Good Morning!

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“If you see someone without
a smile, give them yours.”
― Dolly Parton

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“Learning to stand in somebody else’s
shoes, to see through their eyes, that’s
how peace begins. And it’s up to you to
make that happen. Empathy is a quality
of character that can change the world.”
— Barack Obama, 44^th U.S. President
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“One of the criticisms I’ve faced over the
years is that I’m not aggressive enough or
assertive enough or maybe somehow because
I’m empathetic, it means I’m weak. I totally
rebel against that. I refuse to believe that you
cannot be both compassionate and strong.”
— Jacinda Ardern,
40th New Zealand Prime Minister

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13 Poets born this week,
muses of old moons, old loves,
disasters natural and man-made,
lullabies amidst horrors, and
21^st century recycling

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June 23

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1888 – Anna Akhmatova born as Anna Andreyevna Gorenko near Odessa, Ukraine, but grew up in Tsarskoye Selo (now Pushkin) near St. Petersburg. One of the most acclaimed and significant Russian poets of the 20^th century, she remained in the USSR even after her work was condemned and censored by Stalinist authorities. She wrote in secret about the horrors of living under Stalin. Requiem, her interconnected poems about Stalin’s Great Purge, is considered her masterwork.  Her first husband was executed by the Soviet secret police, and her son spent many years in a Gulag. Requiem, written and rewritten between 1935 and 1961, was published in Germany in 1963. In 1987, Requiem was finally published in Russia, 21 years after her death at age 76.

You Will Hear Thunder

by Anna Akhmatova

You will hear thunder and remember me,
And think: she wanted storms. The rim
Of the sky will be the colour of hard crimson,
And your heart, as it was then, will be on fire.

That day in Moscow, it will all come true,
when, for the last time, I take my leave,
And hasten to the heights that I have longed for,
Leaving my shadow still to be with you.

“You Will Hear Thunder” from The Complete Poems of Anna Akhmatova – Zephyr Press, 2020 edition

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1889 – Miki Rofū pen name of Miki Masao born in Tatsuno, Hyōgo, Japan; Japanese symbolist poet, children’s book author, songwriter, essayist, and a frequent contributor to the poetry magazine Mirai (Future) and the children’s magazine Shinjushima (Pearl Island). His parents divorced when he was five, and he grew up with his grandfather. At age 17, he published his first collection of haiku and tankas. At 20, he attracted attention for his free verse collection Haien (Abandoned Garden). He worked in Kamiso, Hokkaido (1916-1924) in a Trappist monastery as a teacher, and became a Catholic. Rofū was hit by a taxi in December 1964, and died of head injuries at age 75. His poetry collections include: Sabishiki akebono (Lonely Dawn); Ryōshin (Parents); and Kami to hito (Gods and Men).

After the kiss

by Miki Rofū

‘Are you asleep?’
‘No,’ you say.

Flowers in May
Flowering at noon.

In the lakeside grass
Under the sun,
‘I could close my eyes
And die here,’ you say.

“After the Kiss” by Miki Rofū from The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, translated by Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite – Penguin Classics, 2009 revised edition

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1933 – Robert Sward born to a Jewish family in Chicago, Illinois; American poet and novelist. At age 15, Sward wrote rhyming couplets in notes to fellow members of the Semcos, Chicago a street gang. He graduated from high school at 17, and quit his job as a soda jerk to join the U.S. Navy. In 1952, he was aboard an amphibious ship in a combat zone during the Korean War. One of his duties was running the ship’s library.  He was a Fulbright Scholar, and his poetry book, Uncle Dog & Other Poems, was published in 1962. He taught at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and at the University of Victoria in Canada, where he also worked for the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. He then taught at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and was Poet Laureate of Santa Cruz County (2016-2018).  He died at age 78 in February 2022. His poetry collections include: Kissing the Dancer; Vancouver Island Poems; Half a Life’s History; Three Dogs and a Parrot; Heavenly Sex; and God is in the Cracks.

Attic by the River

by Robert Sward

I walk by the used river
each day
past an old attic
(no house, the attic only
beech trees growing through it)
in a field. The river smells
of barges, rotting timbers
waterskiers’ boats, lovers
the very sun upon it.
Rivers age in Connecticut,
grow feeble, irritable
and complain like old women.
The charred attic, too,
complains
bears ill-will toward people,
weeps
and cries, and talks aloud
on certain evenings
to the sea.

