(C) Daily Kos
This story was originally published by Daily Kos and is unaltered.
. . . . . . . . . .



Morning Open Thread: Home’s the Place We Head For in Our Sleep [1]

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

Date: 2025-06-02

________________________________________________________

I have walked into the palaces of kings and queens

and into the houses of presidents. And much more.

But I could not walk into a hotel in America and get

a cup of coffee, and that made me mad.

– Josephine Baker

________________________________________________________

“The model of patriarchy as an integral system enables us

to see that in order to end male domination, we must also

end war – and violence, rape, conquest, exploitation, and

slavery which are sanctioned as part of war. In societies

where the violent behaviors of warriors are celebrated and

in which soldiers who have been trained in the methods of

violence come home, it is unlikely that anyone can succeed

in eradicating rape and violence against women.”

– Carol P. Christ (1945-2021),

Feminist scholar, historian, and theologian

________________________________________________________



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.

__________________________________

13 poets born in June, some famous,

some little-known, but all connected

by their passion for speaking out

though dancing words on paper

__________________________________

June 1

__________________________________

1878 – John Masefield born in land-locked Ledbury, a Herefordshire market town, British poet and novelist - the son of Caroline and George Masefield, a solicitor. His mother died giving birth to his sister when Masefield was only six, and he went to live with an aunt. His father died soon after. After four unhappy years as a boarder at the King’s School in Warwick, another land-locked place, he left to train for a life at sea, aboard HMS Conway. His disapproving aunt hoped this would break his addiction to reading. She must have been disappointed that he spent much of his time reading and recording his experiences in journal entries. After an especially bad voyage where he ended up in the hospital, he left the sea in 1895, and worked a series of jobs – in a carpet factory, as a journalist, and overseeing a fine arts exhibition. In 1902, his first volume of poetry, Salt-Water Ballads, was published, which included his most famous poem, “Sea-Fever.” After marrying, he mostly wrote novels until the success of his long poem “The Everlasting Mercy.” During WWI, too old to serve in combat, he was briefly a hospital orderly at a British Hospital in France, before moving his family to a farm in Berkshire, while he did lecture tours in America. In the 1920s, the Masefields moved to Boar’s Hill, near Oxford, and he took up beekeeping. The 1923 edition of his Collected Poems sold about 80,000 copies, and he wrote more novels. In 1930, he was appointed as England’s Poet Laureate, remaining in the office for the rest of his life. His last book, In Glad Thanksgiving, was published shortly before his death at age 88 in May 1967.

Sea Fever

by John Masefield



I must go down to the seas again, to the lonely sea and the sky,

And all I ask is a tall ship and a star to steer her by;

And the wheel’s kick and the wind’s song and the white sail’s shaking,

And a grey mist on the sea’s face, and a grey dawn breaking.



I must go down to the seas again, for the call of the running tide

Is a wild call and a clear call that may not be denied;

And all I ask is a windy day with the white clouds flying,

And the flung spray and the blown spume, and the sea-gulls crying.



I must go down to the seas again, to the vagrant gypsy life,

To the gull’s way and the whale’s way where the wind’s like a whetted knife;

And all I ask is a merry yarn from a laughing fellow-rover,

And quiet sleep and a sweet dream when the long trick’s over.



“Sea Fever” from John Masefield: Selected Poems – Macmillan Publishers, 1978 edition

______________________________________

1940 – Katerina Gogou born in Athens; Greek poet, author, actress, and anarchist; her poetry is known for its vitriolic depiction of Athens, often chronicling its prostitutes, junkies, psychiatric patients, and petty criminals. Her first poetry collection, Three Clicks Left, published in 1978, was translated into English in 1983 by Jack Hirschman. In 1993, she committed suicide by taking an overdose of pills and alcohol at age 53.

They Will Come

by Katerina Gogou



The signal will be in the air

the white the gray the brown

jackets of the insane without sleeves

that will be snapping empty on the

fence-wires of Leros.

They will unhitch by themselves

with their pulled-out fingernails

the hook that hung them

on the ceiling of your earth.

They’ll have a uniform bruised color

and lobotomies instead of ears.

Out of sewers and prison cells

they will advance slowly.

They will enter with the slow step

with which terror proceeds

and glory bound together

brothers in blood

a bloody thread

will be bringing the news.



Leros is an island in the Aegean, where many political prisoners and “undesirables” were detained by the Junta, the military dictatorship that ruled Greece from 1967 to 1974.

