(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .
Morning Open Thread: When Did I Begin Forgetting I Can Fly? [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-10
______________________________________________________
“The true republic:
men, their rights, and nothing more;
women, their rights, and nothing less.”
— Susan B. Anthony, a leader of the fight for
Woman Suffrage from 1852 until her death in 1906
______________________________________________________
"Women belong in all places where decisions are being
made. It shouldn't be that women are the exception."
— Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Associate Justice
of the U.S. Supreme Court (1993-2020)
______________________________________________________
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.
__________________________________________
March is Women’s History Month,
so this week, I am showcasing a
diverse group of women poets
__________________________________________
March 9
__________________________________
1892 – Vita Sackville-West born in Knole Park, Kent, England; English novelist, poet, journalist, diarist, and garden designer. Portrait of a Marriage, a memoir of her love life, including her marriage to Harold Nicolson and her relationship with Violet Keppel, wasn’t published until 1973, years after her death from cancer at age 70 in June 1962. She published more than a dozen collections of poetry and 13 novels during her life, and wrote a column for The Observer newspaper (1946-1961). Her novel All Passions Spent was a best-seller in 1931, and is probably her best-known work today.
The Greater Cats
by Vita Sackville-West
The greater cats with golden eyes
Stare out between the bars.
Deserts are there, and the different skies,
And night with different stars.
They prowl the aromatic hill,
And mate as fiercely as they kill,
To roam, to live, to drink their fill;
But this beyond their wit know I:
Man loves a little, and for long shall die.
Their kind across the desert range
Where tulips spring from stones,
Not knowing they will suffer change
Or vultures pick their bones.
Their strength's eternal in their sight,
They overtake the deer in flight,
And in their arrogance they smite;
But I am sage, if they are strong:
Man's love is transient as his death is long.
Yet oh what powers to deceive!
My wit is turned to faith,
And at this moment I believe
In love, and scout at death.
I came from nowhere, and shall be
Strong, steadfast, swift, eternally:
I am a lion, a stone, a tree,
And as the Polar star in me
Is fixed my constant heart on thee.
Ah, may I stay forever blind
With lions, tigers, leopards, and their kind.
“The Greater Cats” from Collected Poems, © 1933 by Vita Sackville-West – Hogarth Press
__________________________________________
1947 – Keri Hulme born in Christchurch, New Zealand; New Zealand novelist, poet, and short story writer who also used the pen name Kai Tainui. The eldest of six children, her family heritage included “Māori, Orkney Islanders, Lancashire folk, Faroese and Norwegian migrants.” Hulme was the first New Zealander to win the Booker Prize, in 1985 for The Bone People. She was also the first author to win the Booker for a debut novel. Her father died when she was 11 years old, and she began writing poetry and short stories after that. The family spent their holidays with her mother’s parents at Moeraki, a fishing village on New Zealand’s South Island, which she called her turangawaewae-ngakau (standing-place of my heart). After high school, she worked as a tobacco picker, spent four terms at the University of Canterbury in Chirstchurch, but left because she felt out of place, and returned to the tobacco fields. She kept writing, taking nine months off to write full-time in 1972, then worked many jobs, from a fish-and-chips cook, a winder at a woollen mill, mail deliverer, pharmacist’s assistant, proofreader, newspaper journalist, to an assistant director on documentary and children’s TV shows. Her writing was published in journals and magazines. In 1978, she was a writer-in-residence at the University of Otago, then a visiting poet at Hawaii’s East-West Center in 1979. Hulme submitted her manuscript of The Bone People to publishers for 12 years before it was accepted by the Spiral Collective, a New Zealand feminist literary and arts collective. It won the 1984 New Zealand Book Award for Fiction before being honored with the Booker Prize. Her poetry collections include The silences between (Moeraki Conversations); Lost Possessions; Strands; and Stonefish, a mix of poetry and short stories. After suffering from dementia, she died in a care home at age 74 in December 2021.
