Good Morning!

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“Here we are, the most clever species
ever to have lived. So how is it we can
destroy the only planet we have?”
― Jane Goodall

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Make wars unprofitable and
you make them impossible.
―  A. Philip Randolph,
American labor unionist
and civil rights activist

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13 Poets born this week,
lords of war, war survivors
and its victims — the rebels,
the trailblazers, those who
lost their way, and those
who found themselves

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June 2

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1840 – Thomas Hardy born, English Victorian novelist and poet; his best-known novels are Far from the Madding Crowd, 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 many poetry collections include: Wessex Poems; War Poems; Poems of Pilgrimage; and Time’s Laughingstock.

Before Marching and After

     (in Memoriam F. W. G.)

by Thomas Hardy

Orion swung southward aslant
Where the starved Egdon pine-trees had thinned,
The Pleiads aloft seemed to pant
With the heather that twitched in the wind;
But he looked on indifferent to sights such as these,
Unswayed by love, friendship, home joy or home sorrow,
And wondered to what he would march on the morrow.

The crazed household-clock with its whirr
Rang midnight within as he stood,
He heard the low sighing of her
Who had striven from his birth for his good;
But he still only asked the spring starlight, the breeze,
What great thing or small thing his history would borrow
From that Game with Death he would play on the morrow.

When the heath wore the robe of late summer,
And the fuchsia-bells, hot in the sun,
Hung red by the door, a quick comer
Brought tidings that marching was done
For him who had joined in that game overseas
Where Death stood to win, though his name was to borrow
A brightness therefrom not to fade on the morrow.

“Before Marching and After” from Thomas Hardy: The Complete Poems – edited by James Gibson – Palgrave, 2001 edition

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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

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June 3

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1534 – Hosokawa Fujitaka, aka Hosokawa Yūsai, born in Kyoto, Japan; Japanese Sengoku period samurai daimyō, a retainer of Asjikaga Yoshiaki, the last Ashikaga shōgun. In 1568, Fujitaka became a retainer of Oda Nobunaga, who captured Kyoto, and became a senior Oda general. After Nobunaga died in 1582, Fujitaka took the name “Yūsai”  and delegated his status as daimyō to his son Tadaoki, but remained active as a cultural advisor to Toyotomi Hideyoshi, who granted him a retirement estate in Yamshiro Province in 1586. But after Toyotomi Hideyoshi’s death in 1598, leaving only his 5-year-old son as his heir, the Toyotomi regime fell apart, and Fujitaka became embroiled in a plot against Ishida Mitsunari, a Toyotomi daimyō who was forming alliances to gain power. Fujitaka and his forces were besieged at Tanabe castle and laid down arms only after an imperial decree from Emperor G0-Yozei. Fujitaka died at age 76 in October 1610.

This is Hosokawa Fujitaka’s death poem:

In the world that dwells in change, while forever unchanging,
Like fallen leaves
Words that have sunk deep into my heart give birth to shoots

― translator not credited

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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, and 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

     Homage Kenneth Koch

 by Allen Ginsberg

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

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June 4

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1898 – Harry Crosby born in Boston Massachusetts to a wealthy Back Bay family; American poet and publisher. At 19, he volunteered as an ambulance driver in France. During the Battle of Verdun in November 1917, his ambulance was hit by shrapnel but Crosby was unhurt. In August 1918, he was cited for bravery during evacuation of over 2000 wounded near Orme. These wartime experiences disaffected him. He married Mary Phelps Jacob Peabody, a divorcée six years his senior, and they became expats in 1920s Paris. The two co-founded Black Sun Press in Paris, publishing works by James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Hart Crane, Kay Boyle, Ezra Pound, and D.H. Lawrence. But many wild parties, and large amounts of drugs, alcohol, and many brief affairs sent them on a downward spiral. Then Harry Crosby, at age 31, had an obsessive affair with Josephine Noyes Rotch, age 21, which led to their double suicide in December 1929. Crosby’s best known works are his poetry collections Red Skeletons; Chariot of the Sun; and Transit of Venus.

Study For A Soul

by Harry Crosby

the colors have begun to form
silvergray with cramoisy and gold
into an arrow carved by storm
beyond the fear of new and old
and where the arrow fits the bow
the untroubled darkness of her eyes
watches the red-gold target grow
strong is the sun that purifies

but I have sought in vain to find
the riddle of the bow and archer
there were no shadows left behind
after the heart’s departure.