– translated by Angelos Sakkis

“They Will Come” from Now Let’s See What You’re Gonna Do: Poems 1978-2002, © 2021 by A.S. – The Divers Collection from fmsbw press

__________________________________

June 2

__________________________________

1840 – Thomas Hardy born in Stinsford, Dorset, England, the son of a builder; English Victorian novelist and poet. He did not attend university, and was unable to find a publisher for his poems, so he worked as an architect for several years until his novel Far from the Madding Crowd was published in 1874. It was followed by other successful novels, including: The Return of the Native, Tess of the d’Urbervilles, and Jude the Obscure. He died of pleurisy at age 87 in January 1928. His first published poems about war were written during the Boer War (1899-1902). While he was one of several prominent British authors who originally supported the UK’s involvement in WWI, he became horrified by its terrible destruction and massive death toll, writing "I do not think a world in which such fiendishness is possible to be worth the saving." Hardy’s many poetry collections include: Wessex Poems; War Poems; Poems of Pilgrimage; and Time’s Laughingstock. Hardy died of a heart attack at age 87 in January 1928.

The Man He Killed

by Thomas Hardy



"Had he and I but met

By some old ancient inn,

We should have sat us down to wet

Right many a nipperkin!



"But ranged as infantry,

And staring face to face,

I shot at him as he at me,

And killed him in his place.



"I shot him dead because —

Because he was my foe,

Just so: my foe of course he was;

That's clear enough; although



"He thought he'd 'list, perhaps,

Off-hand like — just as I —

Was out of work — had sold his traps —

No other reason why.



"Yes; quaint and curious war is!

You shoot a fellow down

You'd treat if met where any bar is,

Or help to half-a-crown."

______________________________________

1914 – George Hitchcock born in Hood River, Oregon – American actor, poet, playwright, publisher, teacher, labor activist, and painter. A graduate of the University of Oregon in 1935, he worked for labor movement periodicals like The Western Worker. During WWII, he was a cook in the U.S. Merchant Marine in the Pacific. After the war, he became a union organizer, and taught at the California Labor School. Later, he wrote joined the San Francisco’s Actor’s workshop, but earned a living as a landscape gardener. While performing at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival in 1957, Hitchcock was called to testify before the House Un-American Activities Committee. Asked about his profession, he answered, “I am a gardener. I do underground work on plants.” He refused to answer any other questions “on the grounds that this hearing is a big bore and waste of the public’s money.” By 1958, he was an editor for the San Francisco Review until it folded. He then founded and ran single-handedly Kayak, a poetry magazine (1964-1984), and published early books by Charles Simic, Philip Levine, Raymond Carver, Anne Sexton, Robert Bly, and Margaret Atwood. Hitchcock also taught playwriting at San Francisco State before joining the faculty at UC Santa Cruz (1970-1989). After retiring, he moved to Eugene, Oregon, where he died at age 96 in August 2010.

Scattering Flowers



It is our best and prayerful judgment that they

(air attacks) are a necessary part of the surest

road to peace. – Lyndon B. Johnson (1965)



by George Hitchcock



There is a dark tolling in the air,

an unbearable needle in the vein,

the horizon flaked with feathers of rust.

From the caves of drugged flowers

fireflies rise through the night:

they bear the sweet gospel of napalm.



Democracies of flame are declared

in the villages, the rice-fields

seethe with blistered reeds.

Children stand somnolent on their crutches.

Freedom, a dancing girl,

lifts her petticoats of gasoline,

and on the hot sands of the deserted beach

a wild horse struggles, choking

in the noose of diplomacy.



Now in the cane chairs the old men

who listen for the bitter wind

of bullets, spread on their thighs

maps, portfolios, legends of hair,

and photographs of dark Asian youths

who are already dissolving into broken water.



“Scattering Flowers” from The Wounded Alphabet: Poems Collected and New 1953-1983, © 1983 by George Hitchcock – Jazz Press

__________________________________

June 3

__________________________________

1926 – Allen Ginsberg born in Newark, New Jersey; leading American ‘Beat’ poet of the San Francisco Renaissance; when his famous long poem Howl was published in 1956 by City Lights, publisher Laurence Ferlinghetti and his partner Shigeyosi Murao were arrested on obscenity charges; after a long trial, “Howl” was ruled not obscene. Ginsberg became a student of Tibetan Buddhist Chögyam Trungpa, was active in the peace and anti-war movements, and against economic materialism, sexual repression, and in favor of legalizing marijuana. He died at age 70 of liver cancer and complications of hepatitis in April 1997.

