Good Morning!

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I prefer rogues to imbeciles, because
they sometimes take a rest.
– Alexandre Dumas

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Be careful to leave your sons well instructed
rather than rich, for the hopes of the instructed
are better than the wealth of the ignorant.
– Epictetus

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At the end of the day, we must
go forward with hope and not
backward by fear and division.
– Jesse Jackson

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13 poets born in November,
As winter begins to take hold,
they speak of life and death,
of love and loss, connecting
Past to Present, and our lives
to the unknowable Future.

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November 17

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1866 – Voltairine de Cleyre born in Leslie, Michigan; American anarchist, Freethought Movement activist, prolific writer, poet, and public speaker. She opposed capitalism, the state, marriage, and domination over women’s lives and sexuality by religion. In 1912, she died at age 45 from septic meningitis. De Cleyre was a contemporary of Emma Goldman, with whom she maintained a relationship of respectful disagreement on several issues. Many of de Cleyre’s essays were collected in the Selected Works of Voltairine de Cleyre, published posthumously by Goldman’s magazine Mother Earth in 1914.

Germinal

by Voltairine de Cleyre

Germinal!–The Field of Mars is plowing,
And hard the steel that cuts, and hot the breath
Of the great Oxen, straining flanks and bowing
Beneath his goad, who guides the share of Death.

Germinal!–The Dragon’s teeth are sowing,
And stern and white the sower flings the seed
He shall not gather, though full swift the growing;
Straight down Death’s furrow treads, and does not
heed.

Germinal!–The Helmet Heads are springing
Far up the Field of Mars in gleaming files;
With wild war notes the bursting earth is ringing.

Within his grave the sower sleeps, and smiles.

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1930 – Elizabeth Cook-Lynn born in Fort Thompson, South Dakota, and raised on the Crow Creek Reservation; member of the Crow Creek Sioux, she is a Native American novelist, poet, essayist, anthologist, Professor Emerita of English and Native American Studies at Eastern Washington University in Cheney, Washington, and since retiring, a writer-in-residence and visiting professor at several schools, including Arizona State University. Her father and grandfather served on the Crow Creek Sioux Tribal Council for many years, and her grandmother was a bilingual writer for South Dakota newspapers.  Elizabeth Cook-Lynn was honored with the 2007 Lifetime Achievement Award by the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas. Her other poetry collection is I Remember Fallen Trees: New and Selected Poems.

Mt. Rushmore

by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn

Owls hang in the night air
between the visages of Washington, Lincoln
The Rough Rider, and Jefferson; and coyotes
mourn the theft of sacred ground.
A cenotaph becomes the tourist temple
of the profane.

“Mt. Rushmore” from Seek the House of Relatives, © 1983 by Elizabeth Cook-Lynn – Blue Cloud Quarterly Press

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November 18

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1939 – Margaret Atwood born in Ottawa, Canada; Canadian author, poet, critic, feminist, animal rights and environmental activist, and inventor. Among her 16 novels to date, she is best known for her iconic novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, which won the Arthur C. Clarke Award; and The Blind Assassin, winner of the Man Booker Prize. The Testaments, Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, was a co-winner with Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other of the 2019 Booker Prize. Her poetry collections include Double Persephone; The Circle Game; True Stories; Are You Happy; Interlunar; and Morning in the Burned House.

Ghost Cat

by Margaret Atwood

Cats suffer from dementia too. Did you know that?
Ours did. Not the black one, smart enough
to be neurotic and evade the vet.
The other one, the furrier’s muff, the piece of fluff.
She’d writhe around on the sidewalk
for chance pedestrians, whisker
their trousers, though not when she started losing
what might have been her mind. She’d prowl the night
kitchen, taking a bite
from a tomato here, a ripe peach there,
a crumpet, a softening pear.
Is this what I’m supposed to eat?
Guess not. But what? But where?
Then up the stairs she’d come, moth-footed,
owl-eyed, wailing
like a tiny, fuzzy steam train: Ar-woo! Ar-woo!
So witless and erased. O, who?
Clawing at the bedroom door
shut tight against her. Let me in,
enclose me, tell me who I was.
No good. No purring. No contentment. Out
into the darkened cave of the dining room,
then in, then out, forlorn.
And when I go that way, grow fur, start howling,
scratch at your airwaves:
no matter who I claim
I am or how I love you,
turn the key. Bar the window.

