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Morning Open Thread: Voices That Sound Like Apple Trees and Grape Vines [1]

['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']

Date: 2023-08-07

“When I began to listen to poetry, it’s

when I began to listen to the stones,

and I began to listen to what the clouds

had to say, and I began to listen to other.

And I think, most importantly for all of

us, then you begin to learn to listen to

the soul, the soul of yourself in here,

which is also the soul of everyone else.”

— Joy Harjo, first Native American

U.S. Poet Laureate (2019-2022)

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Welcome to Morning Open Thread, a daily post

with a MOTley crew of hosts who choose the topic

for the day's posting. We support our community,

invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful,

respectful dialogue in an open forum. That’s a

feature, not a bug. Other than that, site rulz rule.

So grab your cuppa, and join in.

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13 poets this week:

love unrequited, life’s bruises,

trees, summer thunder, aunts,

first days, deaths and vigils,

reading, life on your own

terms, untouchable eagle,

and the enduring parent

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August 8

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1884 – Sara Teasdale American poet, born in St. Louis, Missouri into a devout family. She was in poor health as a child, and was home-schooled until she was nine. At age 23, Teasdale published her first poetry collection, Sonnets to Duse and Other Poems (1907). She traveled frequently to Chicago, and became part of Harriet Monroe’s circle (Monroe became the founding publisher of Poetry magazine in 1912, and its long-time editor). Teasdale married in 1914, and moved with her husband to New York City in 1916. In 1918, she won the Columbia University Poetry Society Prize (which became the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry) and the Poetry Society of America Prize for Love Songs, which had appeared in 1917. Between 1911 and 1930, she published six volumes of poetry, including Flame and Arrow; Dark of the Moon; and Stars To-night. Her husband’s constant travel for business led to her filing for divorce in 1929. She lived alone as a semi-invalid, until she committed suicide in January, 1933. Her final book, Strange Victory, was published posthumously.

Debt

by Sara Teasdale

What do I owe to you

Who loved me deep and long?

You never gave my spirit wings

Nor gave my heart a song.

But oh, to him I loved,

Who loved me not at all,

I owe the little open gate

That led through heaven’s wall.

“Debt” was originally published in Poetry magazine’s March 1914 issue

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1985 – Rafael Casal born, grew up in San Francisco bay area; American writer, rapper, actor, producer, director, show runner, and poet. He appeared on HBO’s Def Poetry Jam, and won the Brave New Voice Poetry Slam Festival twice.

#RIDEORDIE

by Rafael Casal

I’ll always think of you

When the goings get easy

You saw me on the nights

I stumble home

Roughed up by the world

Make me dinner from our kitchen scraps

Called me Hemingway

And looked on

Like you hadn’t noticed

The bruises this time round either

I don’t break easy anymore

I’ve made that of my goings now

I have learned to not notice a bruise

For my own good

And that, love, is your doing.

https://www.tumblr.com/rafaelcasalpoetry

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August 9

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1922 – Philip Larkin, British poet, critic, essayist, novelist, and librarian, born in Coventry, England, attended St. John’s College, Oxford, where he befriended novelist and poet Kingsley Amis and finished with First Class Honors in English. After graduating, Larkin undertook professional studies to become a librarian. He worked in libraries in Shropshire and Leicester, then at Queen’s College in Belfast, and finally as librarian at the University of Hull. Though best remembered for his poetry, it is a small part of his published work, which includes reviews of jazz music, and two novels. Larkin, a private man, declined an OBE in 1968, and also declined the post of Poet Laureate in 1984. In 1985, he was diagnosed with esophageal cancer. An attempt at surgical removal revealed the cancer had spread too far. He died in December 1985 at the age of 63.

The Trees

by Philip Larkin

The trees are coming into leaf

Like something almost being said;

The recent buds relax and spread,

Their greenness is a kind of grief.

Is it that they are born again

And we grow old? No, they die too,

Their yearly trick of looking new

Is written down in rings of grain.

Yet still the unresting castles thresh

In fullgrown thickness every May.

Last year is dead, they seem to say,

Begin afresh, afresh, afresh.

“The Trees” from Collected Poems by Philip Larkin – Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 2004 edition

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August 10

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1948 – Richard Kenney born in Glenn Falls, NY; American poet and professor of English at the University of Washington. He studied Celtic lore in Ireland, Scotland, and Wales. His first poetry collection, The Evolution of the Flightless Bird, won the 1983 Yale Series of Younger Poets Prize. His other books of poetry include Orrery; The Invention of Zero; and The One-Strand River: Poems 1994-2007.

The Storm

by Richard Kenney

I remember vividly as the droplets that began

to spit my forehead and shoulders, I stood with a broken

neck and watched the first summer thunderstorm.