“Attic by the River” from Four Incarnations: New & Selected Poems (1957-1991)

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June 24

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1842 – Ambrose Bierce born in a log cabin at Horse Cave Creek in Meigs County, Ohio; American short story writer, journalist, poet, and Civil War Union Army veteran. Best known for his lexicon The Devil’s Dictionary and his short story “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” widely regarded as one of the greatest short stories ever written. Bierce left home at age 15 to become a printer’s devil (apprentice) at The Northern Indianan, an abolitionist newspaper. He enlisted in the 9th Indiana Infantry during the American Civil War. He was in the Battle of Rich Mountain, where he rescued a wounded comrade while under fire. He also fought at the Battle of Shiloh, which inspired several short stories, and a memoir, “What I Saw of Shiloh.” In April 1863, he became a staff officer, but in June 1864, at the Battle of Kennesaw Mountain, he was wounded, and a traumatic brain injury kept him on furlough for months before returning to action. He was discharged from the army in January 1865. In 1866, he joined an inspection tour of military outposts across the U.S. He resigned when they arrived in San Francisco, and remained in the city for many years. He gained fame as a contributor to The Argonaut, the Overland Monthly, The Californian, and The Wasp, where he was also an editor. He was also a crime reporter for The San Francisco News Letter. Bierce lived in England (1872-1875), then returned to San Francisco, and wrote a column for the San Francisco Examiner.  In 1896, he went to Washington DC to expose a plot to quietly pass a bill in Congress that would excuse the Union Pacific and Central Pacific railroads from repaying $130 million in low-interest government loans made to them to build the transcontinental railroad. Collis Huntington, the main mover behind the plot, confronted Bierce on the Capitol steps and told him to name his price for keeping quiet. Bierce’s answer was published in newspapers across the country: “My price is one hundred thirty million dollars. If, when you are ready to pay, I happen to be out of town, you may hand it over to my friend, the Treasurer of the United States.” In October 1913, Bierce, age 71, went to Ciudad Juárez, to become an observer with Pancho Villa’s revolutionary army. He witnessed the Battle of Tierra Blanca. Bierce’s last known communication, a letter to a friend dated December 26, 1913, said “As to me, I leave here tomorrow for an unknown destination.” He then vanished without a trace, one of the most famous unsolved disappearances in American history.

With a Book

by Ambrose Bierce

Words shouting, singing, smiling, frowning—
Sense lacking.
Ah, nothing, more obscure than Browning,
Save blacking.

“With a Book” from The Collected Writings of Ambrose Bierce, edited by Clifton Fadiman – Citadel press, 2001 edition

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1969 – Susan Nalugwa Kiguli born in Luweero, Uganda; Ugandan poet and literary scholar. She earned a Master of Science in literary linguistics for teaching English and literature from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, then a PhD in English from the University of Leeds. She teaches literature at Makerere University, and is a founding member of FEMRITE, the Uganda Women Writers’ Association. She has published several papers on oral poetry and songs in Uganda and South Africa. Her poetry collections include: The African Saga, winner of the 1999 National Book Trust of Uganda Poetry Award, and Home floats in the Distance. Kiguli also contributed poems to Michael’s Eyes: The War against the Ugandan Child, and her poems were featured in the photography book by David Pluth and Pierre-Francois Didek, Eye of the Storm: A Photographic Journey Across Uganda.

Mothers Sing a Lullaby

by Susan Nalugwa Kiguli

Mothers sing a lullaby
As the dark descends on trees
Shutting out shadows.
The sensuous voices swish and swirl
Around shrubs and overgrown grass
Hiding mountains of decapitated dead
And the glint of machetes
That slashed shrieking throats.

In these camps without happiness
Mothers maintain the melody of life
Capturing wistful wind
To sing strength into the souls of children
Who have never known
The taste of morning porridge
Or heard the chirrup of crickets in the evenings.

Mothers sing a lullaby
For the staring faces
Who cringe at the sound of footsteps
Whose playmates are grinning skeletons.