“Ghost Cat” from Dearly: New Poems, © 2020 by Margaret Atwood – Ecco/HarperCollins

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1940 – James Welch born in Browning, Montana; Native American (Blackfoot and A’aninin aka Gros Ventre) novelist, and poet. Best known for his novels Winter in the Blood and Fools Crow (which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and an American Book Award), and his nonfiction book, Killing Custer: The of the Little Bighorn and the Fate of the Plains Indians. His early schooling was on the Blackfeet and Fort Belknap reservations in Montana. He worked as a firefighter before he earned a BA in liberal arts from the University of Montana in 1965.  Welch won an Emmy award for co-writing the  1992 PBS documentary Last Stand at Little Bighorn. He was awarded the Native Writers’ Circle of the Americas Lifetime Achievement Award in 1997. James Welch died of lung cancer at age 62 in August 2003.

The Man from Washington

by James Welch

The end came easy for most of us.
Packed away in our crude beginnings
in some far corner of a flat world,
we didn’t expect much more than firewood and buffalo robes
to keep us warm. The man came down,
a slouching dwarf with rainwater eyes,
and spoke to us. He promised
that life would go on as usual,
that treaties would be signed, and everyone —
man, woman and child — would be inoculated
against a world in which we had no part,
a world of money, promise and disease.

“The Man From Washington” from Riding the Earthboy – 40 –, © 1976, 1990 by James Welch – Confluence Press

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November 19

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1878 – Amelia Josephine Burr born in New York City; American poet, novelist, and playwright. A graduate of Hunter College, she worked for the Red Cross during WWI.  Her poetry collections include In Deep Places; The Roadside Fire; and The Silver Trumpet, a collection of poems about WWI. She died at age 89 in June 1968.

Typhoon

by Amelia Josephine Burr

We shall not shiver as we vainly try
To stir cold ashes once again to fire,
Nor bury a dead passion, you and I.
The wind that weds a moment sea and sky
In one exultant storm and passes by,
Was our desire.

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1918 – W.S. Graham born William Sydney Graham in Greenock, Renfewshire, Scotland; .Scottish poet, educated at Greenock High School, leaving in 1932 to become an apprentice draughtsman before studying structural engineering at Stow College, Glasgow. In 1938, he won a year’s bursary to Newbattle Abbey College, near Edinburgh, where he became interested in poetry. He began publishing in the early 1940s, including a collection brought out by Glasgow printer and publisher William McLellan, who did much to encourage and promote contemporary Scottish literature. Having been rejected for national service on medical grounds, he had various jobs during WWII and moved to Cornwall in 1943, where he was able to live rent-free in a caravan. Graham received an Atlantic Award in 1947 and spent 1947-1948 lecturing at New York University, then moved to London, where he met T.S. Eliot who edited his 4th book of poems, The White Threshold, for Faber and Faber. In 1954, Graham married Nessie Dunsmuir (1909-1999), a poet herself, and they lived in near-poverty until a Civil List pension in 1974 alleviated things somewhat. They settled in Cornwall, residing in the village of Madron, where he died at age 77 in January 1986.

 I Leave This at Your Ear

by W. S. Graham

    – For Nessie Dunsmuir

I leave this at your ear for when you wake,
A creature in its abstract cage asleep.
Your dreams blindfold you by the light they make.

The owl called from the naked-woman tree
As I came down by the Kyle farm to hear
Your house silent by the speaking sea.

I have come late but I have come before
Later with slaked steps from stone to stone
To hope to find you listening for the door.

I stand in the ticking room. My dear, I take
A moth kiss from your breath. The shore gulls cry.
I leave this at your ear for when you wake.

“I Leave This at Your Ear” from New Collected Poems: W. S. Graham, edited by Matthew Francis – Faber and Faber, 2004 edition