Near in the valley to the west, under

the sun’s flat disc, it leaped like a hydrophobic

animal, erratic, rushing, a thick

boil in its throat, and the world in a black hood.

A curtain of wind came several hundred

yards ahead of the rain, laid down the wild lilac

trees; my slapped eardrums felt like

new skin. Cumuli like radioactive stone crushed

in and shocked the earth a half-hour, until nightfall.

The air smelled hot, a river; all through it I crouched

a glistening bat under a black umbrella.

“The Storm” from “The Hours of the Day” © 1976 by Richard Kenney, which appeared in Poetry magazine’s July 1976 issue

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1949 – Joyce Sutphen, American poet, academic, and anthologist, was raised in Saint Joseph, Minnesota. Her first book, Straight Out of View, won the 1994 Barnard New Women’s Poetry Prize. She served as the second Poet Laureate of Minnesota (2011-2021). Her many poetry collections include: Coming Back to the Body; Naming the Stars; After Words; and Modern Love & Other Myths. She has been an editor on three anthologies, most recently Boomer Girls: Poems by Women from the Baby Boom Generation, with co-editors Pamela Gemin and Paula Sergi.

The Aunts

by Joyce Sutphen

I like it when they get together

and talk in voices that sound

like apple trees and grape vines,

and some of them wear hats

and go to Arizona in the winter,

and they all like to play cards.

They will always be the ones

who say “It is time to go now,”

even as we linger at the door,

or stand by the waiting cars, they

remember someone—an uncle we

never knew—and sigh, all

of them together, like wind

in the oak trees behind the farm

where they grew up—a place

I remember—especially

the hen house and the soft

clucking that filled the sunlit yard.

“The Aunts” from First Words, © 2010 by Joyce Sutphen – Red Dragonfly Press

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1975 – Rebecca Gayle Howell, American writer, editor, poet, and translator, born in Lexington, Kentucky. Among her notable mentors are Alicia Ostriker, Nikky Finney, Wendell Berry, W.S. Merwin, and Jean Valentine. Howell’s first book Render / An Apocalypse was selected in 2013 for the Cleveland State University Poetry Center's First Book Prize. Her second book, American Purgatory, won the Sexton Prize for Poetry in 2016. She co-edited with Ashley M. Jones What Things Cost: an anthology for the people in 2023. In collaboration with al-Jubouri and Husam Qaisi, Howell has translated poetry by Iraqi writer Amal al-Jubouri, and also translated Argentinean poet-filmmaker Claudia Prado’s El interior de la Ballena (The Belly of the Whale).

Every Job Has a First Day

by Rebecca Gayle Howell

Slade was pulling minnows out of the dry river

the day we met. Puddles, more or less, was what

was left. But what could live wanted to and tried,

treading narrow circles, a glide of brittle ﬁns.

He wore those rubber boots, though the sun was

an anvil, and very little wet; he smiled, I remember

that, his nickel smile right at me, his ﬁngers

letting fall the small ﬁsh muscles into a bag ﬁlled

with yellow tap. I didn’t ask his name, or what

it was he thought he was doing, but we talked,

I listened as he taught me to relax the hand just enough.

They can smell, he said, the oils our pores release

when we tense to catch. You have to believe it,

he said. You don’t mean any harm.

“Every Job Has a First Day” © 2015 by Rebecca Gayle Howell, appeared in Poetry magazine’s June 2015 issue

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1986 – Kristiana Rae Colón born in Chicago, American poet, playwright, actor, and educator. She is a Cave Canem Fellow, creator of #BlackSexMatters and co-founder/director of the #LetUsBreathe Collective. Cólon won the 2013 Drinking Gourd Poetry Prize for her chapbook promised instruments, and her play Octagon won the 2014 National Latino Playwriting Award.

what i mean when i say vigil

by Kristiana Rae Cólon

Purge: the living

need to purge,

forge a ring of wailing,

fire a womb of grief,

fur of teddy bears to mildew

in the snow, snapbacks

on snapbacks, caps embroidered

with names of places the dead will never see.

We need this: traffic jam

altar where the boy’s body bled,

to shiver here Missouri winter

& conjure his ghost rustling

the wilting balloons. To light

a votive, to clutch our plastic

candles with battery fueled flames,

gather and sing. To clean

December’s rotting leaves, October’s

molding gourds—I mean these days

we pray with our rage, with voices flayed

raw by the vortex. I mean these days

we mourn through megaphones,

yell elegies at riot shields, gouge

the eyes of body cameras with the litany

of slain names. I mean these days

the dead demand glass and gasoline,

haunt clouds of tear gas, cackle in the crack

of a baton. We cremate the QuikTrip

in loving memory. Black specters

dare the living to retreat—in memoriam

we march asphalt to ashes, badges

to dust. These days

we be mourning with our feet.