Trust
by Keri Hulme
Here,
where we live
by the rubbling sea
we know our tides and
why we should be
constantly crunched
crouched and sluiced
and rearranged and
hoping – o hoping
for a new moon
to be free
“Trust” was used as a poster by the Phantom Billsticker series for National Poetry Day, © 2012 by Keri Hulme
__________________________________________
March 10
__________________________________
1842 – Ina Donna Coolbrith born in Nauvoo, Illinois; American poet, author, and city librarian of Oakland (1874-1892); California’s inaugural Poet Laureate (1915-1928), the first state-appointed poet laureate. Her poetry collections include A Perfect Day and Wings of Sunset. Coolbrith’s health was in decline before the 1906 earthquake. She escaped from her house carrying her cat, but the fire burned it to the ground. She lost over 3,000 books, many were first editions signed by their authors, and the manuscript of her history of the California literary scene, which she never completed. She lived in temporary quarters until her friends raised the money to build a new house for her. Ina Coolbrith died in 1928 at age 86.
The Mariposa Lily
by Ina Donna Coolbrith
Insect or blossom? Fragile, fairy thing,
Poised upon slender tip, and quivering
To flight! a flower of the fields of air;
A jeweled moth; a butterfly, with rare
And tender tints upon his downy wings,
A moment resting in our happy sight;
A flower held captive by a thread so slight
Its petal-wings of broidered gossamer
Are light as the wind, with every wind astir,
Wafting sweet odor, faint and exquisite.
O dainty nursling of the field and sky.
What fairer thing looks up to heaven's blue
And drinks the noontide sun, the dawning's dew?
Thou winged bloom! thou blossom-butterfly!
“The Mariposa Lily” from Songs from the Golden Gate, by Ina Donna Coolbrith – published by Houghton Mifflin in 1907
__________________________________________
1900 – Margaret Fishback born in Washington DC; American poet, prose author, and advertising copywriter, rumored to be the highest-paid woman copywriter in the world in the 1930s. After earning a degree from Goucher College, she joined Macy’s as a divisional advertising copywriter – later promoted to chief copywriter. In 1936, she married Alberto Gatone Antolini, chief rug buyer for Macy’s. She left Macy’s in 1951 to work for ad agencies, and contributed to ad campaigns for Arrow Shirts, Borden’s, Chef Boy-Ar-Dee, Clairol, DuPont, Hanes Hosiery, Pabst Blue Ribbon, Seagram’s, Simmons Beautyrest, Wrigley, and many others before her 1963 retirement. Her poems and short stories appeared in magazines and newspapers, including The New Yorker and The New York Times. Five collections of her poems originally printed in magazines and papers were published, including: I Feel Better Now; I Take It Back; One to a Customer; and Time for a Quick One. Margaret Fishback died at age 85 in September 1985.
Taking Everything into Consideration
by Margaret Fishback
The problems of a working girl
Are more than meet the naked eye;
And life becomes a dizzy whirl
At times—and dizzy, too, am I.
I have not found the answer yet,
And this is just a working plan:
I shove along and do not fret,
Nor yet depend on any man.
To be a mother and a wife,
I'm often urged by all my kith
And kin—but as for husbands, life
Is easier without than with.
"Taking Everything into Consideration" from I Feel Better Now. © 1932 by Margaret Fishback – E. P. Dutton
__________________________________________
1979 – Ama Codjoe born “with roots in Memphis and Accra,” raised in Youngstown, Ohio; African American poet, social justice activist, and dancer. She received the Rona Jaffe Graduate Fellowship from New York University, and earned an MFA in Dance Performance from Ohio State University. Codjoe was a Cave Canem fellow, a Black Bottom Tuesday Poet, and Associate Director of Professional Development for the DreamYard Art Center. Her poetry collection, Blood of the Air, won the 2019 Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, and Bluest Nude: Poems won the 2023 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.
On Seeing and Being Seen
by Ama Codjoe
I don’t like being photographed. When we kissed
at a wedding, the night grew long and luminous.
You unhooked my bra. A photograph
passes for proof, Sontag says, that a given thing
has happened. Or you leaned back to watch
as I eased the straps from my shoulders.
Hooks and eyes. Right now, my breasts
are too tender to be touched. Their breasts
were horrifying, Elizabeth Bishop writes. Tell her
someone wanted to touch them. I am touching
the photograph of my last seduction. It is as slick
as a magazine page, as dark as a street
darkened by rain. When I want to remember
something beautiful, instead of taking
a photograph, I close my eyes.
I watched as you covered my nipple
with your mouth. Desire made you
beautiful. I closed my eyes.
Tonight, I am alone in my tenderness.
There is nothing in my hand except a certain
grasping. In my mind’s eye, I am
stroking your hair with damp fingertips. This is exactly
how it happened. On the lit-up hotel bed,
I remember thinking, My body is a lens
I can look through with my mind.