Homework

by Allen Ginsberg



Homage Kenneth Koch



If I were doing my Laundry I’d wash my dirty Iran

I’d throw in my United States, and pour on the Ivory Soap, scrub up Africa, put all the birds and elephants back in the jungle,

I’d wash the Amazon river and clean the oily Carib & Gulf of Mexico,

Rub that smog off the North Pole, wipe up all the pipelines in Alaska,

Rub a dub dub for Rocky Flats and Los Alamos, Flush that sparkly Cesium out of Love Canal

Rinse down the Acid Rain over the Parthenon & Sphinx, Drain Sludge out of the Mediterranean basin & make it azure again,

Put some blueing back into the sky over the Rhine, bleach the little Clouds so snow return white as snow,

Cleanse the Hudson Thames & Neckar, Drain the Suds out of Lake Erie

Then I’d throw big Asia in one giant Load & wash out the blood & Agent Orange,

Dump the whole mess of Russia and China in the wringer, squeeze out the tattletail Gray of U.S. Central American police state,

& put the planet in the drier & let it sit 20 minutes or an Aeon till it came out clean.



– Boulder, April 26, 1980

“Homework” from Collected Poems, 1947-1980, © 1984 by Allen Ginsberg – HarperCollins Publishers

__________________________________

June 4

__________________________________

1956 – Joyce Sidman born in Hartford, Connecticut; American poet and children’s author. She has written over 19 books, including Dark Emperor & Other Poems of the Night was a 2011 Newbery Honor Book; The Girl Who Drew Butterflies: How Maria Merian’s Art Changed Science, winner of the 2019 Robert F. Sibert Medal; and Hello, Earth! – Poems to Our Planet was the 2022 Paterson Prize for Books for Young People.

Blessing on the Curl of a Cat

by Joyce Sidman



As Cat curls

in a circle of sun –

sleek and warm,

a hint of ear

cocked in readiness –

so may I find my place

in this shifting world:

secure within myself,

certain of my worth,

equally willing to

purr

or leap.



“Blessing on the Curl of a Cat” from What the Heart Knows: Chants, Charms, and Blessings, © 2013 by Joyce Sidman – Clarion Books

__________________________________

June 5

__________________________________

1898 – Federico Garcia Lorca born in Granada province, Andalusia, to a landowning family; major Spanish poet, playwright, and theatre director. After touring the poorest areas of Spain with a classical theatre company sponsored by the Second Republic’s Ministry of Education, he began writing plays, using the theatre as a platform for societal change: “The theatre is a school of weeping and of laughter, a free forum, where men can question norms that are outmoded or mistaken and explain with living example the eternal norms of the human heart.” Lorca was gay, and struggled with recurring bouts of depression. He was murdered at age 38 in August 1936 by the Franquists during the Spanish Civil War. His remains have never been found. Lorca’s books and plays were banned in Franco’s Spain until 1953, when Obras completas (Complete Works) was published – but it was censored, and incomplete. After that, some of his plays were allowed to be performed. Once Franco died in 1975, Lorca’s work reappeared in Spain uncensored.

Gacela of Unforseen Love

by Federico Garcia Lorca



No one understood the perfume

of the dark magnolia of your womb.

Nobody knew that you tormented

a hummingbird of love between your teeth.



A thousand Persian little horses fell asleep

in the plaza with moon of your forehead,

while through four nights I embraced

your waist, enemy of the snow.



Between plaster and jasmins, your glance

was a pale branch of seeds.

I sought in my heart to give you

the ivory letters that say "siempre",



"siempre", "siempre" : garden of my agony,

your body elusive always,

that blood of your veins in my mouth,

your mouth already lightless for my death.



— translator not credited

______________________________________

1923 – Shirley Kaufman born in Seattle, Washington, to Polish immigrants; American-Israeli poet and translator. She attended James A. Garfield High School, then graduated in 1940 from UCLA. She married in 1946 and had three daughters. Kaufman studied at San Francisco State University with poet Jack Gilbert, where she completed her Masters in creative writing. She won the U.S. Award of the International Poetry Forum for her first book of poems in 1969. She and her second husband, Professor Hillel Daleski (some of her work was published under Shirley Kaufman Deleski) lived in Jerusalem for 37 years. In 1999, The Feminist Press published The Defiant Muse, a bilingual collection of feminist Hebrew poetry from the Bible to the present, edited by Shirley Kaufman, Galit Hasan-Rokem and Tamar Hess, with many translations by Kaufman. After her husband’s death, she returned to the Bay Area in 2011. Among the 9 collections of poetry she published are: The Flood Keeps Turning; Gold Country; From One Life to Another; Claims; Roots in the Air: New and Selected Poems; and Ezekiel’s Wheels. She died at age 93 from Alzheimer’s in September 2016.