“Study for a Soul” from Collected Poems of Harry Crosby –published posthumously in 1931 by Black Sun Press

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1952 – Dambudzo Marechera born in Rusape in eastern Zimbabwe to Shona parents; Zimbabwean novelist, short story writer, playwright, and poet. He grew up surrounded by racial discrimination, poverty, and violence. Though his talent was recognized early, in school he rebelled against the set curriculum, and belligerent. This later led to his expulsion from New College, Oxford, because of his excessive drinking, threats against others, and an attempt to set the college on fire. He went to prison for possession of marijuana, then lived in a squatter’s community in central London. Many experiences from his childhood became part of his first book, a short fiction collection, The House of Hunger, which won the 1979 Guardian Fiction Prize. He continued his downward spiral, but managed to publish a novel, Black Sunlight, in 1980. He went back to Zimbabwe during the making of a film based on The House of Hunger, but he quarreled with the director, and stayed in Zimbabwe when they left. Marechera died at age 35 of an AIDS-related pulmonary disorder in August 1987.

For Bettina, A Tuesday Prologue

by Dambudzo Marechera

From nightsky’s black earth
Rare lilies, like stars,
Flower into life, yours and mine.
Orion, Andromeda, these startling sickles.
Of each our nights, recumbent beyond mere mortal
Rest, are not fixed but pliant to our motion
When courage lip to lip embraces despair.
Do not to the deep sorrow surrender
But ever twine upward to the silver light
Eyes a blast furnace terror to untruth.
Through windowpane I view the wide vistas
Of improbability become possible, hugging each to
Other in heartrending love: no more the one step
That’s a giant stride for mankind, but you and I
In fiery leap burning bright become starfruits
Over stony ground.

“For Bettina, A Tuesday Prologue” from Cemetery of Mind: Selected Poems, © 2021 by  The Dambudzo Marechera Trust, edited by Flora Veit-Wild – IOSA Press

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June 5

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1898 – Federico Garcia Lorca born in Granada province, Andalusia, to a landowning family; major Spanish poet, playwright, and theatre director. After touring Spain’s poorest areas with a classical theatre company sponsored by the Second Republic’s Ministry of Education, he began writing plays: “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 a repressed homosexual, and struggled with recurring bouts of depression. He was murdered at age 38 in August 1936 by the Franquists during the Spanish Civil War. Lorca’s books and plays were banned in Franco’s Spain until 1953, when Obras completas  (Complete Works) was published – 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.

Wish (Deseo)

by Federico Garcia Lorca

Just your hot heart,
nothing more.

My Paradise, a field,
no nightingales,
no strings,
a river, discrete,
and a little fountain.

Without the spurs,
of the wind, in the branches,
without the star,
that wants to be leaf.

An enormous light
that will be
the glow
of the Other,
in a field of broken gazes.

A still calm
where our kisses,
sonorous circles
of echoes,
will open, far-off.

And your hot heart,
nothing more.

– translated by A.S. Kline, © 2007, 2023

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1926 – David Wagoner born in Massillon, Ohio, but raised in Whiting, Indiana; prolific American poet, novelist, and professor. He graduated from Pennsylvania State University, then earned an M.A. in English from Indiana University in 1949. Beginning in 1954, he taught at the University of Washington, and was editor of Poetry Northwest (1966-2002). After his retirement from full-time teaching at UW, he taught writing at the Hugo House community center and the MFA program of the Northwest Institute of Literary Arts on Whidbey Island. He died in his sleep at age 95 in December 2021. His many poetry collections include: Dry Sun, Dry Wind; The Nesting Ground; Riverbed; Collected Poems; In Broken Country; Through the Forest; Walt Whitman Bathing; and A Map of the Night.

After the Point of No Return

by David Wagoner

After that moment when you’ve lost all reason
for going back where you started, when going ahead
is no longer a Yes or No, but a matter of fact,
you’ll need to weigh, on the one hand, what will seem,
on the other, almost nothing against something

slightly more than nothing and must choose
again and again, at points of fewer and fewer
chances to guess, when and which way to turn.

That’s when you might stop thinking about stars
and storm clouds, the direction of wind,
the difference between rain and snow, the time
of day or the lay of the land, about which trees
mean water, which birds know what you need
to know before it’s too late, or what’s right here
under your feet, no longer able to tell you

where it was you thought you had to go.

“After the Point of No Return” from After the Point of No Return, © 2012 by David Wagoner – Copper Canyon Press

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June 6

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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.

 Women and Horses

After Auschwitz, to write a poem is barbaric. —Theodor Adorno

by Maxine Kumin

After Auschwitz: after ten of my father’s kin—
the ones who stayed—starved, then were gassed in the camps.
After Vietnam, after Korea, Kuwait, Somalia, Haiti, Afghanistan.
After the Towers. This late in the life of our haplessly orbiting world
let us celebrate whatever scraps the muse, that naked child,
can pluck from the still smoldering dumps.

If there’s a lyre around, strike it! A body, stand back, give it air!
Let us have sparrows laying their eggs in bluebird boxes.
Let us have bluebirds insouciantly nesting elsewhere.
Lend us navel-bared teens, eyebrow- and nose-ringed prodigies
crumbling breakfast bagels over dog-eared and jelly-smeared texts.
Allow the able-bodied among us to have steamy sex.