“what I mean when I say vigil” by Kristiana Rae Colón – published at cavecanempoets.org © 2023

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August 11

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1836 – Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt born on a Kentucky plantation, prolific American poet. She was 8 years old when her mother died, and her life changed drastically. Accompanied by an African-American enslaved woman, she was sent for long visits with relatives. Later, her father placed her with an aunt in New Castle, Kentucky, where Sarah attended Henry Female College, and her poetry was published in a local newspaper. By 1855, her poems appeared in the Louisville Journal and the New York Ledger. In 1861, she married John Piatt, and they moved to Washington DC, where he worked in various civil service positions. Her poetry appeared in D.C. newspapers, and in 1971, her first book, A Woman’s Poems, appeared anonymously. She contributed poems to national magazines like The Atlantic Monthly, Scribner’s Monthly, and Harper’s Magazine. She published five more poetry collections. In 1882, her husband was appointed as U.S. Consul (1882-1893) to Cork, Ireland. She was the mother of six surviving children, but one of her sons died in Ireland in a boating accident in 1884. After her husband died in 1917, she lived with her son Cecil in New Jersey until her death from pneumonia at age 83 in December 1919. Her work fell into obscurity until the mid-1990s, when it was rediscovered and reprinted.

Counsel―In the South

by Sarah Morgan Bryan Piatt

My boy, not of your will nor mine

You keep the mountain pass and wait,

Restless, for evil gold to shine

And hold you to your fate.

A stronger Hand than yours gave you

The lawless sword—you know not why.

That you must live is all too true,

And other men must die.

My boy, be brigand if you must,

But face the traveller in your track:

Stand one to one, and never thrust

The dagger in his back.

Nay, make no ambush of the dark.

Look straight into your victim’s eyes;

Then—let his free soul, like a lark,

Fly, singing, toward the skies.

My boy, if Christ must be betrayed,

And you must the betrayer be,

Oh, marked before the worlds were made!

What help is there for me?

Ah, if the prophets from their graves

Demand such blood of you as this,

Take Him, I say, with swords and staves,

But—never with a kiss!

“Counsel―In the South” from Words for the Hour: A New Anthology of American Civil War Poetry, edited by Faith Barrett and Cristanne Miller – University of Massachusetts Press – 2005 edition

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1897 – Louise Bogan, notable American poet and critic, born in Livermore Falls, Maine, the daughter of a millworker and unhappy mother. A benefactor helped her to attend the Girls’ Latin School in Boston. Bogan and her husband lived in the Panama Canal Zone for a time, but separated in 1919. She lived in Vienna (1920-1923), before moving to New York, where she had jobs in a bookstore, and worked for anthropologist Margaret Mead. From 1931 until she retired just before her death in 1970, she was the poetry reviewer for The New Yorker magazine. She published her first volume of poetry, Body of This Death, in 1923. Her other collections include Dark Summer; Sleeping Fury; Poems and New Poems. Her last collection was The Blue Estuaries: Poems, 1923-1968.

Epitaph for a Romantic Woman

by Louise Bogan

She has attained the permanence

She dreamed of, where old stones lie sunning.

Untended stalks blow over her

Even and swift, like young men running.

Always in the heart she loved

Others had lived,—she heard their laughter.

She lies where none has lain before,

Where certainly none will follow after.

“Epitaph for a Romantic Woman” from Body of This Death: Poems, © 1923 by Louise Bogan – Robert M. McBride & Company

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1913 – Nathalia Crane born in Brooklyn NY; American child prodigy, poet, and novelist. The New York Sun, unaware of her age, began publishing her poems when she was just 9 years old. Her first book, The Janitor’s Boy, written when she age 10, was published two year later. When her second book of poems, Lava Lane, was published in 1925, some called it a hoax, believing it impossible that the poems were written by a 12-year-old girl. She was dubbed “The Brooklyn Bard” and became part of Louis Untermeyer’s circle of writers while still a teenager. In all, she published 11 books of poetry, and two novels, and went on to become a professor of English at San Diego State University. She died at age 85 in October 1998.

The Reading Boy

by Nathalia Crane

He is carved in alabaster; he is called the Reading Boy,

A cross-legged little pagan, pondering o’er the Siege of Troy;

He’s a miniature Adonis, with a bandeau round his head,

And he’s reading late and early when he ought to be in bed.

He cons an ancient manuscript, he scanneth as a sage,

But with all his mighty reading, never yet hath turned a page;

Never alabaster side glance at the turtle in the bowl,

Never alabaster wiggle, ’though I know he has a soul.

