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Morning Open Thread: Waiting for the World to Become Good and Beautiful and Kind [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-01-27
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I've been searching for ways to heal myself,
and I've found that kindness is the best way.
– Lady Gaga
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“Shall we make a new rule of life from tonight:
always try to be a little kinder than is necessary?
– J. M. Barrie,
The Little White Bird
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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,
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contact officebss or Ozarkblue
for more information.
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So grab your cuppa, and join in.
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13 poets born twixt
January and February –
ironic, grieving, amusing,
philosophical, and wise.
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January 26
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1976 – Meghan O’Rourke born in Brooklyn New York; American nonfiction writer, journalist, poet, editor, essayist, and critic. Noted for her nonfiction book The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness and her memoir The Long Goodbye. O’Rourke has also published four collections of poetry: Halflife; Once; Sun in Days; and A World Out of Reach: Dispatches from Life Under Lockdown.
Ever
by Meghan O’Rourke
Never, never, never, never, never.
—King Lear
Even now I can’t grasp “nothing” or “never.”
They’re unholdable, unglobable, no map to nothing.
Never? Never ever again to see you?
An error, I aver. You’re never nothing,
because nothing’s not a thing.
I know death is absolute, forever,
the guillotine—gutting—never to which we never say goodbye.
But even as I think “forever” it goes “ever”
and “ever” and “ever.” Ever after.
I’m a thing that keeps on thinking. So I never see you
is not a thing or think my mouth can ever. Aver:
You’re not “nothing.” But neither are you something.
Will I ever really get never?
You’re gone. Nothing, never—ever.
“Ever” © 2015 by Meghan O'Rourke, originally published in Poem-a-Day in July 2015
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January 27
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1832 – Lewis Carroll born as Charles Lutwidge Dodgson in Daresbury, Cheshire, England; English author, poet, and mathematician. He was a scholar and teacher at Christ Church, Oxford. Carroll was also a talented amateur photographer and an avid puzzler who created the word ladder puzzle. He became a deacon of the Church of England in 1861, but never was ordained as a priest. He is best known known for Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Some of his better-known poems like Jabberwocky and The Walrus and the Carpenter originally appeared in Through the Looking-Glass and other stories, but his long poem, The Hunting of the Snark, was published on its own. A longtime sufferer from migraines, Carroll died at age 65 from pneumonia in January 1898.
The Crocodile
by Lewis Carroll
How doth the little crocodile
Improve his shining tail,
And pour the waters of the Nile
On every golden scale!
How cheerfully he seems to grin,
How neatly spreads his claws,
And welcomes little fishes in,
With gently smiling jaws!
“The Crocodile” from Jabberwocky and Other Nonsense: Collected Poems, by Lewis Carroll – Penguin Classics, 2014 edition
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1897 – Iris Tree born in London to actor/theatre manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree and Mrs. Beerbohm Tree (nee Helen Maud Holt), part of the Beerbohm/Tree family of notable eccentrics. Iris Tree was an English poet, an actress, and, true to her family, she was also a bohemian, an art model, a wit, and an adventurer. She posed nude for several notable artists, including Augustus John and Vanessa Bell, and the sculpture of her by Jacob Epstein showing her nude with bobbed hair caused a scandal. She published three collections of poetry: Poems; The Traveller and other Poems; and The Marsh Picnic. Though she primarily acted on the stage, she appeared briefly in the 1956 film of Moby Dick, and played herself in Fellini’s La Dolce Vita.
Thoughts of London
(1918)
by Iris Tree
Oh, have I bartered and forgotten thee,
Selling thy tarnished twilights for gold sun,
Relinquishing thy dreams that used to run
A ragged troop along thy streets with me?
Cast off the glitter of thy jewelry,
Thy lamp-light, starlight, colours crudely spun,
The eloquent ugliness, the roofs of dun,
The fogs that swathe in bands of mystery?
Mother of dreams and laughter and despair!
Thy joy my Heaven is, my Hell thy pain,
Thy labyrinthian streets wind everywhere,
Thy sins and passions baffle me again;
And all my hopes thy lamps that flick and glare,
And all my griefs thy beggars in the rain.
“Thoughts of London” from Poems, by Iris Tree, published in 1920 by John Lane, The Bodley Head
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January 28
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1901 – Shinkichi Takahashi born in Ikata, a small fishing village on Shikoku Island, Japan; Japanese poet who was a pioneer in the Dadaist movement in Japan, and was a master of expressing large ideas in the smallest number of words. His family was too poor to send him to school, so he taught himself to read and write. He went to Tokyo, and worked at menial jobs, but got into trouble, and was in jail when his first book, Dadaist Shinkichi’s Poetry, was published in 1923. In 1928, Zen Master Shizan Ashikaga began training him, in a strict regime that lasted 17 years. Takahashi’s Collected Poems won the 1977 Japanese Ministry of Education Prize for Art, and his collection, Triumph of the Sparrow: Zen Poems of Shinkichi Takahashi, was published in 1985, and translated into English in 2000. Takahashi died in June 1987 at age 86.
