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Morning Open Thread: "Do You Friend, Even Now, Know What It Is All About?" [1]
['This Content Is Not Subject To Review Daily Kos Staff Prior To Publication.']
Date: 2025-07-14
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Violence is the last refuge
of the incompetent.”
– Isaac Asimov
________________________________________________________
“We have a legal and moral obligation
to protect people fleeing bombs, bullets
and tyrants, and throughout history
those people have enriched our society.”
– Juliet Stevenson,
long-time campaigner for
refugees – British actress
(Truly, Madly, Deeply and
Bend It Like Beckham)
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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 born in July,
from across America
and around the world,
speaking the truth of
their lives, and what
they have witnessed
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July 13
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1934 – Wole Soyinka born as Akínwándé Olúwolé Babátúndé Sóyíinká to a Yoruba family in Abeokuta, Southern Region, British Nigeria (now Ogun State in Nigeria). Nigerian prolific playwright, novelist, poet, memoirist, and essayist in the English language. After attending a Nigerian college and University College Ibadan, he studied at the University of Leeds in the UK, then worked with the Royal Court Theatre in London. In the 1960s, he was an activist in the Nigerian campaign for independence from British colonial rule. During the 1967 Nigerian Civil War, Soyinka was arrested by the military government of General Yakubu Gowon and put in solitary confinement for two years, for volunteering to be a non-government mediating actor. Much of his writing has been concerned with “the oppressive boot and the irrelevance of the colour of the foot that wears it,” and spent time in exile, during which he taught at several American universities, including Cornell, Emory, and Yale, as well as Cambridge and Oxford in the UK. In 1986, he was the first sub-Saharan African to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. His poetry collections include: Poems from Prison; A Shuttle in the Crypt; Mandela’s Earth and other poems; and Samarkand & Other Markets I Have Known. Soyinka threatened to burn his green card after Trump was elected U.S. President in 2016.
Civilian and Soldier
by Wole Soyinka
My apparition rose from the fall of lead,
Declared, 'I am a civilian.' It only served
To aggravate your fright. For how could I
Have risen, a being of this world, in that hour
Of impartial death! And I thought also: nor is
Your quarrel of this world.
You stood still
For both eternities, and oh I heard the lesson
Of your training sessions, cautioning -
Scorch earth behind you, do not leave
A dubious neutral to the rear. Reiteration
Of my civilian quandary, burrowing earth
From the lead festival of your more eager friends
Worked the worse on your confusion, and when
You brought the gun to bear on me, and death
Twitched me gently in the eye, your plight
And all of you came clear to me.
I hope some day
Intent upon my trade of living, to be checked
In stride by your apparition in a trench,
Signalling, I am a soldier. No hesitation then
But I shall shoot you clean and fair
With meat and bread, a gourd of wine
A bunch of breasts from either arm, and that
Lone question - do you friend, even now, know
What it is all about?
“Civilian and Soldier” from Selected Poems, © 2002 by Wole Soyinka – Methuen Publishing
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July 14
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1912 – Woody Guthrie born as Woodrow Wilson Guthrie in Okemeh, Oklahoma. After a series of bad real estate deals, his father left the family and went to Texas to work off debts. When Woody was 14, his mother, afflicted with Huntington’s disease, was misdiagnosed as mentally ill, and committed to Oklahoma Hospital for the Insane. The Guthrie children were left fending for themselves. Woody worked odd jobs, or played a harmonica and sang for food and money. He dropped out of high school in his senior year before graduation, but remained an avid reader. His mother died in the mental hospital in 1930. During the Dust Bowl years, Guthrie migrated to California looking for work. He partnered with Maxine “Lefty Lou” Crissman on the “Woody and Lefty Lou Show” on the radio, but were fired after the Soviet Union signed a non-aggression pact with Germany in 1939. He, Pete Seeger, Will Geer, and others went to New York City. In February 1940, Guthrie wrote his most famous song “This Land Is Your Land.” His autobiography, Bound for Glory, was published in 1943. He served in the U.S. Merchant Marine during WWII. By the late 1940s, Guthrie started showing symptoms of Huntington’s disease, but like his mother, he was misdiagnosed. He returned to California, and lived at the Theatricum Botanicum, an outdoor theatre founded and owned by Will Geer. His arm was badly burned in a fire, leaving him unable to play his guitar. Increasingly debilitated by Huntington’s, Guthrie was hospitalized at a series of psychiatric hospitals from 1956 until his death at age 55 in October 1967.
