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Morning Open Thread: Today Just Before the Light Filled Up the Sky [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-03-31
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“… mountain weather; April
splinters like an ice palace.”
― Ruth Stone, American poet,
National Book Award winner
for In the Next Galaxy
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“April was just beginning, and after
the warm spring day it turned cooler,
slightly frosty, and a breath of spring
could be felt in the soft, cold air.”
– Anton Chekov,
Russian playwright and
writer of short stories
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Thirteen poets – for the last days of
Women’s History Month — and the
start of Celebrate Diversity Month
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March 30
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1886 – Frances Cornford born in Cambridge, England, to Newnham College fellow Ellen Wordsworth Croft and botanist Francis Darwin (third son of Chars Darwin); English poet who published under her married name. Her husband was English Classical scholar Francis Macdonald Cornford, but after their marriage they both went by their initials with friends and family to avoid confusion. They had five children, but wisely didn’t name any of them Frances/Francis. Her poetry collections include: The Holtbury Idyll; Spring Morning; Autumn Midnight; Different Days; and Mountains and Molehills. Frances Cornford died at age 74 of heart failure in August 1960.
The New-Born Baby’s Song
by Frances Cornford
When I was twenty inches long,
I could not hear the thrushes’ song;
The radiance of morning skies
Was most displeasing to my eyes.
For loving looks, caressing words,
I cared no more than sun or birds;
But I could bite my mother’s breast,
And that made up for all the rest.
“The Newborn Baby’s Song” from Collected Poems, ©1954 by Frances Cornford — Cresset Press
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March 31
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1934 – Kamala Das AKA Kamala Surayya, born as Kamala Madhavikutty in what was the Malabar district in British India. She was an Indian author, short story writer, and columnist who published poetry in English. She was married off at age 15 to a bank official who was blatantly unfaithful. Das escaped into writing, much of it for magazines and newspapers. In 1948, she became a major figure in launching the national liberal and secular political party Lok Seva Party, which promoted social reform. Her autobiography, My Story, was published in 1976. Her books in English include Summer in Calcutta, The Descendants, and Only the Soul Knows How to Sing. She died of pneumonia at age 75 in May 2009.
The Sunshine Cat
by Kamala Das
They did this to her, the men who know her, the man
She loved, who loved her not enough, being selfish
And a coward, the husband who neither loved nor
Used her, but was a ruthless watcher, and the band
Of cynics she turned to, clinging to their chests where
New hair sprouted like great-winged moths, burrowing her
Face into their smells and their young lusts to forget
To forget, oh, to forget, and, they said, each of
Them, I do not love, I cannot love, it is not
In my nature to love, but I can be kind to you.
They let her slide from pegs of sanity into
A bed made soft with tears, and she lay there weeping,
For sleep had lost its use. I shall build walls with tears,
She said, walls to shut me in. Her husband shut her
In, every morning, locked her in a room of books
With a streak of sunshine lying near the door like
A yellow cat to keep her company, but soon
Winter came, and one day while locking her in, he
Noticed that the cat of sunshine was only a
Line, a half-thin line, and in the evening when
He returned to take her out, she was a cold and
Half dead woman, now of no use at all to men.
“The Sunshine Cat” from Summer in Calcutta, © 1965 by Kamala Das – Everett Press
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1936 – Marge Piercy born in Detroit, Michigan; prolific American poet, novelist, playwright, anthologist, editor, and social activist. Her working-class parents were Jewish, and they lived in a predominately black neighborhood, where the Great Depression hit hard. She became the first in her family to go to college, on a scholarship to the University of Michigan, where she joined and became an organizer for Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) and was active in Anti-Vietnam War/Pro-Peace groups. Piercy is a feminist, a Marxist, and an environmentalist. She has published almost 20 novels and over 20 books of poetry, as well as plays, several volumes of nonfiction, a memoir, and she edited the anthology Early Ripening: American Women’s Poetry Now. Piercy also explores Jewish issues, and was poetry editor of Tikkun Magazine.
Winter Promises
by Marge Piercy
Tomatoes rosy as perfect baby’s buttocks,
eggplants glossy as waxed fenders,
purple neon flawless glistening
peppers, pole beans fecund and fast
growing as Jack’s Viagra-sped stalk,
big as truck tire zinnias that mildew
will never wilt, roses weighing down
a bush never touched by black spot,
brave little fruit trees shouldering up
their spotless ornaments of glass fruit:
I lie on the couch under a blanket
of seed catalogs ordering far
too much. Sleet slides down
the windows, a wind edged
with ice knifes through every crack.