Let there be fat old ladies in flowery tent dresses at bridge tables.
Howling babies in dirty diapers and babies serenely at rest.
War and détente will go on, détente and renewed tearings asunder,
we can never break free from the dark and degrading past.
Let us see life again, nevertheless, in the words of Isaac Babel
as a meadow over which women and horses wander.

“Women and Horses” from Jack and Other Poems, © 2007 by Maxim Kumin – W. W. Norton

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June 7

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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.

kitchenette building

by Gwendolyn Brooks

We are things of dry hours and the involuntary plan,
Grayed in, and gray. “Dream” makes a giddy sound, not strong
Like “rent,” “feeding a wife,” “satisfying a man.”

But could a dream send up through onion fumes
Its white and violet, fight with fried potatoes
And yesterday’s garbage ripening in the hall,
Flutter, or sing an aria down these rooms

Even if we were willing to let it in,
Had time to warm it, keep it very clean,
Anticipate a message, let it begin?

We wonder. But not well! not for a minute!
Since Number Five is out of the bathroom now,
We think of lukewarm water, hope to get in it.

“kitchenette building” from Selected Poems, © 1963 by Gwendolyn Brooks – Harper & Row

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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. Giovanni is a poet, writer, commentator, activist, and educator. Her strong, militant poetry was forged during the Civil Rights and Black Power era.

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

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1954 – Louise Erdrich American novelist, poet, and children’s book author, was 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.  She describes the land as a place where the “earth and sky touch everywhere and nowhere, like sex between two strangers.”  Erdrich was the oldest of seven children. Raised Catholic, she spent some time in a Catholic School. She has written over 18 works of fiction, and 3 poetry collections. Her novel The Night Watchman won the 2021 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction.

Windigo

     For Angela

by Louise Erdrich

The Windigo is a flesh-eating, wintry demon
with a man buried deep inside of it. In some
Chippewa stories, a young girl vanquishes
this monster by forcing boiling lard down
its throat, thereby releasing the human at
the core of ice.

 You knew I was coming for you, little one,
when the kettle jumped into the fire.
Towels flapped on the hooks,
and the dog crept off, groaning,
to the deepest part of the woods.

In the hackles of dry brush a thin laughter started up.
Mother scolded the food warm and smooth in the pot
and called you to eat.
But I spoke in the cold trees:
New one, I have come for you, child hide and lie still.

The sumac pushed sour red cones through the air.
Copper burned in the raw wood.
You saw me drag toward you.
Oh touch me, I murmured, and licked the soles of your feet.
You dug your hands into my pale, melting fur.

I stole you off, a huge thing in my bristling armor.
Steam rolled from my wintry arms, each leaf shivered
from the bushes we passed
until they stood, naked, spread like the cleaned spines of fish.

Then your warm hands hummed over and shoveled themselves full
of the ice and the snow. I would darken and spill
all night running, until at last morning broke the cold earth
and I carried you home,
a river shaking in the sun.

“Windigo” from Jacklight, © 1984 by Louise Erdrich – Holt Rinehart & Winston

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June 8

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1915 – Ruth Stone born as Ruth swan Perkins in Roanoke, Virginia; American poet, teacher, and author. In 1956, her Kenyon Review fellowship enabled her, with her second husband Walter Stone, to buy an old house in Goshen, Vermont. After Walter inexplicably committed suicide in 1959, she struggled to support herself and her daughters, teaching poetry at colleges and universities across the U.S., but always hanging on to her home. In 2000, her eyesight failing, she finally retired from teaching at age 85, and died at age 96 on November 2011. Her many poetry collections include: Unknown Messages; Ordinary Words, winner of the 1999 National Book Critics Circle Award; In the Next Galaxy, winner of the 2002 National Book Award for Poetry; In the Dark; and What Love Comes To, a Pulitzer Prize finalist

Curtains

by Ruth Stone

Putting up new curtains,
other windows intrude.
As though it is that first winter in Cambridge
when you and I had just moved in.
Now cold borscht alone in a bare kitchen.

What does it mean if I say this years later?

Listen, last night
I am on a crying jag
with my landlord, Mr. Tempesta.
I sneaked in two cats.
He screams, “No pets! No pets!”
I become my Aunt Virginia,
proud but weak in the head.
I remember Anna Magnani.
I throw a few books. I shout.
He wipes his eyes and opens his hands.
OK OK keep the dirty animals
but no nails in the walls.
We cry together.
I am so nervous, he says.

I want to dig you up and say, look,
it’s like the time, remember,
when I ran into our living room naked
to get rid of that fire inspector.

See what you miss by being dead?

“Curtains” from Second Hand Coat: Poems New and Selected, © 1987 by Ruth Stone – David R Godine Publishing

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