Deportee (aka Plane Wreck at Los Gatos)
by Woody Guthrie
The crops are all in and the peaches are rotting
The oranges are filed in their creosote dumps
They're flying 'em back to the Mexico border
To take all their money to wade back again
Chorus:
Goodbye to my Juan, farewell Roselita
Adios mes amigos, Jesus e Maria
You won't have a name when you ride the big airplane
All they will call you will be deportees
My father's own father, he waded that river
They took all the money he made in his life
It's six hundred miles to the Mexico border
And they chased them like rustlers, like outlaws, like thieves
Chorus
,
The skyplane caught fire over Los Gatos Canyon
The great ball of fire it shook all our hills
Who are these dear friends who are falling like dry leaves?
Radio said, "They are just deportees"
Chorus
,
“Deportee” © 1961 by Woody Guthrie Publications, Inc & TRO Ludlow Music Inc
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1926 – Himayat Ali Shair born in Augangabad, Hyderabad Deccan, British India; Pakistani Urdu language poet, author, film song lyricist, actor, and radio drama artist. He worked for All India Radio before migrating to Pakistan in 1951. His first poetry book Aag Main Phool (Today I Am a Flower) was published in 1956 and was honored with the Presidential Award in 1958. Two of his film songs earned Nigar Awards. In 1966, Shair produced and directed Lori (Lullaby song) starring Zeba, Santosh Kumar, and Muhammad Ali (not the American boxer). Shair also taught Urdu Literature at Sindh University (1976-1987). He and his wife frequently visited their adult children and their families in Toronto Canada, and both of them died there. She died of cancer in 2001, and he died of a heart attack at age 93 in July 2019.
A Lament for the Motherland
by Himayat Ali Shair
“The vultures sitting over my body
Are snatching every piece of my meat
My eyes, the nest of beautiful dreams
My tongue, the mirror of pearl-like words
My arms, the guarantors of the interpretation of dreams
My heart, in which every impossible, becomes possible
My spirit is watching this whole spectacle
Thinking
Was this entire game
(My corpse over the table-cloth of savages)
Meant for the pleasures of eating and drinking?”
“Madar-e-Vatan Ka Nauha” (“A Lament for the Motherland”), written in 1958 in response to the first military coup in Pakistan, led by the army’s Commander-in-Chief Ayub Khan. It was published in the poet’s complete collection Kuliyat-e-Shair, © 2007
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July 15
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1906 – Richard Armour born in San Pedro, California; prolific American poet and prose writer, best known for his short light verse. He studied with Shakespearean scholar George Lyman Kittredge at Harvard, and earned a PhD in English philology, and later was an English professor at Scripps College and Claremont Graduate University. Many of his short verses were published in newspaper Sunday supplements in his feature Armour’s Armory. A number of Armour poems have frequently been misattributed to Ogden Nash. His satirical books ranged from Twisted Tales from Shakespeare to his It All Started With… fractured history series (i.e. It All Started With Eve). His poetry collections include: Golf bawls; The medical muse, or what to do when the patient comes; An armoury of light verse; and The spouse in the house.
Congress
by Richard Armour
Politics, it seems to me,
For years, or all too long,
Has been concerned with right or left
Instead of right or wrong.
“Congress” from Light Armour, © 1971 by Richard Armour – McGraw-Hill revised edition
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1924 – Bub Bridger born as Noeline Edith Bridger of Ngāti Kahungunu (Maori), Irish, and English ancestry, in Napier, New Zealand. New Zealand poet, short story writer, radio and TV scriptwriter, and actor, who often performed her own work. She left school before completing high school, and worked in local factories before moving to Wellington, where she worked as a clerk. After her marriage failed, she raised her children on her own. Though she loved reading and writing from an early age, it was not until she took a course in creative writing at the age of 50 that she began writing for publication. Her first published story “The Stallion” was featured in the New Zealand Listener, a weekly magazine, in 1975. She performed with the Hens’ Teeth Women’s Comedy Company (1988-2001). Her stories have been anthologized. Her best-known poetry collection is Wild Daisies: The Best of Bub Bridger. She died at age 85 in December 2009.
