Good Morning!

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“The way I see it, if
you want the rainbow,
you gotta put up with
the rain!”
― Dolly Parton

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We are what we repeatedly
do. Excellence then is not
an act, but a habit.”
― Aristotle

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“Worry does not empty tomorrow of its
sorrow, it empties today of its strength.”
– Corrie Ten Boom, watchmaker,
WWII rescuer of Jews, and
author of The Hiding Place

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13 poets born in September,
whose lives took different
paths, but all passed through
joy and sorrow, troubles and
triumphs, though every path
taken will lead to an ending 

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September 22

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1895 – Babette Deutsch born New York City; American poet, critic, translator and novelist. She earned a B.A. from Barnard College in 1917. In 1921, she and writer Avrahm Yarmolinsky, an immigrant from Ukraine, were married. She taught at the New School for Social Research and Columbia University, where one of her students was Lawrence Ferlinghetti.  She is noted for her critical work Walt Whitman: Builder for America, and her acclaimed English translation of Pushkin’s Eugene Onegin. Her poetry collections include Banners; Honey Out of a Rock; Fire for the Night; and Collected Poems (1919-1962).

Silence

by Babette Deutsch

Silence with you is like the faint delicious
Smile of a child asleep, in dreams unguessed:
Only the hinted wonder of its dreaming,
The soft, slow-breathing miracle of rest.
Silence with you is like a kind departure
From iron clangor and the engulfing crowd
Into a wide and greenly barren meadow,
Under the bloom of some blue-bosomed cloud;
Or like one held upon the sands at evening,
When the drawn tide rolls out, and the mixed light
Of sea and sky enshrouds the far, wind-bellowed
Sails that move darkly on the edge of night.

“Silence” from The Collected Poems of Babette Deutsch, published by Doubleday & Company in January 1969

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1914 – Alys Faiz born as Alys George in London, England, to English parents; she became a Pakistani poet, journalist, human rights activist, social worker, and teacher after she married the influential Urdu poet, journalist, and trade unionist Faiz Ahmad Faiz in 1941 and converted to Islam. She was on the editorial staff of Pakistan Times in the 1950s. Some of their life together was spent apart while he was a political prisoner, or exile together during regimes that were hostile to their activism. Her husband died in 1984 from lung and heart disease shortly after being nominated for a Nobel Prize in Literature. She died at age 87 in March 2003. Her published works include: Over My Shoulder; Dear Heart: To Faiz in Prison (1951-1955); and books in Urdu, including Aziz e Dilum and a biography, Alys Banam Faiz.

A Poem For Faiz

by Alys Faiz

I will sing of you later,
when the tread of a thousand feet
the unending roll of sorrow,
the breath of roses enfolding
the eulogies, the warranted praise
the drawn out memories of others
the grief of recalling, the total acceptance of death is over

Then will i sing, not to the tread of a thousand feet,
nor to the roll of sorrow

Nor will i lift the roses
nor echo praise
nor recall, nor accept

My song neither begins nor ends
it is eternity.

“A Poem For Faiz” from Over My Shoulder, © 1993 by Alys Faiz – Frontier Post Publications

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September 23

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1919 –Kaneko Tōhta born in Chichibu, Saitama Prefecture, Japan; Japanese poet, writer, critic, peace activist, and scholar, known for his innovative and influential post-WWII poetry. Kaneko began writing haiku in his teens, studied at the University of Tokyo, and worked for the Bank of Japan. His poetry won several awards and honors, including the prestigious annual Dakotsu Prize for best haiku collection, and he was honored as a Person of Cultural Merit by his country. Kaneko Tōhta died at age 98 in February, 2018. He published several poetry collections, and his work appeared in many Japanese-language anthologies.

haiku

by Kaneko Tōhta

one dog two cats
we three finally
not A-bombed

– translator not credited

This haiku appeared in Kaneko Tohta: Selected Haiku, Part 2, 1961-2012 – © 2012 by Kaneko Tōhta – Red Moon Press

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1934 – M. Travis Lane born as Millicent Elizabeth Travis in San Antonio, Texas, but the family moved frequently because of her father’s military career; American-born Canadian Poet. She earned BA at Vassar, then an MA and a PhD from Cornell University for her dissertation on Robert Frost. She and her husband moved to Canada in 1960 when he became a professor of English literature at the University of New Brunswick. In 1973, the family became Canadian citizens. She also taught some courses at New Brunswick on contemporary American poetry and West Indian writing. In 1981, her Divinations and Shorter Poems won the inaugural Pat Lowther Award for the year’s best book of poetry by a Canadian woman. She has won numerous awards for her many poetry collections, which include: Homecomings; Reckonings; Touch Earth; The Book of Widows; and Crossover. 