Longing for Prophets

by Shirley Kaufman



Not for their ice-pick eyes,

their weeping willow hair,

and their clenched fists beating at heaven.

Not for their warnings, predictions

of doom. But what they promised.

I don’t care if their beards

are mildewed, and the ladders

are broken. Let them go on

picking the wormy fruit. Let the one

with the yoke around his neck

climb out of the cistern.

Let them come down from the heights

in their radiant despair

like the Sankei Juko dancers descending

on ropes, down from these hills

to the earth of their first existence.

Let them follow the track

we’ve cut on the sides of mountains

into the desert, and stumble again

through the great rift, littered

with bones and the walls of cities.

Let them sift through the ashes

with their burned hands. Let them

tell us what will come after.

“Longing for Prophets” from Rivers of Salt, © 1993 by Shirley Kaufman –

Copper Canyon Press

__________________________________

June 6

__________________________________

1925 – Maxine Kumin born in Philadelphia; prolific American poet, novelist, short story writer, essayist, and children’s author. She won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for Up Country in 1973, served as U.S. Poet Laureate (1981-1982), and won the Robert Frost Medal for lifetime achievement in 2006. She died at age 88 in February 2014. Her poetry collections include Halfway; The Nightmare Factory; Looking for Luck; The Long Marriage; and Where I Live.

Plans

by Maxine Kumin



When I grow up, I plan to keep

Eleven cats, and let them sleep

On any bedspread that they wish,

And feed them people’s tuna fish.



“Plans” from Selected Poems 1960-1990 ©1997 by Maxine Kumin – W. W. Norton

______________________________________

1935 – Joy Kogawa born as Joy Nozomi Nakayama in Vancouver, Canada to first-generation Canadians; Canadian poet and novelist. After the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, her family was sent to an internment camp for Japanese Canadians at Slocan, British Columbia. After the war, they resettled in Coaldale, Alberta, where she completed high school. She went on to study at the University of Alberta, the Anglican Women’s Training College, and the Roual Conservatory of Music in Toronto. By 1957, she was married to David Kogawa and living in Toronto. In 1967, her first poetry collection, The Splintered Moon, was published. They had two children but divorced in 1968, and she took classes at the University of Saskatchewan. In 1979, she moved back to Toronto, and has lived there since. In 1981, her novel Obasan won a First Novel Award from Books in Canada, the Canadian Authors Association Book of the Year Award, and a 1983 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. In 1986, Kogawa was made a Member of the Order of Canada; in 2006, she was made a Member of the Order of British Columbia. In 2018, Kogawa formed a group called Yojaros with a Vancouver-based Japanese poet Soramaru Takayama. Her poetry collections include: Jericho Road; What Do I Remember of the Evacuation?; and A Garden of Anchors.

Note to a Gentleman

by Joy Kogawa



The time

to talk about your wife

is before



It is the difference

between a shield

and a sword



And if you want the battle

to be fought without arms

bring her with you



“Note to a Gentleman” from Woman in the Woods, © 1985 by Joy Kogawa – Mosaic Press

__________________________________

June 7

__________________________________

1917 – Gwendolyn Brooks born in Topeka, Kansas, but grew up in Chicago; highly regarded American poet, author, and teacher. She was the first African American to win a Pulitzer Prize, the prize for poetry in 1950 for Annie Allan. She was also the first Black woman to be inducted into the Academy of Arts and Letters, and to serve as Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress (renamed U.S. Poet Laureate in 1986, just after her 1985-1986 term). Among her many books are A Street in Bronzeville; In the Mecca; Riot; and In Montgomery. Gwendolyn Brooks died of cancer at age 83 in December 2000

The Children of the Poor

by Gwendolyn Brooks



1

People who have no children can be hard:

Attain a mail of ice and insolence:

Need not pause in the fire, and in no sense

Hesitate in the hurricane to guard.

And when wide world is bitten and bewarred

They perish purely, waving their spirits hence

Without a trace of grace or of offense

To laugh or fail, diffident, wonder-starred.

While through a throttling dark we others hear

The little lifting helplessness, the queer

Whimper-whine; whose unridiculous

Lost softness softly makes a trap for us.

And makes a curse. And makes a sugar of

The malocclusions, the inconditions of love.