Blatant Resistance
by Bub Bridger
I have a new scarlet coat and
I look like a fire engine
And I don’t give a damn
One should grow old gracefully
Somebody said – I don’t know who
But I’ve heard it all my life and
So you have to but to hell with that
I refuse to grow old anyway
But reluctantly and bold as brass
And when my arthritis bites in all
My bones and sleep sulks outside
My bedroom window in the dark
I just toss and turn and scratch
And swear the hours away I’m not
Growing older – it’s the stupid
Betrayal of bones and flesh
That makes me feel this way but
Look at me now with springs in
My heels and the wind in my hair
Any moment I’ll start whistling
And might even dance you a jig
And stop all the traffic along the
Quay wearing my new scarlet coat
And looking like a fire engine
“Blatant Resistance” from Up Here on the Hill, © 1989 by Bub Bridger
– Mallinson Rendel Publishers
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1985 – Liz Howard grew up in Chapleau, Northern Ontario, Canada; Canadian writer and poet of mixed settler and Anishinaabe heritage. She studied cognitive neuroscience and earned an Honours Bachelor of Science with High Distinction from the University of Toronto, then earned an MFA in Creative Writing from the University of Guelph. Her debut collection, Infinite Citizen of the Shaking Tent, won the 2016 Griffin Poetry Prize, the first time the prize was awarded to a debut collection. It was also shortlisted for the 2015 Governor General’s Award for Poetry. She has since published a second collection, Letters in a Bruised Cosmos. Howard now makes her home in Toronto.
Excerpt from
True Value
by Liz Howard
The sky was never my court date.
If I died once. If I left the body.
Habeas corpus.
This is not my grave.
The value in a dead woman
is that she cannot be killed
again or cross-examined.
The value in being the dead
woman at trial is the Crown
doesn’t represent you
regardless.
The value in being
dead is that it’s impolite
to speak ill
of you.
What is called
wellness,
victim-witness?
A swab taken
of every orifice.
Were there any
identifying marks?
Were you in fact
on the moon
that night,
Miss Howard?
Did you make a choice?
I made a cut—it released something.
I broke the line
‘True Value” from Letters in a Bruised Cosmos, © 2021 by Liz Howard – McClelland & Stewart Books
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July 16
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1919 – Mari Evans born in Toledo, Ohio; African-American poet, writer, and dramatist associated with the Black Arts Movement of the 60s and 70s. Her mother died when she was seven years old, and her father encouraged her to write. In 1939, she enrolled at the University of Toledo, majoring in fashion design, but left in 1941 without earning a degree, to pursue a career as a jazz musician. She moved to Indianapolis, where she earned a living working for the Indiana Housing Authority before joining the U.S. Civil Service. Her first poetry collection, Where is All the Music?, didn’t attract much attention, but her second collection, I Am a Black Woman, became her best-known work. She was later associated with the Black Arts Movement, along with Amiri Baraka, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nikki Giovanni, Etheridge Knight, and Sonia Sanchez, among others. She was also a social justice activist, in favor of prison reform and ending the death penalty, and a critic of racism. She became a writer-in-residence at several American universities, and produced, wrote, and directed The Black Experience, a weekly television program for WTTV in Indianapolis. In 1975, Evans received an honorary doctorate from Marian College, and taught at Purdue, Cornell, and Spelman College, among others. Her poetry collection Nightstar was published in 1981, and A Dark and Splendid Mass appeared in 1992. Mari Evans died at age 97 in March 2017.
If You Have Had Your Midnights
by Mari Evans
if you have had
your midnights
and they have drenched
your barren guts
with tears
I sing you sunrise
and love
and someone to touch
“If You Have Had Your Midnights” from Continuum: New and Selected Poems, © 2007 and 2014 by Mari Evans – Just Us Books, Inc.
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1947 – Linda Hogan born in Denver, Colorado; American Chickasaw poet, novelist, storyteller, playwright, essayist, and environmentalist. She has taught at the University of Colorado and the Indigenous Education Institute. Hogan was honored with the 1994 Lannan Literary Award for Poetry, and in 2016 with the Thoreau Prize from PEN. Her poetry collections include: Calling Myself Home; Eclipse (1983); Seeing Through the Sun, winner of the Before Columbus Foundation’s American Book Award; Savings; The Book of Medicines; and Dark. Sweet. New and Selected Poems.
Arctic Night, Lights Across the Sky
by Linda Hogan
We are curved together,
body to body, cell to cell,
arm over another.
