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Morning Open Thread: Through Slit and Crack - The Piercing Ray Only Glanced Me [1]
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Date: 2025-09-08
“The poet speaks to all men of that other life of theirs that they have smothered and forgotten.” – Dame Edith Sitwell , English poet, critic and editor
“Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?” ― Mary Oliver , from “Have You Ever Tried to Enter the Long Black Branches?”
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Thirteen poets born in September,
a changing time which awakens the
senses after August’s bludgeoning
heat, a last burst of color before
the long winter’s grey and white
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September 7
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1885 – Elinor Wylie born in Somerville, New Jersey; American novelist and poet; her first poem to appear in print was “Velvet Shoes,” in Poetry magazine in 1920, followed in 1921 by publication of her collection Nets to Catch the Wind, and Black Armor in 1923, the same year her first novel, Jennifer Lorn, appeared. She was poetry editor of Vanity Fair magazine (1923-1925), and a contributing editor of The New Republic (1926-1928). Other works include the novel The Orphan Angel, and Angels and Earthly Creatures, a book of verse. She suffered from high blood pressure in adulthood, and severe migraines. She died of a stroke in 1928 at age 43.
Pretty Words
by Elinor Wylie
Poets make pets of pretty, docile words:
I love smooth words, like gold-enamelled fish
Which circle slowly with a silken swish,
And tender ones, like downy-feathered birds:
Words shy and dappled, deep-eyed deer in herds,
Come to my hand, and playful if I wish,
Or purring softly at a silver dish,
Blue Persian kittens fed on cream and curds.
I love bright words, words up and singing early;
Words that are luminous in the dark, and sing;
Warm lazy words, white cattle under trees;
I love words opalescent, cool, and pearly,
Like midsummer moths, and honied words like bees,
Gilded and sticky, with a little sting.
“Pretty words” from Collected Poems of Elinor Wylie, published posthumously in 1934 by A.A. Knopf
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1887 – Dame Edith Sitwell born in Scarborough, North Yorkshire UK, into a wealthy, upper-crust family. English poet, critic and editor. Her health problems included a spinal deformity, and she was put into an iron frame. Her parents, particularly her mother, a noted beauty of the day, abandoned her almost entirely. Sitwell became an eccentric, often cruelly mocked for her tall thin appearance, a large and distinctive nose, and her outrageous, flamboyant style of dress. She is best remembered for Façade, an “entertainment” – a recitation of poems with an instrumental accompaniment composed by William Walton, first performed in 1923. She championed Wilfred Owen, whose poetry she edited, and helped to publish after his death. In the 1950s, Marfan syndrome, which inhibits the body’s ability to produce the protein that makes up connective tissue, led to her becoming wheelchair bound. In 1962, she published her final poetry book, The Outcasts, and gave her last poetry reading. She died of cerebral haemorrhage in December, 1964, at age 77. She was cruelly labeled by critic Julian Symons, while she lay dying, as “wearing other people’s bleeding hearts on her own safe sleeve.” That her personal suffering was cloaked and masked, all while she wore her off-putting nose like a badge of honor, seems never to have occurred to him.
Heart and Mind
by Edith Sitwell
Said the Lion to the Lioness–‘When you are amber dust,–
No more a raging fire like the heat of the Sun
(No liking but all lust)–
Remember still the flowering of the amber blood and bone,
The rippling of bright muscles like a sea,
Remember the rose-prickles of bright paws
Though the fire of that sun the heart and the moon-cold bone are one.’
Said the Skeleton lying upon the sands of Time–
‘The great gold planet that is the mourning heat of the Sun
Is greater than all gold, more powerful
Than the tawny body of a Lion that fire consumes
Like all that grows or leaps…so is the heart
More powerful than all dust. Once I was Hercules
Or Samson, strong as the pillars of the seas:
But the flames of the heart consumed me, and the mind
Is but a foolish wind.’
Said the Sun to the Moon– ‘When you are but a lonely white crone,
And I, a dead King in my golden armour somewhere in a dark wood,
Remember only this of our hopeless love
That never till Time is done
Will the fire of the heart and the fire of the mind be one.’
“Heart and Mind” © by Edith Sitwell was published in the July 1944 issue of The Atlantic magazine
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September 8
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1940 – Jack Prelutsky born in Brooklyn, NY; American poet and singer-songwriter , most often writing for children; he has published over 50 poetry collections. Before becoming a writer, he sang in coffee house, and worked odd jobs including driving a cab, moving furniture, busboy, potter, woodworker, and door-to-door salesman. He was appointed as the first U.S. Children’s Laureate by the Poetry Foundation (2006-2008). His many poetry collections include Me I Am; My Dog May Be a Genius; I’ve Lost My Hippopotamus; and Sardines Swim High Across the Sky.
