Poem for the Day: November 6th, 2021

Autumn by Grace Paley

1

What is sometimes called a   
   tongue of flame
or an arm extended burning   
   is only the long
red and orange branch of   
   a green maple
in early September   reaching
   into the greenest field
out of the green woods   at the
   edge of which the birch trees   
appear a little tattered   tired
   of sustaining delicacy
all through the hot summer   re-
   minding everyone (in   
our family) of a Russian
   song   a story
by Chekhov   or my father


2

What is sometimes called a   
   tongue of flame
or an arm extended   burning
   is only the long
red and orange branch of
   a green maple
in early September   reaching   
   into the greenest field
out of the green woods   at the   
   edge of which the birch trees
appear a little tattered   tired
   of sustaining delicacy
all through the hot summer   re-
   minding everyone (in   
our family) of a Russian
   song   a story by
Chekhov or my father on
   his own lawn   standing   
beside his own wood in
   the United States of   
America   saying (in Russian)
   this birch is a lovely
tree   but among the others
   somehow superficial

© 1991 Grace Paley. “Autumn” first appeared in Long Walks and Intimate Talks by Grace Paley and Vera B. Williams, which was published in 1991 by The Feminist Press at the City University of New York. It was later included in Begin Again: The Collected Poems of Grace Paley, which was published in 1999 by The Feminist Press. You can read more about Grace Paley and her life and work here.

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Poem for the Day: November 5th, 2021

the sonnet-ballad by Gwendolyn Brooks

Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?
They took my lover's tallness off to war,
Left me lamenting. Now I cannot guess
What I can use an empty heart-cup for.
He won't be coming back here any more.
Some day the war will end, but, oh, I knew
When he went walking grandly out that door
That my sweet love would have to be untrue.
Would have to be untrue. Would have to court
Coquettish death, whose impudent and strange
Possessive arms and beauty (of a sort)
Can make a hard man hesitate—and change.
And he will be the one to stammer, "Yes."
Oh mother, mother, where is happiness?

Today’s poem is taken from “”Appendix to The Anniad: leaves from a loose-leaf war diary”, which first appeared in Annie Allen, published by Harper in 1949.

Gwendolyn Brooks (1917-2000) published more than twenty books of poetry during her lifetime, as well as works in other genres. She was the first Black woman named as consultant in poetry to the Library of Congress, a post now referred to as Poet Laureate. Among numerous awards and accolades, she was the recipient of a Pulitzer Prize, an American Academy of Arts and Letters Award, and a National Endowment for the Arts Award. You can read more about her life and work here.

Poem for the Day: November 2nd, 2021

Women by Alice Walker

They were women then 
My mama’s generation 
Husky of voice—stout of 
Step 
With fists as well as 
Hands 
How they battered down 
Doors 
And ironed 
Starched white 
Shirts 
How they led 
Armies
Headragged generals 
Across mined 
Fields 
Booby-trapped 
Ditches 
To discover books 
Desks 
A place for us 
How they knew what we 
Must know 
Without knowing a page 
Of it 
Themselves.

© Alice Walker. Alice Walker is one of the preeminent American writers of her generation. She is a novelist, short story writer, essayist, poet, and activist whose work, while critically-acclaimed and highly-lauded by members of the literary intelligentsia, far surpasses any words which mere mortals may bestow upon it. For her 1982 novel The Color Purple, Walker won the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The Steven Spielberg-directed film adaptation was nominated for 11 Academy Awards, and if you’re asking me, the fact that it didn’t win in any category is one of the biggest snubs in Oscars history.

I first read “Women” as a high school freshman, memorizing and reciting it for extra credit. Later on, it grew in significance for me when I read Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston and learned that if not for Alice Walker, Hurston’s great body of work would probably have languished in obscurity for all time. Walker’s acknowledgment of the labor of her Black women foremothers in making her own life possible is a major theme throughout her body of work, and nowhere is it clearer than in today’s poem.

Quote for the Day: November 1st, 2021

Give of yourself of both hands and overflowing heart, but give only the excess after you have lived your own life.
Maybelle Stephens Mitchell, American suffragist, activist, and mother to Pulitzer Prize-winning author Margaret Mitchell, in a letter dictated to her daughter while on her deathbed

Quote for the Day: October 30th, 2021

*Tuck Everlasting (40th Anniversary Edition)* by Natalie Babbitt and Gregory Maguire (Foreword)

Don’t be afraid of death; be afraid of an unlived life. You don’t have to live forever, you just have to live.
Natalie Babbitt, Tuck Everlasting

Poem for the Day: October 26th, 2021

Trees by Joyce Kilmer

I think that I shall never see
A poem lovely as a tree.

A tree whose hungry mouth is prest
Against the earth’s sweet flowing breast;

A tree that looks at God all day,
And lifts her leafy arms to pray;

A tree that may in Summer wear
A nest of robins in her hair;

Upon whose bosom snow has lain;
Who intimately lives with rain.

Poems are made by fools like me,
But only God can make a tree.