Lie to me, sweet garden-mongers:
I want to believe every promise,
to trust in five pound tomatoes
and dahlias brighter than the sun
that was eaten by frost last week.
“Winter Promises” from Circles on the Water, © 1982 by Marge Piercy
– Alfred A. Knopf
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April 1
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1902 – Maria Polydouri born in Kalamata, Greece; Neo-Hellene poet whose first notable poem “O Ponos tis Manas” (“The Pain of the Mother”) was published when she was 14. When she was 20, both her parents died within 40 days of each other. At age 20, she fell in love with the poet Kostas Karyotakis, but he found out he had syphilis, incurable at the time, and they parted. The poems which are regarded as her most important were written during the last four years of her life while she was suffering from consumption (tuberculosis). Polydouri was devastated when Karyotakis committed suicide in July 1928. She died in a sanatorium at age 28 in April 1930. Her two collections of poetry are The Trills That Die Out, and Echo in Chaos.
Today
by Maria Polydouri
Today just before the light filled up the sky,
far off I heard bells sounding in the city.
Bells … why did I notice? As if sowing hate
the last shadows slowly and dolefully moved on.
Where have I left my sweet, childlike soul,
in what season, with what bell’s tune entwined?
In what season … and today to say my prayers
I stayed on bended knee in sorrow.
A prayer to beauty, to a forgotten mother,
to ignorance, to a smile, to the voice of a dream,
listening to the day’s bell of anguish
which sadly tolled an untimely death.
— translated by Georgia Theophillis Noble
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1949 – Gil Scott-Heron born in Chicago, Illinois, Black American jazz and spoken word poet, singer, and musician – the son of an African-American opera singer and a Jamaican father who was the first Black player recruited by the Celtic Football Club in Glasgow, Scotland. Scott-Heron’s collaborative efforts with musician Brian Jackson fused jazz, blues, and soul with lyrics about social and political issues of the time, delivered in both rapping and melisamatic vocal styles. He referred to himself as a “bluesologist.” Scott-Heron’s music, most notably on the albums Pieces of a Man and Winter in America during the early 1970s, influenced and foreshadowed later African-American music genres, including hip hop and neo soul. His poem “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” is considered a major influence on hip hop music. Gil Scott-Heron served two prison terms for cocaine-related charges. He told New York magazine in 2008 that he had contracted HIV. He died at age 62 in May 2011. His poetry collections are So Far, So Good and Now and Then: The Poems of Gil Scott-Heron. His memoir, The Last Holiday, was published in 2012.
Grandma’s Hands
by Gil Scott Heron
Grandma's hands clapped to church on Sunday mornings
Grandma's hands played the tambourine so well
Grandma's hands used to issue out a warning
She say, 'Scotty why you run so fast,
Might fall on a piece of glass,
Might be snakes there in that grass?'
Grandma's hands, they keep on calling to me.
Grandma's hands soothed the local unwed mothers
Grandma's hands used to ache sometimes and swell
Grandma's hands, lord they'd really come in handy
She say, 'Bobbie why you want to whip that boy?
What you want to whip him for?
He didn't throw no apple core.'
Grandma's hands, they keep on calling to me.
Grandma's hands soothed the local unwed mothers
Grandma's hands used to ache sometimes and swell
Grandma's hands, well they really came in handy
She say, 'Bobbie why you want to whip that boy?
What you want to whip him for?
He didn't throw no apple core.'
But I don't have grandma anymore
When I get to heaven I'll look for grandma's hands.
.
“Grandma’s Hands,” © 1981 by Gil Scott-Heron
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1961 – Liu Xia born in Beijing, China; Chinese painter, poet, photographer, and proponent of human rights. She was a civil servant in the Beijing tax bureau when she met philosopher and human rights activist Liu Xiaobo in the 1980s. She married him while he was a prisoner in a labor re-education camp in 1996, and often served as his proxy during the many times he was sent to prison. While Liu Xiaobo was serving another prison term in 2010, he was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. Liu Xia was immediately put under effective house arrest until July 2018, a year after Liu Xiaobo had died of liver cancer, presumably to prevent her from speaking on his behalf. She is still under surveillance and denied access to a phone or a computer.
