Quote for the Day: November 9th, 2021

Seek to be whole, not perfect.
Oprah Winfrey

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Poem for the Day: November 8th, 2021

Night Work by Ed Bok Lee

All summer, the city engine's low
roar capsizes our bodies into sleep,
groans,
                evacuation—
                                                   Lost to a watery
anamnesis so warm it requires a raft
thatched from death's
                                         flotsam to necklace its shore

                              I swim on, calling your name

In my dreams, something is always deserting

But tonight, no fast shadows of birds
No oceanic flowers disrobing butterflies
or bright beach of child's porridge and bones—

                                                                                 Instead, someone weaving

a net from fallen hair in and around our bed
to catch the breath, blood, and ritual
motions that oiled us
                                            as one candle in a cave

In your dreams, someone is always resisting being saved

My teeth are on fire, you say I said

Don't fly for the labyrinth, once
I thought you were admonishing me to go away
I don't remember most others, a thousand seasons
phonographed in through a wounded window

Everyone can't have a cactus

Just o.k. empty all the rice from my legs

Once I awoke screaming, paws red-hot embers
You opened my mouth and poured a night-cold river in

Once you died and my heart fished all winter

Once we were eating lunch inside a kiln

Once you thought you smelled death,
but the lavender farm was too large to shave

On the fifth straight morning I'd dreamt of water
I stared at your face, its nacreous lids, 
and I swear I could see a Glorious Ghost shifting
over your sun-warm waves

Water my birth sign, and one day my mother's death
that protect-fills my love with sadness

There, in words to my coworkers
it was still dripping, in my nods
over a galapagos of pages and forms

All love is immigrant, that autumn apparently
I mumbled

Your reply, after days: Turn off the steam in the trees

Somewhere right now, two lovers are conversing
without even knowing what their lives mean

One's heart gazelle-quick to survey a mountain his dead
              father is always vandalizing
The other frequently misplacing her hair, ears, or self-
sabotaging a crime

One usually struggling to stay alive
The other often untethering something

Or is it my mitochondria that powder-sugars the moon?
And you calcifying a promise inside to inscribe?

There is a dominion where inverses
invert until only terror, love, and imagination cling,

heavy, on human branches—enter your vista, phylum
unsequenced, dimmer deeds

Can you hear it tonight?
Wind in iron jars buried inside the living:
Grandmothers, past spouses, cable men, priests

Now! I finally manage
as our train smokes out all the rats on their bed of leaves

All night, I dive
down to the soft structures of some blue civilization's faith

In this myth of life, I keep forgetting whose ideas and
              sensations I'm supposed to be

Come morning: rain, trees, silvery
sleet
              and daily, this new fresh bounty
                                                                        we share, side by side
like angels coming home from work at a pearl factory

Quote for the Day: November 8th, 2021

The ocean does not apologize for its depth and the mountains do not seek forgiveness for the space they take and so, neither shall I.
Becca Lee

Poem for the Day: November 7th, 2021

The Nail by C.K. Williams

Some dictator or other had gone into exile, and now reports were coming about his regime,
the usual crimes, torture, false imprisonment, cruelty and corruption, but then a detail:
that the way his henchmen had disposed of enemies was by hammering nails into their skulls.
Horror, then, what mind does after horror, after that first feeling that you’ll never catch your breath,
mind imagines—how not be annihilated by it?—the preliminary tap, feels it in the tendons of the hand,
feels the way you do with your nail when you’re fixing something, making something, shelves, a bed;
the first light tap to set the slant, and then the slightly harder tap, to em-bed the tip a little more ...

No, no more: this should be happening in myth, in stone, or paint, not in reality, not here;
it should be an emblem of itself, not itself, something that would mean, not really have to happen,
something to go out, expand in implication from that unmoved mass of matter in the breast;
as in the image of an anguished face, in grief for us, not us as us, us as in a myth, a moral tale,
a way to tell the truth that grief is limitless, a way to tell us we must always understand
it’s we who do such things, we who set the slant, embed the tip, lift the sledge and drive the nail,
drive the nail which is the axis upon which turns the brutal human world upon the world.

© 1999 C.K. Williams. “The Nail” appeared as part of the Pulitzer Prize-winning collection Repair, which was published in 1999 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, LLC. It is available to purchase wherever books are sold.

Quote for the Day: November 7th, 2021

Choose, everyday to forgive yourself. You are human, flawed, and most of all worthy of love.
Alison Malee

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.

Quote for the Day: November 6th, 2021

You don’t have to move mountains. Simply fall in love with life. Be a tornado of happiness, gratitude and acceptance. You will change the world just by being a warm, kind hearted human being.
Anita Krizzan

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.

Quote for the Day: November 5th, 2021

In the end, we’ll all become stories.
Margaret Atwood

If you’ve read this blog for any length of time whatsoever then you know how much I love Margaret Atwood and her work. So, you can imagine my excitement when I saw that she was releasing a new collection of essays, Burning Questions: Essays and Occasional Pieces 2004-2021, due to be published by Doubleday in March of next year. Until then I’ll be here not-so-patiently waiting.

Poem for the Day: November 4th, 2021

A Thousand Vowels by Shuri Kido Translated from the Japanese by Tomoyuki Endo & Forrest Gander

A long slope.
The strong sun dipped, and finally sank.
No matter how long I walked, I stayed in "the middle of the road."
The name torn into pieces.
Just keeping on, climbing higher and higher,
I'd completely forgotten the name.
The west wind shifts the typhoon's course,
the world, for a few hours, is thrown into confusion.
You might name one thing after another,
but each loses its name in that same moment.
Into what we call "nature."
I stood in the middle of nature.
And something was missing, the natural was
draped in a thin shroud.
Vowels scattered,
the name went missing.
When once more the name "nature" was applied
to the desolate-as-ever landscape,
immediately, the name began to weather away.
What is still losing its name,
and what has already lost its name,
those two strands entwine
around the true name.
Those who have wings stay put,
howling out their condition over and over,
"How fragile we are!"
though no one hears them.
Thousands of ripples tell
a story of benthic anguish.
The ripples beach themselves
on the name of each anguish,
vowels scatter by the thousands
over the earth.