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Morning Open Thread: We Will Not Have Laughter Stolen from Our Bodies [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-02-03
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“If you are neutral in situations of oppression,
you have chosen the side of the oppressor.”
– Archbishop Desmond Tutu,
1984 Nobel Peace Prize Winner
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“The only valid censorship of ideas
is the right of people not to listen.”
– Tom Smothers, American comedian,
CBS canceled The Smothers Brothers Show
because they would not bow to censorship
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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.
Morning Open Thread is looking for
contributors — either occasional,
or weekly. If interested, please
contact officebss or Ozarkblue
for more information.
__________________________________________
So grab your cuppa, and join in.
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13 poets with ties to America,
born in the month of
Washington’s and Lincoln’s
birthdays, writing about
the personal, the past,
and the ever present
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WARNING: Two poems this week,
The Ritual and A Woman Will Do That,
are about sexual abuse and the
oppression of women. The imagery
is powerful and distressing.
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February 2
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1931 – Judith Viorst was born in Newark, NJ; American author of Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day, which has sold some four million copies; the Lulu books, and Necessary Losses. She is also notable for her series of poetry books related to aging which began with When Did I Stop Being 20 and Other Injustices. Her most recent books of poetry include What Are You Glad About?; What Are You Mad About?; and Nearing Ninety, and Other Comedies of Late Life.
My Cat
by Judith Viorst
My cat isn’t stuck up,
Even though
He’s the handsomest cat in
the world,
And smart,
And brave,
And climbs the highest trees.
My cat will sit on your lap and
let you pet him.
He won’t mind.
He thinks human beings are
Almost as good
As he is.
“My Cat” from If I Were in Charge of the World and Other Worries: Poems for Children and Their Parents, © 1984 by Judith Viorst – Atheneum Books for Young Readers
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1963 – A. V. Christie born Ann Victoria Christie in Redwood City, CA. American poet who lived as a child in the San Francisco Bay area, Montana, and British Columbia. She graduated from Vassar College, then earned an MFA from the University of Maryland, and became a writer-in-residence at several colleges and universities in Pennsylvania and Maryland. Her first poetry collection, Nine Skies, won the 1996 National Poetry Series prize. Her other poetry books include: The Housing; The Wonders; and And I Began to Entertain Doubts. Christie died at age 53 of breast cancer in April 2016.
And I Thought of Glass Flowers
by A. V. Christie
Some say superior people disdain the glass flowers at Harvard,
and so I sought the flowers out.
Arrayed they were, in low light, in glass cases.
I cried unexpectedly at their glass roots, cried
at the beauty of the task:
transverse section, frond, pod, stamen, thousands
of botanical specimens made to hold still.
And I felt there was, too, something unlawful about it.
Where there was first an iris, an iris to the touch,
there was now a glass iris—.
Now loss. Now triumph.
And I saw that
laid open, every song is a love song.
“And I Thought of Glass Flowers” from More Here Than Light: New & Selected Poems, © 2019 by the Estate of A.V. Christie – Ashland Poetry Press
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February 3
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1949 – Frannie Lindsay born in Belmont, Massachusetts; American poet, and a classical pianist whose mother was a concert violinist, and anthologist. Lindsay earned a BA from Russell Sage College and her MFA from the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. She has taught at Salisbury University in Maryland. Her poetry collections include: If Mercy; Where She Always Was, winner of the 2004 May Swenson Poetry Award; Lamb; Our Vanishing, which won the 2012 Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award; and The Snow’s Wife. She lives in her hometown with her retired grayhounds.
The Thrift Shop Dresses
by Frannie Lindsay
I slid the white louvers shut so I could stand in your closet
a little while among the throng of flowered dresses
you hadn’t worn in years, and touch the creases
on each of their sleeves that smelled of forgiveness
and even though you would still be alive a few more days
I knew they were ready to let themselves be
packed into liquor store boxes simply
because you had asked that of them,
and dropped at the door of the Salvation Army
without having noticed me
wrapping my arms around so many at once
that one slipped a big padded shoulder off of its hanger
as if to return the embrace.