The Long Way Through the Chairs

by M. Travis Lane

The cat takes the long way through the chairs,
a shadowless embroidery of motion, past
the line between
two points, inobvious, subtle, intricate.

The purely sensual pleasure of the path
is a type of some rare poetry
which makes the way it got there more delight
than ever where it was or is.

It also is a type of life
whose virtue is not one still place
tucked in the warmth of your elbow, nights,
nor this which lies like ink upon the page, which lies,

but truth
which endlessly dissolves,
inobvious, subtle, intricate, motion
its pure delight.

“The Long Way Through the Chairs” from Temporary Shelter, © 1993 by M. Travis Lane – Goose Lane Editions

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September 24

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1825 – Frances Watkins Harper was born in Baltimore, Maryland, as a free woman; African-American abolitionist, lecturer, poet, and author. She published her first book of poetry at age 20, and became the first American black woman to publish a short story, “Two Offers,” in the Anglo-African in 1859. Her novel Iola Leroy, published in 1892, was widely praised. She was part of the Underground Railroad in the 1850s, and was a public speaker for the American Anti-Slavery Society, and an advocate for woman suffrage and for prohibition. In 1894, she was a co-founder of the National Association of Colored Women, and served as its first vice president.

Bury Me in a Free Land

by Frances Watkins Harper

Make me a grave where’er you will,
In a lowly plain, or a lofty hill;
Make it among earth’s humblest graves,
But not in a land where men are slaves.

I could not rest if around my grave
I heard the steps of a trembling slave;
His shadow above my silent tomb
Would make it a place of fearful gloom.

I could not rest if I heard the tread
Of a coffle gang to the shambles led,
And the mother’s shriek of wild despair
Rise like a curse on the trembling air.

I could not sleep if I saw the lash
Drinking her blood at each fearful gash,
And I saw her babes torn from her breast,
Like trembling doves from their parent nest.

I’d shudder and start if I heard the bay
Of bloodhounds seizing their human prey,
And I heard the captive plead in vain
As they bound afresh his galling chain.

If I saw young girls from their mother’s arms
Bartered and sold for their youthful charms,
My eye would flash with a mournful flame,
My death-paled cheek grow red with shame.

I would sleep, dear friends, where bloated might
Can rob no man of his dearest right;
My rest shall be calm in any grave
Where none can call his brother a slave.

I ask no monument, proud and high,
To arrest the gaze of the passers-by;
All that my yearning spirit craves,
Is bury me not in a land of slaves.

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September 25

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1921 – Cintio Vitier born in Key West, Florida to Cuban parents; Cuban poet, essayist, and novelist. He attended the school started by his father in Matanzas, Cuba until the family moved to Havana when he was 15. Vitier’s first poetry book, Poemas, was published when he was just 17. In 1947, he graduated from the University of Havana with a law degree.  He helped start the Cuban poetry magazine Origenes. His poetry collections include Extrañeza de estar (The Wonder of Being), Vísperas (Vespers), Canto llano (Plain Song), and Testimonios, (collected works 1953-1968).  While Vitier wrote mainly in Spanish, his José Martí, Cuban Apostle: A Dialogue, was published posthumously in 2013 in English by I.B. Taurus of London. He died at age 88 in 2009.

Greater Solitude

by Cintio Vitier

My words verge on silence
like great birds that disappear
into the early evening: their
strenuous white wings
carry off the intense sweetness
of dusk, visible then
in starlight.

My words turn toward the night
with no look back
at what is lost or won, or
what is missing, like those workers,
who, utterly fatigued
by a long day, return home
so the household once again can rest
and the strength that comes
with morning be restored.

– translated from Spanish by Kathleen Weaver

“Greater Solitude” appeared in Image magazine, Issue 65

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1930 – Shel Silverstein born in Chicago, Illinois; American writer, poet, cartoonist, singer-songwriter, children’s author, and playwright. Among his many notable works are: Now Here’s My Plan; The Giving Tree; Uncle Shelby’s Story of Lafcadio: The Lion Who Shot Back; Where the Sidewalk Ends; A Light in the Attic; and his Grammy-winning albums: Boy Named Sue and Other Country Songs and Where the Sidewalk Ends.