Mothers become a lullaby
Silencing the sirens of sorrow
Restoring compassion to the nation.

“Mothers Sing a Lullaby” from Weeping Lands and Other Poems, © 2023 by Susan Nalugwa Kiguli, bilingual English/Italian edition – Interlinea

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June 25

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1903 – George Orwell born as Eric Arthur Blair in Motihari, British India; English novelist, essayist, journalist, poet, and critic. His father was a Sub-Deputy Opium Agent in the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service, overseeing the production and storage of opium for sale to China. His mother brought the children back to England when Eric was a year old. His father returned in 1912. The family, unable to pay the full fees for his schooling, sent him on scholarship to St. Cyprian’s, a boys’ school which he hated. He was a King’s Scholar at Eton College (1917-1921), then went Burma to join the India Imperial Police. After attending police training school in Mandalay, he was appointed as an assistant district superintendent, posted to a frontier outpost, then to a port city near Rangoon. The Burmese were hostile toward the British, but Blair was also alienated from his fellow countrymen because he was interested in Burmese culture, became fluent in Burmese, and spent more time reading than socializing. In 1926, he contracted dengue fever, and returned to England. His novel Burmese Days, and his essay “Shooting an Elephant” came out of his experiences. He lived in London until 1928, then moved to Paris. Back in England in 1929, he wrote reviews and essays, and did private tutoring. By 1932, he was teaching at a boys’ school, but finally found a publisher and chose the pen name of George Orwell. His Down and Out in Paris and London was published in 1933 to favorable reviews. In 1936, he became a corporal with a contingent of the Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification in the Spanish Civil War, and became disillusioned with communism. In 1937, he was wounded in the throat, and declared medically unfit for service. Back in England, he spent time in a sanatorium. Due to his health, he was rejected for military service during WWII, but joined the British Home Guard, then worked for the BBC on cultural broadcasts to India until 1943, when he began work on Animal Farm, published in 1945. In 1949, Nineteen Eighty-Four was published. His lung problems worsened, and he went to a sanatorium. Diagnosed with tuberculosis, he was sent to University College Hospital in London. In January 1950, an artery burst in his lungs, and he died at age 46.

The Pagan

This poem, written in 1918, refers to a disagreement between the Oxford High School authorities and Orwell’s friend Jacintha Buddicom’s family over their agnosticism.

by George Orwell

So here are you, and here am I,
Where we may thank our gods to be,
Above the earth, beneath the sky,
Naked souls, alive and free.
The autumn wind goes rustling by
And stirs the stubble round our feet;
Out of the west it whispering blows,
Stops to caress and onward goes,
Bringing its earthy odours sweet.
See with what pride the setting sun
Kinglike in gold and purple dies.
And like a robe of rainbow spun
Tinges the earth with shades divine.
That mystic light is in your eyes
And ever in your heart will shine.

“The Pagan” from George Orwell: the Complete Poetry, edited by Peter Davison, was published in 2015 by Finlay Publishers

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1955 – Patricia Smith born in Chicago, Illinois; American poet, spoken-word performer, playwright, author, and has been on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada University.  Currently, Smith is a professor at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, a core faculty member in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada University, and a resident in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Residency Program. She is a four-time individual National Poetry Slam champion. Her poetry collections include Life According to Motown; Close to Death; Incendiary Art; and Should Been Jimi Savannah, which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Rebekah Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Poetry.

The President Flies Over

by Patricia Smith

Aloft between heaven and them,

 I babble the landscape—what staunch, vicious trees,
what cluttered roads, slow cars. This is my

 country as it was gifted me—victimless, vast.
The soundtrack buzzing the air around my ears
continually loops ditties of eagles and oil.
I can’t choose. Every moment I’m awake,
aroused instrumentals channel theme songs,
speaking
what I cannot.

 I don’t ever have to come down.
I can stay hooked to heaven,
dictating this blandness.
My flyboys memorize flip and soar.
They’ll never swoop real enough
to resurrect that other country,

won’t ever get close enough to give name
to tonight’s dreams darkening the water.

 I understand that somewhere it has rained.