"On Seeing and Being Seen " from Bluest Nude, © 2022 by Ama Codjoe - Milkweed Editions
__________________________________________
March 11
__________________________________
1917 – Nancy Fotheringham Cato born in Glen Osmond, South Australia; Australian newspaperwoman, prose writer, novelist poet, anthology editor, and conservationist who campaigned against development of Australia’s Sunshine Coast. She was educated at the Presbyterian Ladies College and the University of Adelaide, and worked for the Adelaide News as a journalist and later as an art critic. Cato edited the Jindyworobak Anthology. Her novels include: All the Rivers Run; Green grows the vine; Brown Sugar; and Time, Flow Softly. She also published two volumes of poetry. Cato was honored with the 1988 Alice Award by the Society of Women Writers, and the Advance Australia award for her environmental campaigning. She died of a stroke at age 83 in July 2000.
Willy-wag and Sparrow
by Nancy Cato
Willy-wag and Sparrow
sat on a stone.
Said Willy, it's cold
when the sun is gone.
But my heart beats hot
in my white silk breast;
time enough later
for me to rest.
Said Sparrow, It's dark
in the green willow,
and the cat may lurk
in the shade below.
He fluffed his feathers
and shook his head;
by now the others
are safe in bed.
Said Willy, the sky
is full of light,
and a juicy fly
is quickly caught.
I'll flirt my fan
awhile the cold,
and I won't go in
till the moon is gold.
Said sparrow, the tree
is full by now,
and I'm off to my perch
on the topmost bough.
But Willy said, whether
it's dark or light,
if I feel like singing
I'll sing all night.
A Willy-Wag-Tail is a small bird belonging to the family of fly catchers.
“Willy-wag and Sparrow” from The Dancing Bough, © 1957 by Nancy Fotheringham Cato
__________________________________________
March 12
__________________________________
1951 – Susan Musgrave born in Santa Cruz, California to Canadian parents; prolific Canadian poet, children’s author, novelist, memoirist, essayist, and anthologist. She left school at 14, running away to Berkeley, California. Her first poems were published when she was 16. Her collection, Songs of the Sea-Witch, appeared in 1970. Her first husband was a lawyer, her second husband was an accused drug smuggler, and she married her third husband in the prison where he was serving a sentence for bank robbing, after reading the manuscript of his novel. Though granted full parole in 1987, he was convicted again for bank robbery in 1999. Her first novel, The Charcoal Burners, reflected her interest in West Coast mythologies and feminism. Musgrave now lives in Haida Gwaii, an archipelago in British Columbia. She was nominated four times for the Governor-General’s Literary Award. Her 20 poetry collections include: Entrance of the Celebrant; Tarts and Muggers; The Impstone; Kiskatinaw Songs; A Man to Marry, A Man to Bury; Right through the Heart; What the Small Day Cannot Hold; and Origami Dove.
Hunger
by Susan Musgrave
When I go to the river with my trouble,
and sit under the big trees, I see my girl again.
Her dress is the colour of soft butter.
Her hunger tastes of whiskey and rain.
Behind us is darkness, and darkness lies ahead.
The worst kind of pain is to miss someone
you’ve never known, and worse, never will.
The emptiest days are loveliest; only
people with desires can be fooled,
and I have none.
“Hunger” from Exculpatory Lilies, © 2022 by Susan Musgrave – McClelland & Stewart
__________________________________________
1952 – Naomi Shihab Nye born in St. Louis, Missouri, to a Palestinian father and an American mother; poet, songwriter, children’s author, novelist, teacher, and editor. In 1966, her family moved to the West Bank because her paternal grandmother was sick. They returned to the U.S. in 1967, just before the Six-Day War broke out, settling in San Antonio, Texas. She earned a BA in English and world religions from Trinity University in 1974. Nye teaches creative writing at Texas State University, and runs writing workshops for children and teens. Honored for her body of work with the 2013 NSK Neustadt Prize for Children’s Literature, and the Poetry Foundation chose her as the Young People’s Poet Laureate for the 2019-2021 term. In addition to editing anthologies of verse by contemporary poets, she’s published over two dozen collections of her own poetry. Her debut young adult novel Habibi was named an ALA Best Book for Young Adults, and honored with a Jane Addams Children’s Book Award.
Elementary
by Naomi Shihab Nye
At the 100-year-old National Elk Refuge
near Jackson Hole, we might ask,
How long does an elk live?