“The Thrift Shop Dresses” from Mayweed, © 2010 by Frannie Lindsay – The Word Works
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1965 – Dana Levin was born in Los Angeles with Rh disease, but grew up in the Mohave Desert; American poet and writer-in-residence at Maryville University in St. Louis. She earned a BA from Pitzer College and an MA from New York University. Her first book, In the Surgical Theatre, was selected for the Honickman First Book Prize from American Poetry Review. Her other collections are: Wedding Day; Sky Burial; Banana Palace; and Now You Know Where You Are, which includes poems she wrote to cope during Trump’s first term in the White House (“in sleep, I’ve been arguing with fellow travelers about conspiracy versus incompetence”).
My Sentence
by Dana Levin
—spring wind with its
train of spoons,
kidney-bean shaped
pools, Floridian
humus, cicadas with their
electric appliance hum, cricket
pulse of dusk under
the pixilate gold of the trees, fall’s
finish, snow’s white
afterlife, death’s breath
finishing the monologue Phenomena, The Most Beautiful Girl
you carved the word because you craved the world—
“My Sentence” © 2010 by Dana Levin, appeared in Poetry magazine’s September 2012 issue
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1992 – Olivia Gatwood was born in Albuquerque, New Mexico; American poet, writer, activist, and educator. She spent three years in Port of Spain, Trinidad and Tobago, where she began writing poetry at age 11 at the suggestion of a librarian. As a high school student, she was involved with women workers in a case against a local bakery for sexual harassment reported to the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission, in which they won a settlement of over $10,000. Gatwood graduated from the Pratt Institute’s fiction program in 2015. With co-creator Megan Falley, she toured the U.S. with their interactive poetry show called Speak Like a Girl. Gatwood has been a finalist at the National Poetry Slam. Her two poetry collections are New American Best Friend and Life of the Party. Her first novel, Whoever Your Are, Honey was published in 2024.
The Ritual
by Olivia Gatwood
you agree to do it if he lets you lie on your side.
you tell him it hurts less this way.
you tell him you will close your eyes.
you tell him it feels nice. like spooning.
you place your hand on the wall in front of you. when he pushes,
your hand against the wall acts as a cushion for your face.
you have grown accustomed to discovering all of the ways
you can make the pain intangible. unrecognizable.
for instance, preventing a nosebleed.
and so, you are between him and your hand, against the wall
window-shopping for the next room, the front door,
outside, where it is lunchtime and your father is repairing
something
on the car you ruined. the boy goes fast and apologizes.
you do not tell him everything you’ve learned.
that this, your body, a small knot and his, in combat, is what you know.
he pulls your hair back from your face
says thank you, i needed that. i’m hungry, let’s eat.
“The Ritual,” © 2017 by Oliva Gatwood, appeared on May 30, 2017, at the online magazine NAILED
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February 4
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1876 – Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn born as Sarah Norcliffe Dalton in Norfolk, Virginia; American writer, essayist, poet, social reformer, and teacher. She spent her early childhood in Wisconsin and Minnesota, but went to live with her father’s spinster sisters in Manchester, Vermont, after her mother died. In Manchester, she and Dorothy Canfield Fisher became friends and later collaborated on the novel Fellow Captains. In 1895, Sarah graduated from Burr and Burton Seminary, a co-educational boarding school, then spent a year at Radcliffe College. Cleghorn was a Quaker pacifist, became a member of the Socialist Party of America, was opposed to lynching, capital punishment, and child labor, but advocated for vegetarianism, animal rights, and prison reform. Her early poetry was published in magazines like the Atlantic Monthly and Harpers, and but her later work appeared in The Masses and social reform publications. She taught at Manumit Farm, a socialist school for the children of workers for over 20 years, retiring at age 60 because of declining health. Her best-known poem, ‘The Golf Links,” first appeared in the New York Tribune column of F.P. Adams around 1914. Her poetry collections include Portraits and Protests and Poems of Peace and Freedom. She died at age 83 in April 1959.