The world is the bed for the cold night,
one cat curled in the bend of a knee,
dog at the feet,
my hand in yours, we are embraced
in animal presence, warmth,
the sea outside sounding
winter waves, one arriving after another
from the mystery far out
where in the depths of the sea
are other beings
that create their own light,
this world all one heartbeat.
“Arctic Night, Lights Across the Sky” from A History of Kindness, © 2020 by Linda Hogan – Torrey House Press
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July 17
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1914 – James Purdy born as James Otis Purdy in Hicksville, Ohio, but grew up in Findlay, Ohio. American novelist, short-story writer, playwright, and poet. His parents went through a bitter divorce after his father lost most of his money in bad investments, and his mother turned the family home into a boarding house. Purdy earned a Bachelor of Arts teaching degree in French from Bowling Green State College in 1935, where he became part of the Bohemian and Jazz scenes. After graduating, he taught French at the Greenbrier Military School in West Virginia. Purdy earned a master's degree in English in 1937 from the University of Chicago. In May, 1941, he joined the U.S. Army. After his military service, he studied Spanish at the University of Chicago and the University of Puebla in Mexico, then taught English for a year in Cuba, before returning to the U.S., where he taught Spanish at Lawrence College in Wisconsin. He spent the later years of his life living in Brooklyn Heights in New York. Though his writing covered a wide range of subjects, his 1967 novel Eustace Chisholm and the Works forever after labeled him a “homosexual writer” and limited his future success, in spite of the praise he received from critics and other writers like British author Edith Sitwell, who was a benefactor and champion of his work, and Gore Vidal. He published two major poetry collections: Lessons and Complaints and The Brooklyn Branding Parlors. James Purdy died at age 94 in March 2009. He was cremated and his ashes were sent to be buried next to Edith Sitwell in Northamptonshire, England.
Do You Wonder Why I Am Sleepy
by James Purdy
Last night it was already half past eleven
the doorbell rang.
Paul a young hustler barely 19
but with
body and face of a 14-year old
stood on my threshold.
Yes, I let him in
though I know he is
a profiteer.
Our relation is tense and tentative.
I never was one of his clients.
I know I should have sent him away,
but he went on sitting on the edge of the bed.
As I lay trying to sleep
he caressed and stroked my legs and feet.
I smiled and closed my eyes.
There followed a deep all-encompassing silence.
Suddenly without warning he flew away
like a little bird.
He was afraid
because I asked nothing of him.
“Do You Wonder Why I Am Sleepy” from Collected Poems, by James Purdy, © 1990– Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep
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July 18
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1920 – Zheng Min born in Beijing, China; Chinese scholar and modernist poet. She earned a master’s in literature and philosophy from Brown University in 1952. She returned to China in 1955 and taught at the Beijing Normal University from 1960 until her retirement. Nine Leaves, a collection of poetry by nine poets from the 1940s, was published in 1981. Zheng Min was the last living poet from the Nine Leaves circle, a transitional poet between modern and contemporary poetry in China. She died at age 101 in January 2022.
Golden Rice Sheaves
by Zheng Min
Golden rice stands in sheaves
in the freshly cut autumn field.
I think of many exhausted mothers and see
beautiful, wrinkled faces along the road at dusk.
This is the day of harvest, a full moon hangs
atop the towering trees
and in the twilight, distant mountains
circling my heart.
No statues can ever be more solemn.
Shouldering great weariness, you
lower your head in thought
in the far-reaching field of autumn.
Silence. Silence. History is but a small
stream flowing under your feet.
And you—you just stand there, your thought
becoming a thought of the human race.
“Golden Rice Sheaves” © by Zheng Ming, was published in the Nine Leaves anthology in 1981 – this translation is by Ming Di, © 2021
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1990 ― Xu Lizhi, Chinese poet and factory worker born in Jieyang in Guangdong Province to a farming family. He was interested in reading and learning, but had very limited access to books. After his test scores on the national entrance exams for college for too low to gain admission, he became depressed. In July 2010, he went to Shenzhen, a larger city in his province which is a center for technology and manufacturing. He went to work for Hon Hai, multinational electronics manufacturer. In October, 2010 while recovering from an appendectomy, he posted one of his poems on his blog for the first time. He had a three-year contract at Hon Hai, but working conditions were poor, causing coughing, headaches, and trouble sleeping. He wrote for a local newspaper, and published poems and reviews online and in magazines. Xu tried to find other work, applying for jobs in libraries, but wasn’t hired. In September 2014, at age 24, he committed suicide by jumping off a building. His blog posted a new message after his death, and his friends published a collection of his poems, leading to some of them being translated into English.