Crocodile’s Toothache

by Shel Silverstein

Oh the Crocodile
Went to the dentist
And sat down in the chair,
And the dentist said, ‘Now tell me, sir,
Why does it hurt and where?’
And the Crocodile said, ‘I’ll tell you the truth.
I have a terrible ache in my tooth.’
And he opened his jaws so wide, so wide,
That the dentist he climbed right inside,
And the dentist laughed, ‘Oh, isn’t this fun?’
As he pulled the teeth out, one by one.
And the Crocodile cried, ‘You’re hurting me so!
Please put down your pliers and let me go.’
But the dentist just laughed with a Ho Ho Ho,
And he said, ‘I still have twelve to go —
Oops, that’s the wrong one, I confess.
But what’s one crocodile’s tooth, more or less?’
Then suddenly the jaws went snap,
And the dentist was gone right off the map.
And where he went one could only guess…
To North or South or East or West…
He left no forwarding address.
But what’s one dentist more or less?

“Crocodile’s Toothache” from Where the Sidewalk Ends, © 1974 by Evil Eye Music, Inc. – HarperCollins Children’s Books

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September 26

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1872 – Max Ehrmann born in Terre Haute, Indiana; American writer, poet, playwright, and attorney; best known for his 1927 prose poem Desiderata (Latin: “things desired”). His parents emigrated to the U.S. from Bavaria in the 1840s. After earning a degree in English at DePauw University, he studied law and philosophy at Harvard.  He began practicing law in his hometown in 1898, then was a deputy state’s attorney in Vigo County, Indiana, for two years. He later worked in his family’s meatpacking and overalls manufacturing businesses, but left at age 40 to write. He was a contributor to Eugene V. Debs, what his neighbors and others say of Him in 1912 and In Memoriam Elbert and Alice Hubbard in 1915. His poetry collections include Breaking Home Ties; A Virgin’s Dream and other verses by Scarlet Women; and A Prayer and other selections. Though he wrote Desiderata at age 55, but it didn’t become famous until after his death at age 72 in 1945.

Whatever Else You Do

by Max Ehrmann

Whatever else you do or forbear,
impose upon yourself the task of happiness;
and now and then abandon yourself
to the joy of laughter.

And however much you condemn
the evil in the world, remember that the
world is not all evil; that somewhere
children are at play, as you yourself in the
old days; that women still find joy
in the stalwart hearts of men;

And that men, treading with restless feet
their many paths, may yet find refuge
from the storms of the world in the cheerful
house of love.

“Whatever Else You Do” from The Poems of Max Ehrmann –Forgotten Books 2018 classic reprint

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1942 – Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa born in the Rio Grande Valley in southern Texas; American scholar of Chicana cultural theory, feminist theory, and queer theory; her book, Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, is loosely based on her life growing up on the Mexican-Texas border. Anzaldúa died from complications related to diabetes at age 61 in May 2004.

To Delia, Who Failed on Principles

by Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa

Because of four lousy points
Delia, a senior, repeating
A sophomore course
Failed.

Short of hair, cow-eyed, humble-proud
From cooking class brought me cookies
From Oregon, an apple. But I stuck to
My principles.

In arbitrary tests the high score
Of momentarily memorized words and facts
I passed, but you
Didn’t graduate.

I stuck to my principles
And for a week couldn’t sleep
The following year
I passed all repeaters who tried
On principle.

“To Delia, Who Failed on Principles” from The Gloria Anzaldúa Reader, © 2009 by Gloria Evangelina Anzaldúa – Duke University Press

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September 27

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1884 – Su Manshu  born in Yokohama, Japan; Chinese poet, painter, translator, revolutionary, and journalist. He was born as Su Jian, the illegitimate son of a Cantonese merchant and the sister of his Japanese concubine. The discrimination he suffered from his father’s family was one of the causes of his bouts of despair. After spending most of his childhood in China, he returned to Japan in 1898 to study, and joined the student revolutionary circles there. He also worked for a Shanghai newspaper  which serialized his translation of Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables. Besides fiction, he also translated poetry, including works by Byron. Despairing of the social and political situation, he sought solace in Buddhist monkhood more than once, but was also known for his indulgence in wine and women. Manshu was notable for his command of foreign languages and his literary talent, but wrote his own work in classical Chinese, the literary standard of the time. He published stories dealing with disillusionment in the search for utopia, but his best-known work is the semi-autobiographical novel  Duanhong lingyan ji (The Lone Swan), translated into English in 1924. He died at age 34 in 1918. Though legend says he died of eating 60 meat dumplings to win a bet, his cause of death was listed as a stomach disease.