Empty Chairs
by Liu Xia
Empty empty empty
so many empty chairs
everywhere. They look
charming in van Gogh’s paintings.
I quietly sit on them
and try to rock
but they don’t move —
they are frozen
by what’s breathing inside them.
Van Gogh waves his paintbrush —
leave leave leave
there’s no funeral tonight.
He looks straight through me,
and I sit down
in the flames of his sunflower
like a piece of clay to be fired.
“Empty Chairs” from Empty Chairs by Liu Xia, translation © 2015 by Ming Di
and Jennifer Stern – Graywolf Press
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April 2
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1805 – Hans Christian Andersen born in Odense, Denmark; Danish writer, best known for his fairy tales, but he was also a playwright, novelist, poet, and travel writer. His fairy tales, translated into over 125 languages, remain popular around the world. His father sparked Andersen’s interest in stories by reading The Arabian Nights to him, but he died when Andersen was 11. After his mother remarried in 1818, he went to a school for poor children where only basic education was offered. He worked as an apprentice to a weaver and then to a tailor. At 14, Andersen moved to Copenhagen. He was accepted into the Royal Danish Theatre, but when his voice changed, the theatre’s director sent him to a grammar school, even persuading King Frederick VI to pay part of his tuition. Though he continued his education until 1827, he later said those years were bitter because of the harsh and abusive treatment he suffered from a schoolmaster who discouraged him from writing. In 1829, his first success, "A Journey on Foot from Holmen's Canal to the East Point of Amager," included a talking cat. A small stipend enabled him to travel, and his first novel, written in 1835 after his travels in Italy, was acclaimed in Denmark. It was shortly followed by his first set of fairy tales, but the critics were harsh, because children’s books at the time were supposed to impress moral principles on children, not entertain them. His best-known tales were written in the 1830s and 1840s. He showed signs of liver cancer in 1872 and died at age 70 in August 1875. Just before his death, he told the composer of his funeral music: "Most of the people who will walk after me will be children, so make the beat keep time with little steps."
“That ancient tree, don’t let it fall”
by Hans Christian Andersen
That ancient tree, don’t let it fall
Until old age is knelling;
So many things it can recall,
What tales it could be telling.
We once did see its blossom-haul
Each branch with fruit was swelling.
That ancient tree, don’t let it fall,
You must not think of felling!
Now to be journeying I yearn
But yet the truth in part is
One does but travel to return,
For home is where one’s heart is.
When this old tree stands blossom-tall,
I’m nearly home it’s telling;
That ancient tree, don’t let it fall,
You must not think of felling!.
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April 3
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1836 – Harriet Prescott Spofford born in Maine, but grew up in Newburyport, Massachusetts: American author and poet. At age 17, she became the sole support of her family when both her parents became incapacitated. She wrote Gothic romances, detective stories, novelettes, poems, often writing 12 to 15 hours a day, to earn money – 100 of her short stories were published in Boston story papers over the next three years. But when the going rate for stories was slashed from $5 to $2.50, she declined to send them more. She struggled until her story “In a Cellar” was published in Atlantic Monthly in 1859. It so impressed Atlantic editor James Russell Lowell that he sent her a check for $100 with a letter of recommendation. His recommendation made her a welcome contributor to all the chief periodicals of the day. She wrote many novels, some children’s books, Art Decoration Applied to Furniture, articles, poems, and ballads. In 1865, after a long engagement, at age 29 she married a Boston lawyer, and they lived on Deer Island near Amesbury. Harriet Prescott Spofford died at age 85 in 1921.
A Sigh
by Harriet Prescott Spofford
It was nothing but a rose I gave her,—
Nothing but a rose
Any wind might rob of half its savor,
Any wind that blows.
When she took it from my trembling fingers
With a hand as chill,—
Ah, the flying touch upon them lingers,
Stays, and thrills them still!
Withered, faded, pressed between the pages,
Crumpled fold on fold,—
Once it lay upon her breast, and ages
Cannot make it old!
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1954 – Vanna Bonta born in Clarksville, TN to Italian painter Maria Ugolini Bonta and James Bonta, an American military officer. She is an American writer, actress, inventor, and poet. Best known for her book Flight: A Quantum Fiction Novel, and for playing "Zed's Queen" in 1982 film The Beastmaster. She invented the 2suit, a flight garment which can be attached to another 2suit to allow people to stay in proximity in low-gravity and designed a pressure-release valve for high-combustion engines.