Haiku
by Shinkichi Takahashi
The wind blows hard among the pines
Toward the beginning
Of an endless past.
Listen: you’ve heard everything.
― translation of Shinkichi Takahashi’s poem is from Zen Poems of China and Japan: The Crane’s Bill, © 1973 – Grove Press
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January 29
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1895 – Muna Lee born in Raymond, Mississippi, then raised from age 7 in Hugo, Oklahoma; American lyric poet, mystery novelist, feminist, translator, and advocate for Latin American literature and Pan-Americanism. She graduated from the University of Mississippi at age 18 in 1913, and worked as a teacher. Lee was also writing poetry, which began appearing in national literary magazines. Muna Lee won Poetry magazine’s inaugural 1916 Prize for Lyric Poetry. She taught herself Spanish and got a job with the U.S. Secret Service in New York City, where she worked as a translator during WWI. Lee translated confidential letters from Spanish, Portuguese, and French. Her poetry in translation began to be published in Pan American magazines. In 1925, she published Poetry, an anthology of her translations of Latin American poets. In the 1930s, Lee did work for the National Women’s Party in Washington D.C., and co-authored 5 detective novels with Maurice Guiness, under the pen name Newton Gayle. Muna Lee was a founding member of the Inter-American Commission of Women, and also worked for the U.S. State Department, primarily on cultural exchanges with Latin America. She died at age 70 from lung cancer in April 1965.
Caribbean Marsh
by Muna Lee
Acres of mangrove, crowding the sea-streaked marsh,
Acres of mangrove, wading toward the beaches,
And here and there a milky-white bloom tossed
On fragile boughs above the flooded reaches.
Mangrove thrusts deep in salty mud,
Balances uneasily upon its three-pronged roots,
Huddles from wind in its dissonance of leaves.
Tempest and drought it has withstood,
This straggling orchard that bears no fruits,
This field where none will garner sheaves.
Sucking life up from the acrid marsh,
Drawing life down from the burning sun,
All the year offers of crude and harsh
There between sea and shore it has known.
Wave and glare, sea-urge, sea-drift,
It has been their victim, proved their power,
Persisting bleakly for one end alone—
Through an unheeded hour
Briefly, awkwardly, to lift
This frail, inconsequent flower.
“Caribbean Marsh” from Sea-Change, © 1923 by Muna Lee – The Macmillan Company
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1941 – Robin Morgan was born in Lake Worth, Florida, but grew up in New York; prolific American author, poet, journalist, anti-war and civil rights activist, radical feminist founder of Women’s International Terrorist Conspiracy from Hell, (W.I.T.C.H) and The Sisterhood Is Powerful Fund. Morgan is known for her essay “Goodbye to All That.” When she was a toddler, her mother started her as a child model, and Robin had her own radio program by age five. By age 8, she was a regular on the TV series Mama. She wanted to write so she fought her mother’s efforts to keep her working in television. At age 13, she discovered that her mother had lied about her father being killed in World War II, and had gone to Florida to give birth Robin to avoid the scandal of being an unwed mother. Morgan took courses at Columbia University while working as a secretary at Curtis Brown Literary Agency. She married poet Kenneth Pitchford in 1962, had her son Morgan in 1969 (the same year she walked off The Tonight Show when it screened footage of her as a child actor while she was speaking about the first national march against rape). She published her first poetry collection, Monster, in 1972. Her marriage ended in divorce in 1983. Morgan served as editor-in-chief of Ms. Magazine (1989-1994). Her poetry collections include: Lady of the Beasts; Depth Perception; A Hot January; and Upstairs in the Garden.
3rd Poem from
Three Definitions of Poetry
by Robin Morgan
3.
Outside it’s raining catatonics and dogmatics.
Inside, inside the room, inside the cover
of the cage, inside the cage itself, inside the head
under the hunched wing, the eyes of the poem
tick, unblinking, in sockets of oil.
When the cage cover is removed, everyone marvels at
such spontaneity of song.