A Dragon’s Lament
by Jack Prelutsky
I’m tired of being a dragon,
Ferocious and brimming with flame,
The cause of unspeakable terror
When anyone mentions my name.
I’m bored with my bad reputation
For being a miserable brute,
And being routinely expected
To brazenly pillage and loot.
I wish that I weren’t repulsive,
Despicable, ruthless, and fierce,
With talons designed to dismember
And fangs finely fashioned to pierce.
I’ve lost my desire for doing
The deeds any dragon should do,
But since I can’t alter my nature,
I guess I’ll just terrify you.
“A Dragon’s Lament” from The Dragons Are Singing Tonight, © 1997 by Jack Prelutsky – Greenwillow Books
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1983 – Sarah Stup born in Frederick, Maryland; American author, poet and essayist, who writes about autism. She has limited motor skills and does not speak. She uses a variety of typing devices to converse and work. Stup has self-published her poetry collection Are Your Eyes Listening?, and two children’s books, Paul and His Beast, and Do-si-Do with Autism. “Writing is my way out of a lonely place where only God knows,” she says. “I feel alive to type. The lid opens and out comes pieces of Sarah, a girl with wings who soars above the place with no hope called autism. I am real when I write. Autism is my prison, but typing is the air of freedom and peace.”
Are Your Eyes Listening?
by Sarah Stup
Are your eyes listening?
That’s what needs to happen to hear my writing voice. Because of autism, the thief of politeness and friendship, I have no sounding voice.
By typing words I can play with my life and stretch from my world to yours. I become a real person when my words try to reach out to you without my weird body scaring you away. Then I am alive.
With writing I reach out to try, and autism or hate or walls of doubt can’t hold me. I am pleased to be typing away — typing away loneliness, typing away silence, using paper to hug you and slap you and join you.
Click, click, clicking keys are my heartbeat. Listen with your eyes.
“Are Your Eyes Listening?” from Are Your Eyes Listening?, © 2007 by Sarah Stup – self-published
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September 9
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1868 – Mary Hunter Austin born Carlinville, Illinois; prolific American novelist, essayist, poet, short story writer, playwright, and a pioneering writer about nature in the U.S. Southwest. Her classic book, The Land of Little Rain (1903), describes the fauna, flora, people and their mysticism and spirituality, in the region between the High Sierra and the Mojave Desert of Southern California. Her book The American Rhythm, which she called a “re-expression” of Native American poems and songs, was part of her efforts to preserve American Indian culture. She died at age 65 in August 1934.
Hunting Weather
by Mary Hunter Austin
When misty, misty mornings come,
When wild geese low are flying,
And down along the reedy marsh
The mallard drakes are crying;
When cattle leave the highest hills,
And blackbirds flock together --
By all these signs the hunter knows
Has come good hunting weather.
“Hunting Weather” from The Road to the Spring: Collected Poems, © 1930 by Mary Hunter Austin/ © 2014 by Syracuse University Press
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1934 – Sonia Sanchez born as Wilsonia Driver in Birmingham, Alabama; influential African American poet, author, teacher, and activist, associated with the Black Arts movement. She was involved in the Civil Rights Movement, and briefly joined the Nation of Islam in the 1970s, but left because of their views on women’s rights. Sanchez was a pioneer in developing Black Studies courses, including a class in African American women’s literature. She has published over a dozen books of poetry, as well as short stories and children’s books. Her poetry collections include Homecoming; We a BaddDDD People; Shake Loose My Skin; and Does Your House Have Lions? Sanchez has been honored with the Robert Frost Medal and the Langston Hughes Poetry Award. She was the first Poet Laureate of the city of Philadelphia (2012-2014).
This Is Not a Small Voice
by Sonia Sanchez
This is not a small voice
you hear this is a large
voice coming out of these cities.
This is the voice of LaTanya.
Kadesha. Shaniqua. This
is the voice of Antoine.
Darryl. Shaquille.
Running over waters
navigating the hallways
of our schools spilling out
on the corners of our cities and
no epitaphs spill out of their river
mouths.
This is not a small love
you hear this is a large
love, a passion for kissing learning
on its face.
This is a love that crowns the feet
with hands
that nourishes, conceives, feels the
water sails
mends the children,
folds them inside our history
where they
toast more than the flesh
where they suck the bones of the
alphabet
and spit out closed vowels.
This is a love colored with iron
and lace.