The Golf Links
by Sarah Norcliffe Cleghorn
The golf links lie so near the mill
That almost every day
The laboring children can look out
And see the men at play.
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1941 – Janice Mirikitani born in Stockton, California – she was interned with her parents in an Arkansas camp during WWII; American poet, author, community activist, dancer, and anthology editor. Mirikitani was founding president of the Glide Foundation, an organization she and her husband, minister and activist Cecil Williams, started to empower marginalized communities in San Francisco. They coauthored Beyond the Possible: 50 Years of Creating Radical Change in a Community Called Glide (2013). Mirikitani also served on the San Francisco Arts Commission. Among the anthologies she edited are Third World Women and Ayumi: A Japanese American Anthology. Collections of her poetry include: Awake in the River; Shedding Silence; Love Works; and Out of the Dust. In 2000, she was named as San Francisco’s 2nd Poet Laureate. She died from cancer at age 80 in July 2021.
A Woman Will Do That
by Janice Mirikitani
My grandmother washed on Sundays,
fed chickens, birthed nine children,
cooked and cleaned and grew flowers and greens
and grandchildren. She’d soothe our hurts,
massaged the knots from my grandfather’s shoulders,
because a woman will do that.
And my mother tried to break tradition
because she could sing
her voice like velvet orchids would hush crowds,
But she was silenced by war,
locked in U.S. prison camps for no other reason but race,
and she did not sing anymore.
And tho the hurt throbbed in her throat, she swallowed all of it,
never to release those bitter notes,
and a woman will do that.
My aunt trembled so hard,
she could not hold a cup…they would not speak
of the beatings, but I knew, when she cooed
to me in Japanese to study hard and escape the dogs,
“kuso” * — she called her husband
after he bloodied her face and raped her.
She marked the sofa with her pee
and sang her stories to me…
Head for the mountains my girl she sings,
grab a fistful of flowers and degrees.
Don’t let a man steal laughter outta your body.
She picked up a rifle and shot him with her trembling hands,
hit one testicle, but that was enough.
He checked himself into a mental hospital
to escape the smell of the sofa and gunpowder.
I’ll meet you where the rain smells clean
she sings, and there I will repair my face,
steady my hands and grow flowers.
And a woman will do that.
My daughter
denies she is like me,
independent — knowing the open spaces of choice.
She escapes the cycles of self abuse,
breaks the cycle of should’s and supposed to be’s,
she is breaking tradition,
because a woman will do that.
At age 23, I became pregnant, unable to care for a child,
lost in confusion and abusive delusion
illegal abortion my choiceless solution.
I still remember the rubber spoon that gags my screams,
the endless scraping. Did I bleed? Lord did I bleed.
We are taught to believe that our flesh
is a brutal cage of time; made useful for man’s needs–
that whiter is better
and anger forbidden,
and acquiescence is holy and silence is golden.
yes, we are taught that
But we, now, break tradition
of second classness and unwanted pregnancy.
We will not turn back to kitchen table abortions,
knitting needles, deadly hangers and deadlier shame.
Break tradition
because I do not want the body of my daughter nor her daughters
bound in disaffirmation.
We must be the storms to the rivers rising,
thunder’s great rumble, an arc of lightening,
a conduit of power, a bridge of arms, and multicolored hands
that join and extend over chasms of hurt
inequity, poverty and need,
femicide and sex slavery.
We will not have laughter stolen from our bodies.
Let the hands of women
birth the future with arms fully open,
choose to fulfill families with care,
and foretell a new day.
Let this language of hands, the work that they do,
shout more loudly than guns, or greed or religiosity.
Let the power of women lead, harmoniously,
Because a woman
will do that.
© 2021 by Janice Mirikitani
* “kuso” is a very rude curse word in Japanese for excrement
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February 5
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1962 – Jeremy Michael Clark was born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky; Black American poet and writer. He earned an MFA from Rutgers University, and was an editorial assistant at the Black literary journal Callaloo. His poems have appeared in Poetry magazine; Poem-a-Day, The Southern Review, and in Once Said a City: A Louisville Poets Anthology. His first collection, The Trouble with Light, was published in 2014 as part of the Miller Williams Poetry Series, and a chapbook, some blues I know by name, came out in 2017. He now lives in Brooklyn. NY.