This haiku by Vanna Bonta was included in a poetry collection on a DVD which was aboard NASA’s MAVEN spacecraft, launched into orbit around Mars in November 2013:
Thirty-six million
miles of whispering welcome.
Mars, you called us home.
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April 4
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1661 – Uejima Onitsura born in Itami, Honshu Island, Japan, to a family of brewers. He showed exceptional talent for poetry from an early age. When he was 25, he moved to Osaka, and began to make his mark in haiku and other poetic forms. Though he had few disciples, he nevertheless was a major poet of the Danrin school of haiku, founded by Niahiyama Sōin, which opposed the more formal “bookishness” prevailing in haiku at the time. Danrin translates as ‘talkative forrest’ and adherents preferred plain language, everyday subjects, and the use of humor. Matsuo Bashō would become the most famous poet of this school. Later in life, Onitsura worked as a masseur before becoming a priest. He considered makoto (sincerity) the key to writing poetry. Uejima Onitsura died at age 77 in August 1738.
Believed to be Uejima Onitsura’s first poem – composed at age 8:
come here! come here!
I cry, but the fireflies
just fly away
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1892 – Edith Södergran born in St. Petersburg, Russia; Finnish Swedish-speaking modernist poet, educated at a German-language girls school. In her teens, she contracted tuberculosis. She published five collections of poetry, including Dikter (Poems); Septemberlyran (September Lyre); and Rosenaltaret (The Rose Altar) before she died at age 31 in June 1923.
Luck Cat
by Edith Södergran
I have a luck cat in my arms,
it spins threads of luck.
Luck cat, luck cat,
make for me three things:
make for me a golden ring,
to tell me that I am lucky;
make for me a mirror
to tell me that I am beautiful;
make for me a fan
to waft away my cumbersome thoughts.
Luck cat, luck cat,
spin for me some news of my future!
– translated by David McDuff (poem from Dikter, published in 1916)
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1928 – Maya Angelou born in St. Louis, Missouri; American poet, writer, memoirist, and civil rights activist; known for her memoir, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. In 2000, she was awarded the National Medal of Arts by President Clinton. In 2010, President Obama awarded her the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Her poetry collections include: Just Give Me a Cool Drink of Water ‘fore I Diie; And Still I Rise; and I Shall Not Be Moved. Maya Angelou died after a long illness at age 86 in May 2014.
Momma Welfare Roll
by Maya Angelou
Her arms semaphore fat triangles,
Pudgy hands bunched on layered hips
Where bones idle under years of fatback
And lima beans.
Her jowls shiver in accusation
Of crimes clichéd by
Repetition. Her children, strangers
To childhood’s toys, play
Best the games of darkened doorways,
Rooftop tag, and know the slick feel of
Other people’s property.
Too fat to whore,
Too mad to work,
Searches her dreams for the
Lucky sign and walks bare-handed
Into a den of bureaucrats for
Her portion.
‘They don’t give me welfare.
I take it.’
“Momma Welfare Roll” from The Complete Collected Poems of Maya Angelou, © 1994 by Maya Angelou – Random House
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April 5
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1904 – Richard Eberhart born as Richard Ghormley Eberhart in Austin, Minnesota; American poet, teacher, and anthologist, who grew up on a rural estate called Burr Oaks, which became the title of his 1947 poetry collection. He was at the University of Minnesota when his mother died of cancer, prompting him to begin writing poetry, and transfer to Dartmouth College. He later studied at St. John’s College, Cambridge, then became private tutor to the son of Siam’s King Prajadhipok (1931–1932). He taught at St. Mark’s School in Massachusetts (1933-1941), then became an officer in the U.S. Naval Reserve during WWII. He won the Bollingen Prize in 1962, his Selected Poems 1930-1965 won the 1966 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Collected Poems, 1930-1976 won the 1977 National Book Award for Poetry. His many poetry collections include: A Bravery of Earth; Brotherhood of Men; Shifts of Being; Fields of Grace; and The Long Reach. He died at age 1001 in June 2005.
The Eclipse
by Richard Eberhart
I stood out in the open cold
To see the essence of the eclipse
Which was its perfect darkness.
I stood in the cold on the porch
And could not think of anything so perfect
As man’s hope of light in the face of darkness.
“The Eclipse” from Collected Poems 1930-1986, © 1988 by Richard Eberhart – Oxford University Press
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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[END]
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