This is a love initialed Black
Genius.
This is not a small voice
you hear.
“This Is Not a Small Voice” from Wounded in the House of a Friend, © 1995 by Sonia Sanchez – Beacon Press
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September 10
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1886 – Hilda Dolittle born in Bethlehem, PA. She used the pen name H.D.; American poet and novelist, known for avant-garde poetry, literary editor of The Egoist journal during WWI. H.D. frequently used Greek mythology and insights from psychoanalysis in her work. She was the only daughter among five sons in the family of a professor of astronomy and a Moravian mother with a passion for music. The family moved to Philadelphia when her father joined the faculty of the University of Pennsylvania in 1896. She met Ezra Pound when she was 15, and they became secretly engaged, but her father strongly disapproved of Pound, and their romance fizzled when he moved to Europe in 1908. By 1911, H.D. was touring Europe, and there she remained, in spite of her parents’ objections – though they did not cut off their financial support. She settled in London, and married writer Richard Aldington. Then she gave birth to a stillborn child, and Aldington went to war. He came home a traumatized and greatly changed man. The marriage foundered. H.D. met the wealthy English novelist Bryher (Annie Winifred Ellerman), who became the great love of her life. Though they both were involved in many affairs and even marriages, Bryher remained the most constant and steadying influence in H.D.’s life. H.D. lived her last years in Switzerland. She suffered a stroke in July 1961, and died in September 1961 at age 75. Her poetry collections include Sea Garden; Hymen; Hippolytus Temporizes; The Wall Do Not Fall; and Helen in Eqypt.
Helen
by H.D.
All Greece hates
the still eyes in the white face,
the lustre as of olives
where she stands,
and the white hands.
All Greece reviles
the wan face when she smiles,
hating it deeper still
when it grows wan and white,
remembering past enchantments
and past ills.
Greece sees, unmoved,
God’s daughter, born of love,
the beauty of cool feet
and slenderest knees,
could love indeed the maid,
only if she were laid,
white ash amid funereal cypresses.
“Helen” from Collected Poems 1912-1944, © 1982 by the Estate of Hilda Dolittle – New Directions, Eighth Printing
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1890 – Franz Werfel born in Prague, in what was then Bohemia; Czech-German Expressionist Jewish playwright, poet, and novelist. In 1933, Werfel was forced to leave the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1933. His books were burned by the Nazis. Werfel left Austria after the Anschluss in 1938 and went to France. After the German invasion, Werfel had flee again in 1940. He was inspired to write his best-known book, The Song of Bernadette, because he found solace in Lourdes, long a place of pilgrimage for Roman Catholics, while escaping from France. He crossed the Pyrenees on foot into Spain, then reached Portugal, and boarded a ship bound for New York. He settled in Los Angeles among other German and Austrian refugees, where he died of heart failure at age 54 in 1945.
Morning Hymn
by Franz Werfel
I am not dead. Through slit and crack
The piercing ray only glanced me,
And in the glow of self-possession
I survive once more once again.
Through open shutters with waves surges
A blue that does not look blue to me.
Like a baby the air’s nursed itself
Full of the sun’s milk that melts down.
On the sea a steamer’s whistle
Blows like a rutting stag.
From mountains flashes a secret army’s
Visible-invisible birth.
I am not dead. I’d like to shout loud
On this day of who gets mercy,
That today each of my sails fills
Themselves once more once again.
“Morning Hymn” from Poems, © 1945 by Franz Werfel and translator Edith Abercrombie Snow – Princeton University Press – reissued by Nabu Press in 2011
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1935 – Mary Oliver born in Maple Heights, Ohio, a suburb of Cleveland; prolific and popular American poet and essayist. She won the 1992 National Book Award for her New and Selected Poems, and the 1984 Pulitzer Prize for American Primitive. She died of lymphoma at age 83 in January 2019. Among her many poetry collections are Sleeping in the Forest; Why I Wake Early; Blue Iris; A Thousand Mornings; Dog Songs; and Blue Horses
Morning
by Mary Oliver
Salt shining behind its glass cylinder.
Milk in a blue bowl. The yellow linoleum.
The cat stretching her black body from the pillow.
The way she makes her curvaceous response to the small, kind gesture.
Then laps the bowl clean.
Then wants to go out into the world
where she leaps lightly and for no apparent reason across the lawn,
then sits, perfectly still, in the grass.
I watch her a little while, thinking:
what more could I do with wild words?
I stand in the cold kitchen, bowing down to her.
I stand in the cold kitchen, everything wonderful around me.