I have watched him late and early, just an image out of Rome,

And politely offered bookmarks to divert him from that tome;

Yea, with aggravating gestures sought to turn aside his face,

But not for pots of honey could you make him lose his place.

There he sits in sweet perfection that the chisel did unveil,

With the rapture of an angel up against a lively tale.

But I’d give an old maid’s ransom, just to see that little wretch,

Discard that Trojan magazine, and give a real good stretch.

“The Reading Boy” from The Janitor’s Boy and Other Poems, © 1924 by Nathalia Crane – Thomas Seltzer

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1962 – Laura Ann Hershey born in Colorado, American disability rights activist, feminist, poet, essayist, and journalist. Spinal muscular atrophy confined her to a wheelchair, but she never let that slow her down. She earned a BA in history at Colorado College — the school had to move some of her classes from non-accessible buildings to accommodate her. She served on Denver’s Commission for People with Disabilities, wrote a column for the Denver Post, led workshops, and campaigned for social justice as well as disability rights. She attended international UN conferences on women’s rights, and wrote the book Survival Strategies for Going Abroad: A Guide for People with Disabilities. She died in November 2010 at age 48. The Laura Hershey Memorial Disability Benefits Support Program was created in 2011 by the Colorado State Legislature to "provide education, direct assistance and advocacy for people with disabilities eligible for Social Security Disability Insurance, Supplemental Security Income and Long-Term Medicaid."

Special Vans

by Laura Hershey

The city's renting special vans,

the daily paper reads,

The cops are getting ready,

for special people with special needs.

The mayor's special crip advisor

has given special training

in moving all our special chairs

when arresting and detaining.

They've set up special jail cells

in a building on the pier.

They've brought in special bathrooms

and nurses—never fear.

The cops are weary of our bodies

they treat us in a special way,

special smiles, if you're lucky

special brutality when you're in the way.

Bush's campaign office gives us

all the special treatment we can take;

locked doors and angry words,

while Clinton's office gives us cake.

The ones who run the nursing homes

think they're doing noble deeds—

locking up our friends in cages

special people with special needs.

They put up special barricades,

to try to keep us out,

still we're in their face,

still we chant and shout.

What's so special really

about needing your own home?

If I need pride and dignity,

is that special, just my own?

Are these really special needs,

unique to only me?

Or is it just the common wish,

to be alive and free?

"Special Vans" from Laura Hershey: On the Life & Work of an American Master, © 2019 by The Estate of Laura Hershey – Pleiades Press

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August 12

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1901 – Robert Francis, American poet, essayist, and columnist; born in Upland, Pennsylvania, but his family moved to Massachusetts when he was a boy, and in 1926 Francis was a resident of Amherst, Massachusetts. Though he gave lectures and workshops, he mainly earned his living through his writing. He was honored with the 1939 Shelley Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America, and the 1984 Academy of American Poets award for distinguished poetic achievement. He died in 1987, at age 85. His poetry collections include Stand with Me Here; The Orb Weaver; Like Ghosts of Eagles; and Late Fire, Late Snow.

Eagle Plain

by Robert Francis

The American eagle is not aware he is

the American eagle. He is never tempted

to look modest.

When orators advertise the American eagle’s

virtues, the American eagle is not listening.

This is his virtue.

He is somewhere else, he is mountains away

but even if he were near he would never

make an audience.

The American eagle never says he will serve

if drafted, will dutifully serve etc. He is

not at our service.

If we have honored him we have honored one

who unequivocally honors himself by

overlooking us.

He does not know the meaning of magnificent.

Perhaps we do not altogether either

who cannot touch him.

“Eagle Plain” from Collected Poems, 1936-1976, © 1993 by Robert Francis - University of Massachusetts Press

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1968 – Teresia Teaiwa born in Honolulu, Hawaii, and raised in Suva, Fiji; I-Kiribati and African-American poet, scholar noted for ground-breaking work in Pacific Studies, feminist, anti-nuclear activist, and mentor. She earned a Ph.D. in History of Consciousness at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and taught at the University of the South Pacific in Fiji, at New Zealand’s Victoria University, and lectured at the University of Hawaii. Teaiwa died of cancer at age 48 in March 2017. Sweat and Saltwater: Selected Works, was published posthumously in 2021. Her poetry collection Searching for Nei Nim’anoa appeared in 1995. She also released two CDs, I Can See Fiji and Terenesia: Amplified Poetry and Songs.

Mother

by Teresia Teaiwa

The sky that

Makes possible

A lightning storm

The earth that

Makes possible

A volcano

The ocean that

Makes possible

A tidal wave

The parent

Who endures . . . outlives . . .

The child

“Mother” from Searching for Nei Nim’anoa, © 1995 by Teresia Teaiwa – Mana Publications

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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

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