Who’s an old elk here?
We’d like to spend time
with an elder elk please.
Tell us how to balance our lives
on this hard edge of human mean,
mean temperatures, what we do and don’t
want to mean.
Closing the door
to the news will only make you
stupid, snapped my friend
who wanted everyone to know as much
as she did. I’m hiding in old school books
with information we never used yet.
Before I drove, before I flew,
before the principal went to jail.
Sinking my eyes into tall wooden
window sashes, dreaming of light
arriving from far reaches,
our teacher as shepherds,
school a vessel of golden hope,
you could lift your daily lesson
in front of your eyes,
stare hard and think,
this will take me
somewhere. O histories of India,
geological formations of Australia,
ancient poetries of China, Japan,
someday we will be aligned in a place
of wisdom, together.
Red deer, wapiti, running elk rising
above yellow meadows at sundown.
An elk bows her head. In the company
of other elk, she feels at home.
And we are lost on the horizon now,
clumsy humanity,
deeper into the next century than we
can even believe,
and they will not speak to us.
“Elementary” from The Tiny Journalist, © 2019 by Naomi Shihab Nye – BOA Editions, Ltd
__________________________________________
March 13
__________________________________
1920 – Ann Darr born as Lois Ann Russell in Bagley, Iowa American poet, teacher, pilot, and WWII WASP (Women’s Airforce Service Pilot). “I was one of the lucky women who were part of the experiment that proved women could fly as well as men.” She published eight poetry collections, including Riding with the Fireworks; St. Ann’s Gut; Do You Take This Woman; The Myth of a Woman’s Fist; and Confessions of a Skewed Romantic. She recorded some of her poems for the Library of Congress Contemporary Poets Series, and many were published in over 70 journals and 30 anthologies. She was featured in the Museum of Television and Radio in New York City, where she wrote and performed radio scripts for NBC and ABC before moving to the Washington, D.C. area. She taught at The American University in Washington, D.C. and at the Writer’s Center in Bethesda, Maryland. Late in life, Ann Darr was stricken with Alzheimers, and died at age 87 in December 2007.
An Old Film on TV at the Reunion of the Fifinellas
by Ann Darr
I watch the girl,
Hair flying,
Leap onto the wing
Of an AT6.
I know who she is,
I have made that leap.
I watch those planes
in formation,
precede their moment
of peeling off
with a delicious
NOW
and pull away,
my body arcing,
that small smile
coming up from
my toes and settling
on my mouth.
O clear arc
in the air,
when did I begin
forgetting
I can fly?
“An Old Film on TV at the Reunion of the Fifinellas” from Cleared for Landing, © 1978 by Ann Darr – Dryad Press
__________________________________________
March 14
__________________________________
1947 – Pam Ayres born in Stanford in the Vale, Berkshire, England; British poet, comedian, songwriter, author of six books of poetry; frequent guest on various BBC radio programmes, and presenter of Ayres on the Air.
Woodland Burial
by Pam Ayres
Don’t lay me in some gloomy churchyard shaded by a wall,
Where the dust of ancient bones has spread a dryness over all,
Lay me in some leafy loam where, sheltered from the cold,
Little seeds investigate and tender leaves unfold.
There kindly and affectionately, plant a native tree,
To grow resplendent before God and hold some part of me.
The roots will not disturb me as they wend their peaceful way,
To build the fine and bountiful, from closure and decay.
To seek their small requirements so that when their work is done,
I’ll be tall and standing strongly in the beauty of the sun.
“Woodland Burial” from The Works: Selected Poems, © 1993 by Pam Ayres – Parkwest Publications
__________________________________________
1949 – Lynn Emanuel born in Mount Kisco, New York; American poet and academic. She earned an MA from City College of New York, and an MFA from the Iowa Writers Workshop. She lived, worked, and traveled in North Africa, Europe, and the Near East. Emanuel is Director of the Pittsburgh Contemporary Writers Series, and a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh. Her husband, anthropologist Jeffrey H. Schwartz, named the early primate Microadapis lynnae after her. Her poetry collections include: Oblique Light; Hotel Fiesta; The Dig; Noose and Hook; and The Nerve of It, which won the 2016 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize.