“Morning” from New and Selected Poems, Volume One © 2004 by Mary Oliver –
Beacon Press
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September 11
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1941 – Miguel Algarín born in Santurce, Puerto Rico, who came to New York City in the 1950s; American poet, writer, anthologist, translator, and co-founder of the Nuyorican Poets Café in 1973, a place where Puerto Rican and African-American poets and playwrights could present their work.
Elections and . . . : second part (1985)
by Miguel Algarín
"People go out to vote
but the guerrillas obstruct them."
That's what's said on Channel 4 in Manhattan.
On the 28th of March we're made to understand
that Democracy is being obstructed
by the left, "the guerrillas
fire against the Salvadoran people,"
but that chaos was invented in the White House
and it doesn't afflict the public in Chatatenango,
there aren't any guarantees
for the public to take hold of!
although some go out and vote pretending
that the machinery is not fraudulent,
that Duarte doesn't repress,
not withstanding that it's written in every man's bible,
that in El Salvador Christ has not yet
freed his folk.
"Elections and . . . : second part (1985)" from Survival Supervivencia, © 2009 by Miguel Algarin - Arte Público Press
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1952 – Davidson Garrett born in Shreveport, Louisiana, son of a hardware salesman and a florist; American poet, actor, spoken word playwright/performer, and New York City taxi driver. He drove a yellow taxicab from 1978 to 2018 while writing poetry and appearing on the stage and in soap operas like All My Children, As the World Turns, and The Guiding Light, as well as TV series, including The Sopranos, Law and Order, and Spin City. His spoken word plays include Conspiracy Theory: The Mysterious Death of Dorothy Kilgallen and The Tragedy of MacCheney. His poetry collections include: To Tell The Truth I Wanted To Be Kitty Carlisle; King Lear of the Taxi: Musings of a New York City Actor/Taxi Driver; What Happened to The Man Who Taught Me Beowulf?; and Arias of a Rhapsodic Spirit.
Freudian Slipcover
by Davidson Garrett
Have you heard the barker of Seville?
Canine basso roughing up Rossini
under limbs of fragrant orange trees
swaying to minor keys of rhythmic traffic.
No great Figaro: but figure why
a loose ended howler huddled on all fours?
.
Could it be Mama, Papa, Aunt Rosina
conducting his outrageous bow-wows
from an excavated orchestra pit
inside the psychic cavern of a lost mind?
.
They say fast roulades are best sung
after rigorous hours of arpeggio practice.
Or is it in the lungs, these embellishments
of exploding notes on familial themes?
.
You know the tune, “Largo al factorum.”
Ruff-ruff-ruff-ruff—instead of tra-la-la-la.
.
Each day around noon, bark with him,
the aria of the disillusioned dog.
Afterward, hot bones will be sold—
with or without relish
.
“Freudian Slipcover” © 2018 by Davidson Garrett appeared online at The Paddock Review in January 2018
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September 12
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1942 – Michael Ondaatje born in Colombo, Sri Lanka; Canadian novelist, poet, essayist, editor, and filmmaker. He emigrated to England in 1954, attended Dulwich College, then moved to Montreal Canada. Best known for his novel, The English Patient, which won the Man Booker Prize.
Wells II
by Michael Ondaatje
The last Sinhala word I lost
was vatura.
The word for water.
Forest water. The water in a kiss. The tears
I gave to my ayah Rosalin on leaving
the first home of my life.
More water for her than any other
that fled my eyes again
this year, remembering her,
a lost almost-mother in those years
of thirsty love.
No photograph of her, no meeting
since the age of eleven,
not even knowledge of her grave.
Who abandoned who, I wonder now.
“Wells II” from A Year of Last Things, © 2024 by Michael Ondaatje – Borzoi/Alfred A. Knopf
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September 13
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1916 – Roald Dahl was born in Cardiff, Wales, to Norwegian emigrant parents; British Novelist, short-story writer, screenwriter, children’s author, and poet, who lived most of his life in England. Known for Tales of the Unexpected (both the anthology and the TV series); James and the Giant Peach; Matilda; and Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. Roald Dahl died at age 74 of myelodysplastic syndrome, a rare blood cancer, in November 1990. Children often leave toys or flowers on his grave in Great Missenden, in the Chiltern Hills of Buckinghamshire
Hey diddle diddle
by Roald Dahl
Hey diddle diddle
We're all on the fiddle
And never get up until noon.
We only take cash
Which we carefully stash
And we work by the light of the moon.
“Hey diddle diddle” from Rhyme Stew, by Roald Dahl – 2024 edition – Penguin Books
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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!
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