren’t composed and tidy, but spur of the moment snaps that showed how people really navigated the American landscape. I really do encourage you, as you have time, to page through his collection at the Library of Congress, or the myriad other images on the Library of Congress’ Flickr collection. It’s quite a piece of history, and we need to embrace it while we have it.
I have forced my focus to be on short poems this month, though I have moved between haibun, cinquain, and tanka, unable to settle on any one form for what I want to say. As that has worked fairly well, I decided to deliberately move between forms again, allowing myself to look at different aspects of this very striking yet ordinary photograph through the lens of an elfchen, cinquain, and finally a haibun. This image is composed of myriad small things. What I love about it is that those small things shows me so much. Look at the care this woman took with her appearance – her nails are painted, though we can’t see the deep red her thumbnail and perhaps her lips sported. She’s wearing hoops, her brows are plucked and shaped, and her hair has marks of a roller set. She’s got on a snugly buttoned cardigan beneath her wool coat, and on the windowsill, the newspaper is spread. I wish I knew what was in her hand – her house keys? A spoon for her tea? A handkerchief or the puppy’s leash? Her presence in that window has the flavor of ritual. Perhaps she’s going to pop back inside in a moment to grab something to munch on while she checks out who wore what to work today, and who is being seen home from the bus stop by whom. I love how her dog is just as eagerly interested in the events outside of his house – his territory is being sniffed out, and listened to, and he’s rigid with attention. I love that we have a picture of a Black woman with a pet. Not a mop or a vacuum. Not a passel of children or a man. A pet, a manicure, and a good coat, and every appearance of self-satisfaction as she looks out of the window alone. Bully for you, girl.
Windowsill leaners
Afternoon dreamers,
Nose for the news of the day on the street.
Watching the weather
Birds of a feather
Harlem-bred harbingers gossip and greet.
Sit. Stay.
Eyes sharp, ears high
Voices rise like hot air
Scent unrolling tales like newsprint
Good boy.
Eyes
A shade
Of skeptical,
Girl’s already seen it all
before.
(The colorized image is courtesy of amateur colorist PaadonMe in March of 2015 on the Shorpy.com website.)
Though I can only see her right hand, and don’t know if her left bore a ring, I admire her classy wool coat and seeing her knitted cardigan layered beneath know that May evening wasn’t quite warm enough yet for the windows to all be thrown quite so wide. Still, she’s ready for a change, eager for it in jaunty hoops and red-varnished nails, perhaps a domestic, breathing in the evening from her very own window, an office typist or a wartime riveter returned home for the evening, spreading out the paper and checking on the neighborhood between headlines. Perhaps she has a kettle at the boil, readying a last cup of coffee before she settles in, the wind in her face, and change on the horizon.
She wasn’t lonely
With such brave companionship
And the world turning
Below, everything changing
Country unstitched and made new.
There’s more in the photo album. You’ll find Tricia’s poem here. Liz’s poem is here. Laura’s skinny poem and Sara’s tribute is here. You’ll find Mary Lee’s poem here and Michelle K’s poem is here. More peeps may join in the ekphrastic exchanges before the weekend is over, so do check back for the full round-up. Meanwhile, Poetry Friday is ably hosted today by my second cousin, Heidi in her juicy little universe, where you’ll find plenty more poetry on all subjects, plus the latest stop on the Kidlit Progressive Poem, so don’t miss it. Thanks, Heidi!
The world is filled with hard things this week – maybe harder things than you’ve expected, in this moment. But in the words of Eleanor Roosevelt, “We do not have to become heroes overnight. Just a step at a time, meeting each thing that comes up, seeing it is not as dreadful as it appeared, discovering we have the strength to stare it down.” We are leaning next to you, in our own hero-training. We share your windowsill and we’re looking out and giving a skeptical, brows raised, dispassionate stare at whatever is currently troubling you, right next to you. Whatever this moment is bringing you, you are not alone in it – remember, you are well-loved.
Have a courageous weekend.
“Should auld acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?” – lyrics recorded by Robert Burns.
“Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” – George Santayana
“I wish I were in the land of cotton, old times there are not forgotten.” – Daniel Decatur Emmett
As a fifth grader carefully shaping cursive letters for our daily penmanship exercise, I was often struck by the quotations we were copying. Like so many 80’s men, my fifth grade teacher was an eager early adopter to the computer, and had us doing simple coding the last period of the day, but first period was for penmanship and famous quotations – things he insisted would benefit us greatly in the digital age. We coped quotations from Rudyard Kipling, Robert Service, Ellen G. White, and Winston Churchhill. “Remember where you came from so you appreciate where you’re going,” he was fond of saying. The words ran over us like water, wearing grooves into our brains. Remember. Remember. Remember.
Only now as the American past faces deletions and revisions through the intense ethnocentrism of our current administration do I realize where the Santayana quote fails. Too many of us remember the past – but not everyone agrees on how far ‘past’ it should be.
rising behind you
softness from red soil, sunward
pasts wrenched from sharp bolls
the wind is moving
somehow I am standing, still
through buffet and roar
sea change comes over water
I see the cloudscape shifting.
unprecedented?
nothing’s new under the sun
we’ve been here before.