Today’s poem first appeared in the August 1913 issue of Poetry. It was later collected in Kilmer’s 1914 collection entitled Trees and Other Poems, which is available to purchase wherever books are sold. A free public domain version of the text can be accessed and disseminated without limitations at Project Gutenberg.

100 Days and Counting

I’ve said this before, but I truly can’t remember what my life was like before I started The Voracious Bibliophile. Today made the 100th day in a row that I’ve posted at least one new piece of content to my blog. My intention was to start a blog but it quickly turned into a brand. I’d like to give a huge thank you to everyone who has read this blog and amplified its reach. You have my love and appreciation forever.

30 and the Beginning of a New Era

Yes, I’ve already started making edits. Don’t judge me.

We have waited so very long for new material from Adele that most of us, myself included, had just resigned ourselves to waiting indefinitely. I’m happy to say that our stint in purgatory is over.

Are we ever as emotionally raw as we are during those early teen years? I can’t imagine we are because otherwise our hearts would eventually explode out of our chests.

Yesterday Adele dropped “Easy On Me”, the lead single from her forthcoming senior album, 30. 30 is due to be released on November 19th and I’m holding my breath just like the rest of the world. Adele occupies a special place in my heart. When 21 first came out I was just shy of 15. I was figuring out who I was and my place in the world. My emotions were everywhere and every small tragedy felt like the onset of Armageddon. Are we ever as emotionally raw as we are during those early teen years? I can’t imagine we are because otherwise our hearts would eventually explode out of our chests.

On a school trip to a bigger city north of where I live, I bought 21 in a Hot Topic. Impatient and still wholly unmedicated, I opened up the packaging and made the bus driver play the CD on the way home. I honestly can’t remember my first reaction to hearing those songs for the first time but I distinctly remember uploading that CD to my iTunes account and adding the album to my 2nd-generation iPod Nano, which I still have by the way.

You could map my entire topography of feelings from the years 2011-2013 on the track listing to that record and I am so grateful to Adele for being there for me while I was trying to figure everything out.

21 became the soundtrack to my life, narrating every facet of my existence. You could map my entire topography of feelings from the years 2011-2013 on the track listing to that record and I am so grateful to Adele for being there for me while I was trying to figure everything out.

If I could tell him just one thing, it’d be this: Go easy on yourself, kid. What you’re feeling now is valid but the pain won’t last forever. Believe in yourself and everything else will fall into place. I’m rooting for you.

I suppose 30 will be the same thing for me. Like Adele, I’m in a much different place than I was a decade ago. I’ve gained and lost friends. I’d like to think that tender and fragile young man who performed impromptu concerts in the living room at fifteen is proud of the person he became. I think he would be. I suppose he is. If I could tell him just one thing, it’d be this: Go easy on yourself, kid. What you’re feeling now is valid but the pain won’t last forever. Believe in yourself and everything else will fall into place. I’m rooting for you.

Poem for the Day: October 15th, 2021

Notes from the Camoufleurs by Karen Skolfield

The light in Afghanistan
is not the light in Vietnam.
If  vegetation, describe the leaf.

If  rock, its striation. If city, its doorways
and lintels, its hosting of guests.
Its gestures of welcome and warning.

Describe the wattage of searchlights,
the color of streetlamps, the wakefulness
of men. Describe the cigarette’s blooded eye,

a crimp of smoke. Describe evening’s
lift of heat, the riming of sweat.
If olive trees, describe the olives.

How a fig feels in the hand.
Of the women to be outfitted calculate
their curvatures and needs, if they require

more or fewer pockets for pens.
Determine torso length, musculature,
what weapons may be carried; where

the ammo belt sits, if more men
dress right or left, if concertina wire
bares its teeth every three inches or four.

Study how nature tucks itself into grasses,
study the striping of zebras, the panther’s
darkness, a savannah and the jackal

folded within; how a seal’s belly blends
with the sky when viewed from below.
A ptarmigan feathering into snow.

Describe the mission: peacekeeping
or suppression. Shield or storm.
Consider that a pattern may dazzle

or disrupt. Describe the sight lines:
heat-seeking technology versus scopes.
Scopes versus the sharp-eyed.

When a friend is not always a friend.
When a back might be turned. Consider,
at times, how the jaguar wants to be seen.

Quote for the Day: October 12th, 2021

*Lie With Me: A Novel* by Philippe Besson and Molly Ringwald (Translator)

Later I will write about this longing, the intolerable deprivation of the other. I will write about the sadness that eats away at you, making you crazy. It will become the template for my books, in spite of myself. I wonder sometimes if I have ever written of anything else. It’s as if I never recovered from it: the inaccessible other, occupying all my thoughts.
Philippe Besson and Molly Ringwald (Translator), Lie With Me: A Novel

There’s nothing in the entire world more painful than unrequited love, or love given then taken inexplicably away. It’s maddening, truly. You never forget it, and for the rest of your life the hundred thousand scenarios called forth from the interrogative haunt you like a bad dream you see every time you think of the one you lost.

The only real cure for this kind of heartache is love, and it needn’t necessarily come from a romantic relationship. It turns out you can give yourself the love you deserve. You just have to be willing to put it in the work.

Tag: Pop Culture