“The President Flies Over” from Blood Dazzler, © 2008 by Patricia Smith – Coffee House Press

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June 26

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1786 – Sunthorn Phu born as Phra Sunthonwohan, Thailand’s best-known royal poet, during the Rattanakosin Period (1782-1932). He was a government clerk when he was discovered in an illicit relationship with a lady of the royal court (forbidden between commoner and aristocrat) and sent to prison, but was pardoned and released in 1806. King Rama II ascended the throne in 1809, and was so taken with Phu’s poems that he gave Phu a position at court as ‘literary-friend’ of the King. He served the Rama until the king’s death in 1824, when Phu became a monk. Twenty years later, in the reign of King Rama III, he returned to court as a royal scribe, where he remained until his death at age 69 in 1855. Phu’s epic poetry is still popular in Thailand today. Sunthorn Phu was declared a World Poet by UNESCO in 1986.

Untitled

by Sunthorn Phu

We may be drunk,
But we are also intoxicated by love.
I cannot resist my heart.
And though we are drunk,
Tomorrow the sun will shine,
And that drunkenness will have passed.
But when night falls, the intoxication of love will return.

– translator not credited

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June 27

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1872 – Paul Laurence Dunbar born in Dayton Ohio, to parents who were slaves before the Civil War; author and poet, one of the first African-American poets who gained national attention and acclaim. Orville Wright and the owner of United Brethren Publishing helped get his first poetry collection Oak and Ivy published in 1893, and two other Dayton Residents, lawyer Charles Thatcher and psychiatrist Henry Tobey, teamed to publish his second book, Majors and Minors.  Thatcher and Tobey also helped him get an agent, and book public readings. Lyrics of Lowly Life sold well enough for Dunbar to go to England, where he found a British publisher for this book. In 1897, he became a clerk at the Library of Congress. He wrote Folks From Dixie, a short story collection, while working there. But he began to have lung problems which led to tuberculosis, and he resigned in 1898. He continued to write, but died of tuberculosis at age 33 in February 1906. His poetry collections include Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow and Lyrics of the Hearthside.

 Sympathy

by Paul Laurence Dunbar

I know what the caged bird feels, alas!
When the sun is bright on the upland slopes;
When the wind stirs soft through the springing grass,
And the river flows like a stream of glass;
When the first bird sings and the first bud opes,
And the faint perfume from its chalice steals—
I know what the caged bird feels!

I know why the caged bird beats his wing
Till its blood is red on the cruel bars;
For he must fly back to his perch and cling
When he fain would be on the bough a-swing;
And a pain still throbs in the old, old scars
And they pulse again with a keener sting—
I know why he beats his wing!

I know why the caged bird sings, ah me,
When his wing is bruised and his bosom sore,—
When he beats his bars and he would be free;
It is not a carol of joy or glee,
But a prayer that he sends from his heart’s deep core,
But a plea, that upward to Heaven he flings—
I know why the caged bird sings!

“Sympathy” from The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1913 edition)

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1936 – Lucille Clifton born in Depew in northern New York state; prolific American author, poet and educator, Poet Laureate of Maryland (1979-1985); her work celebrates her African-American heritage and chronicles her experiences as a woman. She won the 1984 Coretta Scott King Award for Everett Anderson’s Good-bye; the 2000 National Book Award for Poetry for Blessing the Boats; the 2007 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement; and the 2010 Frost Medal for lifetime achievement. She died of cancer at age 73 in February 2010. Her poetry collections include Two-Headed Woman; Next; Quilting; Blessing the Boats; Mercy; Voices; and How to Carry Water.

 won’t you celebrate with me

by Lucille Clifton

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on this bridge between
starshine and clay,
my one hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

“won’t you celebrate with me” from Book of Light, © 1993 by Lucille Clifton – Copper Canyon Press