After the Crest
by Jeremy Michael Clark
One of the spared, I’m left
to wonder: why me.
I fashion a raft from remnants
of the life I’ve lost
& drift
through its waterlogged rooms. Below
the water’s indifferent face:
cars, wardrobes, keepsakes, rocking chairs,
splintered—
a catfish swims
through a shattered window.
On the roof of their home, two girls
orphaned by flood.
I don’t know what matters now.
Huddled in the jacket my drowned
brother always wore, I lower
my cupped hand
into the water,
which seeps through my fingers
as I bring it to my lips.
“After the Crest,” © 2020 by Jeremy Michael Clark, appeared at the Wildness online poetry site in February 2020
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February 6
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1898 – Melvin B. Tolson born as Melvin Beaunorus Tolson in Moberly, Missouri; African American poet, professor, debate coach, columnist, and politician. His parents, a a Methodist minister and a seamstress, were mostly self-educated, and emphasized education for their children. Tolson graduated with honors from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1923. He married another student, Ruth Southall of Virginia, in 1922. They moved to Marshall, Texas, where he taught speech and English (1924-1947) at Wiley College, a small black school noted for its academic reputation. In 1930-1931, Tolson took a leave of absence to study for a Master’s degree at Columbia University. His thesis, “The Harlem Group of Negro Writers,” was based on his extensive interviews with members of the Harlem Renaissance, and had a profound impact on his own poetry. He was awarded his degree in 1940. At Wiley, in addition to teaching, he coached football, directed the theatre club, and started the Wiley Forensic Society, which became an award-winning debate team that was a pioneer in interracial collegiate debate. They competed in 1935 against the University of Southern California, and won. This was fictionalized in the 2007 film The Great Debaters, directed by Denzel Washington, who also starred as Tolson (the USC debate was changed to a debate with Harvard in the film). In 1947, he began teaching at Langston University in Oklahoma, and was director of the school’s Dust Bowl theatre. Also that year, he was appointed as Poet Laureate of Liberia. Tolson served as mayor of Langston, OK (1954-1960). He was appointed as Avalon Poet at Tuskegee Institute (1965-1966). Melvin Tolson died at age 68 from cancer in August 1966. His four poetry collections are: Rendezvous with America; Libretto for the Republic of Liberia; Harlem Gallery; and A Gallery of Harlem Portraits, published posthumously.
The Sea-Turtle And The Shark
by Melvin B. Tolson
Strange but true is the story
of the sea-turtle and the shark- the instinctive drive
of the weak to survive in the oceanic dark.
Driven,
riven by hunger from abyss to shoal, sometime the shark
swallows the sea-turtle whole.
The sly reptilian marine
withdraw, into the shell of his undersea craft,
his leathery head and the rapacious claws
that can rip a rhinoceros’ hide or strip a crocodile to fare-thee-well;
now inside the shark,
the sea-turtle begins the churning seesaw
of his decent into pelagic hell;
then…then with ravenous jaws that cut sheet steel scrap,
the sea-turtle gnaws…and gnaws…and gnaws…his way to freedom,
beyond the vomiting dark, beyond the stomach walls of the shark.
“The Sea-Turtle And The Shark” from Harlem Gallery and Other Poems of Melvin B. Tolson – University of Virginia Press, 1999 edition, annotated by Raymond Nelson
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February 7
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1979 – Lebogang Mashile born in Pawtucket, Rhode Island, to exiled South African parents; South African-American actress, writer, poet, and spoken word performer. In 1994, she went to South Africa after the end of apartheid, and attended the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. She, along with Myesha Jenkins and Ntsiki Mazwai, founded the poetry group Feela Sistah. As an actress, she has appeared onstage and in films like Hotel Rwanda. Her first poetry collection, In a Ribbon of Rhythm, won the 2006 Noma Award for works published in Africa. Her poetry has also appeared in two anthologies: Beyond Words: South African Poetics and New Daughters of Africa.