Exile in Japan

by Su Manshu

on the balcony of the tower
I play my flute and watch
the spring rain
I wonder if I ever
will go home and see the tide bore in
the river
again
straw sandals an old
begging bowl
nobody knows me
on how many bridges have I
trampled the fallen
cherry blossoms

– translation by Kenneth Rexroth

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1942 – Mark Vinz was born in Rugby, North Dakota, but grew up in Minneapolis and Kansas City; American poet, academic, and anthologist. He earned a BA and an MA in English at the University of Kansas, then did graduate studies at the University of New Mexico. Vinz was a professor of English (1966-2007) at Moorhead State (now Minnesota State at Moorhead), where he was a co-founder and coordinator of MSUM’s Master of Fine Arts in Creative Writing program, and an editor of Dacotah Territory. His poetry collections include: Minnesota Gothic; Man of the House; and The Trouble with Daydreams.

Center Café

by Mark Vinz

Well, you’re in town, then. The boys
from the class reunion wander in
and take their places in the corner booth,
just as they might have fifty years ago—
grayer, balder, wearing hats announcing
places far away. Their conversation
rises, falls to the inevitable—a missing
friend who worked right up until the end,
another who is long past traveling. Smiles
grow distant as their silence overtakes
the room. The busy waitress pauses,
nods. She’s always known the boys.

“Center Cafe,” © 2019 Mark Vinz from Local News: Poetry About Small Towns –
MWPH Books

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September 28

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1932 – Victor Jara born in San Ignacio, Chile, on September 28, 1932; Chilean teacher, theatre director, singer-songwriter, poet, and political activist. He greatly contributed to Chilean theatre by directing a broad range of plays, both local and world classics, and played a pivotal role in the Nueva canción chilena (New Chilean Song) movement. During the regime of dictator Augusto Pinochet, he was arrested in 1973, tortured, and then killed on September 16, 1973 at age 40. Jara became a symbol of his county’s struggle for human rights and social justice.

Man is a Creator

by Victor Jara

Like lots of other children
I was taught to sweat,
I didn’t know what school was,
didn’t know how to play.
They dragged me out of bed
early every morning,
and alongside my Dad
I grew up as a worker.

Because I was pretty handy
I got by as a carpenter,
a plasterer and a brick-layer,
a plumber and a mechanic.
Hey! It would have been useful
to have had some sort of schooling.
That would have been one more thing to use –
Man as a creator.

I can build you a house,
I can lay down a road,
make wine that tastes good
and keep a factory smoking,
I go down to the depths of the earth
I conquer all the peaks,
I walk among the stars
and carve furrows all over the earth.

I learned the language
of my masters and bosses,
they killed me over and over
for daring to raise my voice,
but I get up off the ground again
helped by the hands of others.
For now I’m not alone.
Now there are so many of us.

– translated by Joan Jara and Adrian Mitchell

“Man is a Creator” from His Hands Were Gentle: Selected Lyrics, © 2014 by Joan Jara – Smokestack Books, bilingual edition

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1985 – Helen Mort born in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England; British poet, anthologist, and novelist. She won the Manchester Poetry Prize for Young Writers in 2008. Her first major poetry book, Division Street, an imagining of the lives of people living on a street in her home town, won the 2014 Fenton Aldeburgh Prize. Mort served as Derbyshire Poet Laureate (2013-2015). She has co-edited poetry anthologies with Clair Carter, published a novel Black Car Burning, and, a memoir about mountain climbing and motherhood called A Line Above the Sky. Her poetry collections include A Pint for the Ghost and The Illustrated Woman.

Waiting for Robert

by Helen Mort

We have lived here for centuries,
Ginger and me.
Pressed close between the dust-sheets,
We wait for my Robert to return.

I pretend to make tea at six.
Pretend. Just think about it,
In case, by chance, he might
Walk in find me unprepared.
Ginger chases spiders, he
Crushes and crunches
Their black ooze between his jaws
And turns his eyes –
Gleaming emerald coals
Set high in his face –
To look, and stare
And ask me if he was right.
And I have to scold: tell him

“No, bad Ginger,
Bad boy, for we have food.”
And though it is a lie,
He will slink, silken and obedient,
As a slip of amber
To the cupboard by the stair.

The windows are my eyes.
They are impassive, they
Stare neutrally at the grey outside,
And the sprawl, the
Long reptilian spine
Of the moor
And the sky,
Soft sky, the sky
That is never full of clouds.
The windows watch for me
And they are full of cobwebs,
Like my own eyes.

Time stands still.
The clocks have long since stopped
And if the ticks do not tick,
There must be no time.
So we are caught in a frieze, Ginger and me.
We are stuck here in our
Dusty little refuge.
The one thing I never
Think of is the battle.
The one thing I never
Think is that he might be dead.

We have lived here for centuries
Ginger and me,
And I have never banished
The clockwork shadows from the walls.

“Waiting for Robert” from Division Street, © 2013 by Helen Mort – Random House

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