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June 28

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1887 – Floyd Dell born in Barry, Illinois; American novelist, playwright, poet, and journalist; pro-feminist and radical liberal editor of The Masses (1914-1917). In 1917, after the Espionage Act passed, the Post Office notified the magazine it was banned from the mails for its outspoken opposition to U.S. involvement in WWI. The Masses  challenged the ban and won, but lost on appeal, after the government officially labeled the magazine “treasonable material” in August 1917, issuing charges against its staff for “unlawfully and willfully… obstruct[ing] the recruiting and enlistment of the United States” military. After three days deliberation, the jury was unable to reach a unanimous decision, because of one juror, who was a socialist. Not only did the other eleven jurors demand the prosecutor levy charges against the lone juror, they attempted to drag him out into the street and lynch him. The Judge, given the uproar, declared a mistrial. A second trial also resulted in a deadlocked jury. While no one was convicted, the magazine folded. During the Depression, Floyd Dell joined the WPA, then worked for the U.S Information Service from 1935 through WWII.  Dell wrote Women as World Builders; Upton Sinclair: A Study in Social Protest; Love in the Machine Age; and Homecoming: An Autobiography.  Floyd Dell died in July, 1969, at age 82.

Apologia

by Floyd Dell

I think I have no soul,
Having instead two hands, sensitive and curious,
And ten subtle and inquisitive fingers
Which reach out continually into the world,
Touching and handling all things.
The fascination of objects!-
The marvellous shapes!
Contours of faces and of dispositions,
Hearts that are tender or rough to the touch,
The smooth soft fabrics in which lives go clothed –
Hope and pity and passion:
All these as I touch them delight and enchant me,
And I think I could go on touching them forever.
But the impulse comes into the nerves of my fingers,
Into the muscles of my hands,
To give back this beauty in some shape
Confessional of joy.
And so I make these toys.

“Apologia” appeared in Poetry magazine’s May 1915 issue

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June 29

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1798 – Giacomo Leopardi born in Recanati, in Italy’s Marche region, ruled by the papacy at the time; Italian lyric poet, scholar, philosopher, translator, and essayist. A sickly adolescent, he was privately tutored and reading avidly in his father’s extraordinary library. Fluent in reading and writing Latin, Greek, and Hebrew, he translated classical texts by Horace and Homer. He began writing his own poetry in 1816. His best known books are Canti (Songs) and Conzoniere (Songbook). His health continued to decline, and he began going blind. He died just days before his 39^th birthday in June 1837.

To the Moon (XIV)

by Giacomo Leopardi

O lovely moon, now I’m reminded
how almost a year since, full of anguish,
I climbed this hill to gaze at you again,
and you hung there, over that wood, as now,
clarifying all things. Filled with mistiness,
trembling, that’s how your face seemed to me,
with all those tears that welled in my eyes, so
troubled was my life, and is, and does not change,
O moon, my delight. And yet it does help me,
to record my sadness and tell it, year by year.
Oh how sweetly it hurts, when we are young,
when hope has such a long journey to run,
and memory is so short,
this remembrance of things past, even if it
is sad, and the pain lasts!

“To the Moon” from The Canti – translated by A.S. Kline, © 2003

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1932 – Circe Maia born in Montevideo, Uruguay; prolific Uruguayan poet, essayist, translator, and philosophy teacher. Her father published her first books of poetry, Plumitas (Feathers), when she was 12 years old. Her second book, En el tiempo (In the time), was published in 1958. She and her husband, Dr. Ariel Ferreira, were members of the Socialist Party of Uruguay. In 1972, at 3 AM, the police raided their home to arrest them, but she was allowed to stay because she was caring for their four-day-old daughter. He was imprisoned for two years, and in 1973, she was fired from her teaching position. She earned money teaching English and French privately. When democracy returned in 1985, Maia taught at her old school again, then published two books in 1987, Destrucciones (Destructions), a poetry collection, and Un viaje a Salto (A Trip to Salto), a nonfiction work about her husband’s imprisonment. In 2001, Yesterday a Eucalyptus, a collection of her poems, was published in English translation. Her poem “Hummingbirds,” translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval, appeared in the November 2013 issue of The New Yorker.

Restorations

by Circe Maia

A sheet of paper says, proudly,
it was made entirely from old paper
which is to say, from discarded
remains, cardboard, packaging,
other sheets of paper . . . So that
it has been reborn, with a shade
between brown and gray, indefinable:
all the same, like voices in a chorus.

It turns out the carpet too is made from the remains
of other carpets, but
each thread can be neatly seen.
Each fiber sings a different note.
Each one, sewn together with others
is still itself.

“Restorations” – by Circe Maia, translated by Jesse Lee Kercheval, appeared in Summer 2017 issue of the journal WHR

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