Waiting in Line
by Xu Lizhi
The packed crowds in this city
crawl up and down the streets
crawl up and down the pedestrian bridges, into the subway
crawl up and down this earth
one lap around is one life
this fire-driven fire-singed species
busy from birth to death
only at the moment of death do they not cut in line
they lower their heads, follow in order
and burrow back into their mothers’ wombs
“Waiting in Line” by Xu Lizhi, from Iron Moon: An Anthology of Chinese Migrant Worker Poetry, translation © 2016 by Eleanor Goodman – White Pine Press 2017
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July 19
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1893 ― Vladimir Mayakovsky born in Baghdati, Georgia, at the edge of the Ajameti forest. A Russian Soviet poet, playwright, artist, and actor, by 1917 he was already a prominent member of the Russian Futurist movement, and a co-signer of its manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. Mayakovsky produced a large body of work including 24 poetry books, five plays, appearances as an actor in films, editing the art journal LEF, and producing agitprop posters supporting the Communist Party during the Russian Civil War (1917–1922). He also wrote My Discovery of America, a combination of travelogue, sketches, and poems, and How to Make Verse, his views on individual artistic integrity and the demands of committed Marxist populism. In his last years, he completed The Bedbug and The Bathhouse, two plays satirizing bureaucratic stupidity and opportunism. He shot himself at age 37 on April 14, 1930, after a dispute with his current lover, actress Veronica Polonskaya, who was unwilling to leave her husband. He had often spoken to friends about his fear of growing old, and about committing suicide.
Call to Account!
by Vladimir Mayakovsky
The drum of war thunders and thunders.
It calls: thrust iron into the living.
From every country
slave after slave
are thrown onto bayonet steel.
For the sake of what?
The earth shivers
hungry
and stripped.
Mankind is vapourised in a blood bath
only so
someone
somewhere
can get hold of Albania.
Human gangs bound in malice,
blow after blow strikes the world
only for
someone’s vessels
to pass without charge
through the Bosporus.
Soon
the world
won’t have a rib intact.
And its soul will be pulled out.
And trampled down
only for someone,
to lay
their hands on
Mesopotamia.
Why does
a boot
crush the Earth — fissured and rough?
What is above the battles’ sky -
Freedom?
God?
Money!
When will you stand to your full height,
you,
giving them your life?
When will you hurl a question to their faces:
Why are we fighting?
“Call to Account!” was written in 1917 – translation by Lika Galkina with Jasper Goss, 2005
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1938 – Dom Moraes born as Dominic Francis Moraes in Bombay, British India; prolific writer, editor, essayist, poet, documentary maker, traveler, and war correspondent. He was the son of Goan journalist and writer Frank Moraes, who was the first Indian editor of The Times of India, but his mother was ultimately institutionalized for her increasingly violent behavior, so Dom frequently traveled with his father throughout Southeast Asia, Australia, and New Zealand. He began writing poetry at age 12, and his first book, Green Is the Grass, about the sport of cricket, was published when he was 13. He went to the University of Oxford at age 16, and became acquainted with W.H. Auden, Stephen Spender, and the painter Francis Bacon. His first book of poetry, A Beginning, was published when he was 19. He then concentrated on other projects, including conducting one of the first interviews with the 14th Dalai Lama; editing magazines in London, Hong Kong, and New York; writing and directing documentaries for the BBC and ITV; and serving as a war correspondent in Algeria, Israel, and Vietnam. He also worked for a time for the United Nations. Dom Moraes died of a heart attack at age 65 in June 2004.
Mission
by Dom Moraes
Low cloud, the first pass
Made through morning mist, rabbitsfoot
Rubbed, bourbon sucked down
Quickly, vomit on my boots—
The kid pilot’s (only his third mission).
The navigator screeching in derision.
Smoke of their breakfasts below
Like grey unfrightened wings of doves
Slowly flying up from their nests.
The kid pilot pulls on his gloves.
We have to come in low.
Red pointers on the counter come to rest.
The seconds pass: and people turn to smoke
Rising to us like angels from the forest.
“Mission” from Collected Poems 1957-1987, © 1987 by Dom Moraes - Viking Penguin
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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[END]
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