2

What shall I give my children? who are poor,

Who are adjudged the leastwise of the land,

Who are my sweetest lepers, who demand

No velvet and no velvety velour;

But who have begged me for a brisk contour,

Crying that they are quasi, contraband

Because unfinished, graven by a hand

Less than angelic, admirable or sure.

My hand is stuffed with mode, design, device.

But I lack access to my proper stone.

And plenitude of plan shall not suffice

Nor grief nor love shall be enough alone

To ratify my little halves who bear

Across an autumn freezing everywhere.



3

And shall I prime my children, pray, to pray?

Mites, come invade most frugal vestibules

Spectered with crusts of penitents’ renewals

And all hysterics arrogant for a day.

Instruct yourselves here is no devil to pay.

Children, confine your lights in jellied rules;

Resemble graves; be metaphysical mules.

Learn Lord will not distort nor leave the fray.

Behind the scurryings of your neat motif

I shall wait, if you wish: revise the psalm

If that should frighten you: sew up belief

If that should tear: turn, singularly calm

At forehead and at fingers rather wise,

Holding the bandage ready for your eyes.



“The Children of the Poor” from Annie Allen, © 1949 by Gwendolyn Brooks – Harper & Row

______________________________________

1943 – Nikki Giovanni born in Knoxville, Tennessee, but her family moved first to Cleveland, Ohio shortly after her birth, and then to Wyoming when she was five. She came back to Knoxville in 1958 to live with her grandparents while going to high school, and went on, after a rocky start, to graduate from Fiske University. Giovannni was a poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. Her strong, militant poetry was forged during the Civil Rights and Black Power era. Her many poetry collections include: My House; Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day; Blues: For All the Changes; and Bicycles: Love Poems. She died of lung cancer at age 81 in December 2024.

BLK History Month

by Nikki Giovanni



If Black History Month is not

viable then wind does not

carry the seeds and drop them

on fertile ground

rain does not

dampen the land

and encourage the seeds

to root

sun does not

warm the earth

and kiss the seedlings

and tell them plain:

You’re As Good As Anybody Else

You’ve Got A Place Here, Too



“BLK History Month” from Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea, © 2002 by Nikki Giovanni – HarperCollins Publishers

______________________________________

1954 – Louise Erdrich born in Little Falls, Minnesota, but grew up in North Dakota, where her Chippewa mother and German-American father taught at a boarding school run by the Bureau of Indian Affairs; Native American author, novelist, children’s book writer, and poet. She is an enrolled member of the Turtle Mountain Band of Chippewa Indians, a tribe of the Anishinaabe, and considered one of the most significant writers of the second wave of the Native American Renaissance. Her first novel, The Plague of Doves, was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. She won the 2012 National Book Award for Fiction for her novel The Round House. Erdich has also published three collections of poetry: Jacklight; Baptism of Desire; and Original Fire. She owns Birchbark Books, an independent bookstore in Minneapolis which focuses on Native American literature.

Indian Boarding School: The Runaways

by Louise Erdrich



Home’s the place we head for in our sleep.

Boxcars stumbling north in dreams

don’t wait for us. We catch them on the run.

The rails, old lacerations that we love,

shoot parallel across the face and break

just under Turtle Mountains. Riding scars

you can’t get lost. Home is the place they cross.



The lame guard strikes a match and makes the dark

less tolerant. We watch through cracks in boards

as the land starts rolling, rolling till it hurts

to be here, cold in regulation clothes.

We know the sheriff’s waiting at midrun

to take us back. His car is dumb and warm.

The highway doesn’t rock, it only hums

like a wing of long insults. The worn-down welts

of ancient punishments lead back and forth.



All runaways wear dresses, long green ones,

the color you would think shame was. We scrub

the sidewalks down because it’s shameful work.

Our brushes cut the stone in watered arcs

and in the soak frail outlines shiver clear

a moment, things us kids pressed on the dark

face before it hardened, pale, remembering

delicate old injuries, the spines of names and leaves.



“Indian Boarding School: The Runaways” from Original Fire: Selected and New Poems, © 2003 by Louise Erdrich – HarperCollins Publishers

________________________________________



G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

________________________________________

Sleeping Tabby Cat - carianoff

[END]
---
[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/6/2/2324965/-Morning-Open-Thread-Home-s-the-Place-We-Head-For-in-Our-Sleep?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/

You are viewing proxied material from magical.fish. The copyright of proxied material belongs to its original authors. Any comments or complaints in relation to proxied material should be directed to the original authors of the content concerned. Please see the disclaimer for more details.