Blonde Bombshell
by Lynn Emanuel
Love is boring and passé, all that old baggage,
the bloody bric-a-brac, the bad, the gothic,
retrograde, obscurantist hum and drum of it
needs to be swept away. So, night after night,
we sit in the dark of the Roxy beside grandmothers
with their shanks tied up in the tourniquets
of rolled stockings and open ourselves, like earth
to rain, to the blue fire of the movie screen
where love surrenders suddenly to gangsters
and their cuties. There in the narrow,
mote-filled finger of light, is a blonde,
so blonde, so blinding, she is a blizzard, a huge
spook, and lights up like the sun the audience
in its galoshes. She bulges like a deuce coupe.
When we see her we say good-bye to Kansas.
She is everything spare, cool, and clean,
like a gas station on a dark night and the cold
dependable light of rage coming in on schedule like a bus.
"Blonde Bombshell" from The Nerve of It, © 2015 by Lynn Emanuel – University of Pittsburgh Press
__________________________________________
March 15
__________________________________
1907 – Elma Stuckey born in Memphis, Tennessee, granddaughter of former slaves; African American poet and schoolteacher. She earned a teaching certificate from Lane College in Jackson, Tennessee, taught school, and ran a nursery school in rural Tennessee until she moved to Chicago in 1945. She became a supervisor for the Illinois Department of Labor. At age 69, she published her first poetry collection, The Big Gate. Her poetry initially got attention when she read her poems on Stud Terkel’s Chicago radio program. Her second collection, The Collected Poems of Elma Stuckey, was published the year before her death. She died at age 81 in September 1988 while in Washington DC to record readings of her poetry for the Smithsonian Institution.
Humanity
by Elma Stuckey
If I am blind and need someone
To keep me safe from harm,
It matters not the race to me
Of the one who takes my arm.
If I am saved from drowning
As I grasp and grope,
I will not stop to see the face
Of the one who throws the rope.
Or if out on some battlefield
I’m falling faint and weak,
The one who gently lifts me up
May any language speak.
We sip the water clear and cool,
No matter the hand that gives it.
A life that’s lived worthwhile and fine
What matters the one who lives it?
“Humanity” from The Collected Poems of Elma Stuckey, © 1987 by Elma Stuckey – Precedent Publications
__________________________________________
1952 – Susan Stewart born in York, Pennsylvania; American poet, academic, and literary critic, with a PhD in folklore from the University of Pennsylvania. Her 2002 book, Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, won the Truman Capote award for literary criticism. She is a professor in the Humanities and English Departments at Princeton, a member of the Associated Faculty of the Department of Art and Archaeology, and editor of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets. Stewart was Director of Princeton’s Society of Fellows in the Liberal Arts (2009-2017). She teaches history of poetry, literary criticism, and aesthetics. Her poetry collections include: Yellow Stars and Ice; The Hive; The Forest; Columbarium, which won the 2003 National Book Critics Circle Award; and Cinder. She was a co-translator with Wesley Smith of Andromache by Euripides, and collaborated with composer James Primosch on A Sybyl, a song cycle for the Chicago Symphony.
Let me tell you about my marvelous god
by Susan Stewart
Let me tell you about my marvelous god, how he hides in the hexagons
of the bees, how the drought that wrings its leather hands
above the world is of his making, as well as the rain in the quiet minutes
that leave only thoughts of rain.
An atom is working and working, an atom is working in deepest
night, then bursting like the farthest star; it is far
smaller than a pinprick, far smaller than a zero and it has no
will, no will toward us.
This is why the heart has paced and paced,
will pace and pace across the field where yarrow
was and now is dust. A leaf catches
in a bone. The burrow’s shut by a tumbled clod
and the roots, upturned, are hot to the touch.
How my god is a feathered and whirling thing; you will singe your arm
when you pluck him from the air,
when you pluck him from that sky
where grieving swirls, and you will burn again
throwing him back.
“Let me tell you about my marvelous god” from Columbarium, © 2003 by Susan Stewart – University of Chicago Press
______________________________________________
G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
______________________________________________
Picture: ‘Not Falling Flying 4’ — by Karen Bloomfield
[END]
---
[1] Url:
https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/3/10/2308836/-Morning-Open-Thread-When-Did-I-Begin-Forgetting-I-Can-Fly?pm_campaign=front_page&pm_source=more_community&pm_medium=web
Published and (C) by Daily Kos
Content appears here under this condition or license: Site content may be used for any purpose without permission unless otherwise specified.
via Magical.Fish Gopher News Feeds:
gopher://magical.fish/1/feeds/news/dailykos/