Love is Elastic
by Lebogang Mashile
When I am closed
Used up
You are stretched at your fullest width
Ready to give
I want to jump
Into you
And feel this life
As you do
Perhaps then
I could give as you do
Perhaps then
I could live as you do
“Love is Elastic” from In a Ribbon of Rhythm, © 2005 by Lebogang Mashile – Oshun Books
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February 8
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1911 – Elizabeth Bishop born in Worchester, Massachusetts; American poet, short story writer, and painter who was Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (1949-1950). The consultant title was later changed to U.S. Poet Laureate. She won the 1956 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, the 1970 National Book Award, and the 1976 Neustadt International Prize for Literature. Elizabeth Bishop died at age 68 of a brain aneurism in October 1979. Her poetry collections include: North & South; A Cold Spring; Geography III; and Edgar Allan Poe & The Juke-Box.
Lullaby For the Cat
by Elizabeth Bishop
Minnow, go to sleep and dream,
Close your great big eyes;
Round your bed Events prepare
The pleasantest surprise.
Darling Minnow, drop that frown,
Just cooperate,
Not a kitten shall be drowned
In the Marxist State.
Joy and Love will both be yours,
Minnow, don’t be glum.
Happy days are coming soon —
Sleep, and let them come…
“Lullaby For the Cat” from Elizabeth Bishop: The Complete Poems: 1927-1979 –Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1983 edition
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1926 – Philip Appleman was born in Kendallville, Indiana; American science scholar, a highly regarded Darwin expert, but also a biting social commentator and satiric novelist. Appleman is an outstanding poet who is by turns hilarious, insightful, and moving. His many poetry collections include Darwin’s Bestiary (1986), Let There be Light (1991), Karma, Dharma, Pudding & Pie (2009) and Perfidious Proverbs and Other Poems (2013). He has often been honored with awards, including a Pushcart Prize, the Castagnola Award, and the Morley Award from the Poetry Society of America. Appleman died at age 94 in April 2020.
The Gossamer
by Philip Appleman
Sixty miles from land the gentle trades
that silk the Yankee clippers to Cathay
sift a million gossamers, like tides
of fluff above the menace of the sea.
These tiny spiders spin their bits of webbing
and ride the air as schooners ride the ocean;
the Beagle trapped a thousand in its rigging,
small aeronauts on some elusive mission.
The Megatherium, done to extinction
by its own bigness, makes a counterpoint
to gossamers, who breathe us this small lesson:
for survival, it’s the little things that count.
“The Gossamer” Part 4 of “Darwin’s Bestiary” from New and Selected Poems, 1956-1996, © 1996 by Phillip Appleman, University of Arkansas Press
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1927 – Judson Jerome born in Tulsa, Oklahoma; American poet, author, literary critic, academic, and poetry columnist for Writer’s Digest from 1959 until shortly before his death. He taught poetry at Antioch College, where two of his students were Gregory Orr and Mark Strand (U.S. Poet Laureate 1990-1991). Jerome’s published works include: The Village: New and Selected Poems; Jonah & Job; and The Poet’s Handbook. He died of lung cancer at age 64 in August 1991.
Deer Hunt
by Judson Jerome
Because the warden is my cousin, my
mountain friends hunt in summer, when the deer
cherish each rattler-ridden spring, and I
have waited hours by a pool in fear
that manhood would require I shoot, or that
the steady drip of the hill would dull my ear
to a snake whispering near the log I sat
upon, and listened to the yelping cheer
of dogs and men resounding ridge to ridge.
I flinched at every lonely rifle crack,
my knuckles whitening where I gripped the edge
of age and clung, like retching, sinking back
then gripping once again the monstrous gun,
since I, to be a man, had taken one.
“Deer Hunt” from The Village: New and Selected Poems, © 1987 by Judson Jerome –Dolphin-Moon Press
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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