“Three Definitions of Poetry” from Depth Perception: New Poems and A Masque, © 1982 by Robin Morgan – Doubleday and Company
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January 30
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1866 – Gelett Burgess born in Boston, Massachusetts, American artist, art critic, author, poet and humorist; editor of The Lark humorous magazine (1895-1897); best known for his poem “The Purple Cow.” He was a major figure in San Francisco’s literary resurgence at the turn of the 19th Century. Burgess initially went to Boston’s MIT for his education and graduated from there in 1887. Fed up with the rather conservative nature of the Massachusetts elite, he yearned for a more eclectic existence and headed for San Francisco in 1891, where he initially worked putting his artistic skills to good use as a draftsman. Shortly after that he found himself employed by Berkeley University, though the job did not last long when he was suspected of being involved in the vandalism of a water fountain and asked to resign. After founding The Lark, which attracted contributors like Carolyn Wells and Maynard Dixon, he went on to write The Goops series, books of humorous poems to teach children good manners. Burgess died at age 85 in 1951 in Carmel, CA.
On Digital Extremities
by Gelett Burgess
I’d Rather have Fingers than Toes;
I’d Rather have Ears than a Nose;
And As for my Hair,
I’m Glad it’s All There;
I’ll be Awfully Sad, when it Goes!
“On Digital Extremities” from Goops and How to Be Them by Gelett Burgess – Timeless Classics – 1968 edition
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1935 – Richard Brautigan born in Tacoma, Washington; American novelist, short story writer, and poet; best known for Trout Fishing in America. His first published book was a poetry collection, The Return of the Rivers, in 1957. His first novel was A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), followed by Trout Fishing in America in 1967. Other works include The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western; Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel; All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace; and An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey, which was published posthumously in a French translation in 1994. Revenge of the Lawn is his best-known short story collection. After years of struggling with alcoholism and depression, in 1984, Richard Brautigan, age 49, was living alone in Bolinas, California, in an old house he bought with his earnings years earlier. He died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head sometime around the middle of September, but his body was not found until several weeks later. He once wrote, “We all have a place in history. Mine is clouds.”
A Candlelion Poem
– for Michael (McClure)
by Richard Brautigan
Turn a candle inside out
and you have the smallest portion of a lion
standing there at the edge of the shadows.
“A Candlelion Poem” from The Pill Versus the Springhill Mine Disaster, © 1989 by Richard Brautigan, Houghton Mifflin
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January 31
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1950 – Janice Silverman Rebibo was born in Boston, Massachusetts; Israeli poet, short story writer, and translator who began writing in Hebrew while studying the language in college, and later immigrated to Israel. Her award-winning poetry collections include: Zara Betzion (A Stranger in Zion) and her English-language book How Many Edens. She died of cancer at age 65 in March 2015.
Sparrows or Starlings (A Love Poem)
by Janice Silverman Rebibo
House invaders, they will take you over,
inhabit your spaces like a lover in your pores
even the day after the doormen whistled him down
a taxi to the nearby airport. No huge public embrace
before you watched the taxi head for the corner
and you headed for the crosswalk, for the station
right across the street. Charles Street. He had
nuzzled you on the sidewalk and was nervous
that the cabs were not responding to the
whistles, mechanical and strictly human lips
and fingers. And he is in your fingers now, and
hands, while you watch, chin in hand, the sparrows
or starlings through the window to the right of your cherry table
as they flit from the rain soaked wall down to the emerald grass.
“Sparrows or Starlings” from My Beautiful Ballooning Heart, © 2013 by Janice Rebibo – Coolidge Corner Publishing
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1952 – Di Brandt (née Janzen) was born in Winkler, Manitoba, Canada, but grew up in a nearby Mennonite farming village; Canadian poet, scholar, essayist, and literary critic. Her first poetry collection, questions i asked my mother, was published in 1987. Brandt has degrees from the University of Manitoba and University of Toronto, and has taught Canadian literature and creative writing. She was poetry editor at Prairie Fire Magazine and Contemporary Verse 2 during the 1980s and 1990s. She also served as Manitoba & Prairie Rep at the League of Canadian Poets National Council and the Writers’ Union of Canada’s National Council. She was the first person to be appointed as Poet Laureate of Winnipeg (2018-2019). Brandt has collaborated with other Canadian artists on poetry with music recordings and a chamber opera. Her other poetry collections include: Agnes in the sky; Now You Care; Walking to Mojacar; and The Sweetest Dance on Earth.
Early Spring Thaw
by Di Brandt
Today I am made of water, touch my shoulder and I leak,
my belly a lake, my bones an open river flowing toward
sea, all this salt in me, who would have thought,
dissolving into flesh, tears, an open wound, rubbed raw.
The wind of February sweeps the air clean, the sky with
its fugitive clouds, its murky definitions, vaguely white,
soon the clear pale lemon yellow fading into dark rose
and then blue black, the night, with its cold sparkle, its
spectacular consolation.