“What a time,” is what people have said to me the most. Or, some variation on, ‘these are just such crazy days,’ with a rather helpless gesticulation. We all know what we mean – the tired phrase of “unprecedented times” has simply been turned inside out and had its seams ripped so it’s bigger, and usable by more people. We are still in a trackless waste with no idea of which direction to strike out for a horizon. We are still free-falling from thousands of feet into space, spinning and disorientated with nothing to grasp for safety. The only good news, as the saying goes, is that there is no ground.
Is it possible to feel safe when we’re not in control? And… have we ever really controlled anything?
I am waiting for this thought to feel like comfort.
the upside-down flag
a visible inversion
of all normalcy
Earth’s S.O.S. colors fly:
Can we be saved from ourselves?
It’s time! The lovely progressive poem has “progressed” for twenty days, and now it’s my turn! Here’s the panoply of poets playing this year:
April 1 Linda Mitchell at A Word Edgewise
April 2 Tricia at The Miss Rumphius Effect
April 3 Robyn at Life on the Deckle Edge
April 4 Donna Smith at Mainely Write
April 5 Denise at https://mrsdkrebs.edublogs.org/
April 6 Buffy at http://www.buffysilverman.com/blog
April 7 Jone at https://www.jonerushmacculloch.com/
April 8 Janice Scully at Salt City Verse
April 9 Tabatha at https://tabathayeatts.blogspot.com/
April 10 Marcie at Marcie Flinchum Atkins
April 11 Rose at Imagine the Possibilities | Rose’s Blog
April 12 Fran Haley at Lit Bits and Pieces
April 13 Cathy Stenquist
April 14 Janet Fagel at Mainly Write
April 15 Carol Varsalona at Beyond LiteracyLink
April 16 Amy Ludwig VanDerwater at The Poem Farm
April 17 Kim Johnson at Common Threads
April 18 Margaret at Reflections on the Teche
April 19 Ramona at Pleasures from the Page
April 20 Mary Lee at A(nother) Year of Reading
April 21 Tanita at {fiction instead of lies}
April 22 *Patricia Franz
April 23 *Ruth at There’s No Such Thing as a Godforsaken Town
April 24 Linda Kulp Trout at http://lindakulptrout.blogspot.com
April 25 Heidi Mordhorst at My Juicy Little Universe
April 26 Michelle Kogan at: https://moreart4all.wordpress.com/
April 27 Linda Baie at Teacher Dance
April 28 Pamela Ross at Words in Flight
April 29 Diane Davis at Starting Again in Poetry
April 30 April Halprin Wayland at Teaching Authors
(EDITED TO ADD – tomorrow’s line will be found at Rose’s blog, and the poem will go forward from there. Please skip Patricia for now. Thank you!)
For those of you new to the process: this NPM children’s poetry celebration was originally begun by Irene Latham, and the mantle taken up by Margaret Simon, who wrangled this year’s distracted poets into a cohesive whole. Linda M. started us off with a gloriously open April window…
April thus far has been a particularly scattered month for me, but reading poetry has been particularly grounding, especially seeing this poem grow in creation. In this April garden, nothing yet has come to grief. It is full of the actions of joy. As I breathed the “gift of the lilacs,” and imagined myself painting and breathing and dabbling and gamboling, I thought about what we verb-y activities we haven’t yet done in this poem – eaten, spoken, shouted, screamed/squealed, or slept (we’re playing in this garden alone, which is its own kind of delightful). I also meditated on the scents on my back porch just now of an evening – orange blossoms from my dwarf citrus tree. It almost feels like we opened that April window into a glorious morning, and now… taking my cue from the thanks at the “day’s end,” and “long-ago springs,” as well as Cousin Mary Lee’s flowering shrubs, I decided to forget about eating (I couldn’t figure out how to fit it in 😂) and drink in a sense of peace and rest. That’s what this April garden has given to me this month. Since we’ve stayed in four lines per stanza, I’ll add an ellipse and begin a new one…and then it’s over to you, Patricia Rose!
Open an April window
let sunlight paint the air
stippling every dogwood
dappling daffodils with flair
Race to the garden
where woodpeckers drum
as hummingbirds thrum
in the blossoming Sweetgum
Sing as you set up the easels
dabble in the paints
echo the colors of lilac and phlox
commune without constraints
Breathe deeply the gifts of lilacs
rejoice in earth’s sweet offerings
feel renewed-give thanks at day’s end
remember long-ago springs
Bask in a royal spring meadow
romp like a golden-doodle pup!
startle the sleeping grasshoppers
delight in each flowering shrub…
Drinking in orange-blossom twilight
At each head-shaking headline, I wonder where these people came from.
The verb ‘graft’ is a word that means ‘corruption,’ and comes from an earlier English word for a ditch, a moat or ‘a digging.’ By 1906, in American English, it was used in the noun form and by 1915, the verb, adding weight to the already extant phrase “confidence trickster.” A grifter was a chiefly a liar, a conniver, a person involved in the graft and corruption of another, which was a low activity for lowlifes, as low as a ditch, or a moat, or a digging. We’re watching, and history is recording, how such low lives are lived, low and digging lower, together in their muck…
Grifter,
Like calls to like:
As magnets call iron
Like waste attracts flies, fools gather
To you.