And me in early spring thaw, gasping for new air,
imagine, in all this snow, melting.
“Early Spring Thaw” © 2002 by Di Brandt, appeared in Rattle #18, Winter 2002
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February 1
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1902 – Langston Hughes was born in Joplin, Missouri, on the 37th anniversary of the day Abraham Lincoln signed the 13th Amendment: “Neither slavery nor involuntary servitude, except as a punishment for crime whereof the party shall have been duly convicted, shall exist within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction.” Hughes became an American poet, novelist, short story writer, non-fiction writer, and playwright. In 1924, he was working in Washington D.C. where he met and impressed the poet Vachel Lindsay, who was popular for his dramatic readings of his own work, and included three Hughes poems at his next reading, rather pompously declaring he had “discovered an American Negro genius.” Hughes’s first book of poetry, The Weary Blues, was published in 1926. In the 1930s, his first novel, Not Without Laughter, won the Harmon gold medal for literature. Hughes spent most of the rest of his life in Harlem, becoming a major figure of the Harlem Renaissance. Though most of the honors and awards he received during his life were either for his novels or for his body of work, he is best remembered now for his poetry. He published 17 collections of his poems during his life, and his Collected Poems were published posthumously.
Tired
by Langston Hughes
I am so tired of waiting,
Aren't you,
For the world to become good
And beautiful and kind?
Let us take a knife
And cut the world in two-
And see what worms are eating
At the rind.
“Tired” from The Collected Poems of Langston Hughes, © 1994 by the Estate of Langston Hughes – Alfred A. Knopf/Vintage
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1918 – Muriel Spark born in Edinburgh, Scotland; Scottish novelist, playwright, poet, and essayist; best known for her novel, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, which was adapted for the stage, and then made into a film in 1969, starring Maggie Smith, who won the Best Actress Oscar for her performance of the title role. Spark’s novel Memento Mori was adapted for BBC television in 1992, and also featured a distinguished cast. Among her poetry collections are: The Fanfarlo and Other Verse; Going Up to Sotheby’s; and All the Poems. She died at age 88 in April 2006 in Italy and is buried there.
The Messengers
by Muriel Spark
Arriving late sometimes and never
Quite expected, still they come,
Bringing a folded meaning home
Between the lines, inside the letter.
As a scarecrow in the harvest
Turns an innocent field to grief
These tattered hints are dumb and deaf,
But bring the matter to a crisis.
They are the messengers who run
Onstage to us who try to doubt them,
Fetching our fate to hand; without them
What would Sophocles have done?
“The Messengers” from All the Poems of Muriel Spark, © 2004 by Muriel Spark – New Directions
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1927 – Galway Kinnell was born in Rhode Island; American poet whose 1982 collection, Selected Poems, won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry and split the 1983 National Book Award for Poetry with Charles Wright’s Country Music: Selected Early Poems. Kinnell graduated from Princeton University in 1948 alongside friend and fellow poet W. S. Merwin, then earned his Master of Arts degree from the University of Rochester. Kinnell traveled extensively in Europe and the Middle East, and went to Paris on a Fulbright Fellowship. Upon returning to the U.S., he joined CORE (Congress of Racial Equality) and worked on voter registration and workplace integration in Hammond, Louisiana. This effort got him arrested. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse to make tax payments as a protest against the Vietnam War. His experiences inspired his book-long poem The Book of Nightmares. He was poet laureate of the state of Vermont (1989-1993), and a Chancellor of the American Academy of Poets. He died of leukemia at age 87 in October 2014.
After Making Love We Hear Footsteps
by Galway Kinnell
For I can snore like a bullhorn
or play loud music
or sit up talking with any reasonably sober Irishman
and Fergus will only sink deeper
into his dreamless sleep, which goes by all in one flash,
but let there be that heavy breathing
or a stifled come-cry anywhere in the house
and he will wrench himself awake
and make for it on the run—as now, we lie together,
after making love, quiet, touching along the length of our bodies,
familiar touch of the long-married,
and he appears—in his baseball pajamas, it happens,
the neck opening so small he has to screw them on—
and flops down between us and hugs us and snuggles himself to sleep,
his face gleaming with satisfaction at being this very child.
In the half darkness we look at each other
and smile
and touch arms across this little, startlingly muscled body—
this one whom habit of memory propels to the ground of his making,
sleeper only the mortal sounds can sing awake,
this blessing love gives again into our arms.
“After Making Love We Hear Footsteps” from Three Books – © 2002 by Galway Kinnell – Houghton Mifflin Company
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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[END]
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