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November 20

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1910 – Pauli Murray born in Baltimore Maryland; Black American civil and women’s rights activist, lawyer, author, and poet. Orphaned very young, she was raised by her maternal grandparents in Durham, North Carolina. At 16, she went to Hunter College in New York, earning a BA in English in 1933. During the Depression, she worked for the Civilian Conservation Corps at an all-woman camp, but Murray later clashed with the camp’s director after he found a Marxist book among her belongings, and he disapproved of her relationship with Peg Holmes, a white counselor. They both left the camp in 1935, and traveled the country on foot, hitching rides and hopping freight trains, before finding work – Murray with the YWCA. In 1940, Murray was arrested for sitting in the whites-only section of a Virginia bus. After this incident, and her involvement with the socialist Workers’ Defense League, Murray enrolled in the law school at Howard University after being denied entry to the University of North Carolina because of her race. At Howard, her awareness of sexism increased, which she called “Jane Crow.” She graduated first in her class, but was denied entry to Harvard for post-graduate work because of her gender. In 1964, she delivered her speech “Jim Crow and Jane Crow” in Washington DC. After earning her masters at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1965 she was the first African American to earn a Doctor of Juridical Science degree from Yale Law School. As a lawyer, Murray took on civil and women’s rights cases. Thurgood Marshall, then the NAACP’s chief counsel, called her 1950 book, States’ Laws on Race and Color, the “bible” of the civil rights movement. Murray taught law at Brandeis University (1968-1973), then in 1977, at age 67, she was the first African American woman ordained as a priest. She worked in a parish in Washington DC. until 1984. She died of pancreatic cancer at age 74 in July 1985.

Dark Testament Verse 8

by Pauli Murray

Hope is a crushed stalk
Between clenched fingers
Hope is a bird’s wing
Broken by a stone.
Hope is a word in a tuneless ditty —
A word whispered with the wind,
A dream of forty acres and a mule,
A cabin of one’s own and a moment to rest,
A name and place for one’s children
And children’s children at last . . .
Hope is a song in a weary throat.
Give me a song of hope
And a world where I can sing it.
Give me a song of faith
And a people to believe in it.
Give me a song of kindliness
And a country where I can live it.
Give me a song of hope and love
And a brown girl’s heart to hear it.

“Dark Testament Verse 8” from Dark Testament and Other Poems, © 1970 by Pauli Murray – Silvermine Publishers

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1950 – E. Ethelbert Miller born in the Bronx, NY; African-American poet, teacher, anthologist, and literary activist; author of two memoirs, co-editor of Poet Lore magazine,  founder-director of the Ascension Poetry Reading Series in the Washington D.C. area, and host of the radio show On the Margin. He was a commissioner on the D.C. Commission on the Arts and Humanities (1997-2008). His many poetry collections include Andromeda; The Migrant Worker; Where Are the Love Poems for Dictators?: Whispers, Secrets and Promises; If God Invented Baseball; and How I Found Love Behind the Catcher’s Mask.

 Crossing the Line

 by E. Ethelbert Miller 

        – For Maria

Sitting across the table from you
I think back to when our friendship
came down from the mountains.
It was a cold day and the miners
had not left for work.

You break a cookie in half like bread
and this sharing is what we both now need.
That which breaks into crumbs are memories.
Your gray hair cut short and you ask if I notice.

How can I tell you that Bolivia will always be
beautiful and everything I notice is you
and yes is you. Our napkins folded in our hands
Folded as if our meeting now is prayer.

Did I ever tell you that your eyes are a map
and I would lose myself if you ever turned away

“Crossing the Line” © 2022 by E. Ethelbert Miller – published in Poem-a-Day by the Academy of American Poets

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November 21

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1844 – Ada Cambridge born in Norfolk County, England, where her father was a gentleman farmer; Australian poet, novelist, and memoirist; she also wrote under her initials A.C. and under her married name Ada Cross. In 1870, she married the Reverend George Frederick Cross and a few weeks later they sailed for Australia. Her husband was assigned to several different parishes which she wrote about in her autobiographical Thirty Years in Australia. Cambridge wrote over 25 works of fiction, but many of them were serialized in Australian newspapers and never published in book form. Her poetry collections include Hymns on the Litany, Echoes, Unspoken Thoughts, and The Hand in the Dark. She died at age 81 in 1926.

Fashion

by Ada Cambridge

See those resplendent creatures, as they glide
O’er scarlet carpet, between footmen tall,
From sumptuous carriage to effulgent hall-
A dazzling vision in their pomp and pride!
See that choice supper-needless-cast aside-
Though worth a thousand fortunes, counting all,
To them for whom no crumb of it will fall-
The starved and homeless in the street outside.
Some day the little great god will decree
That overmuch connotes the underbred,
That pampered body means an empty head,
And wealth displayed the last vulgarity.
When selfish greed becomes a social sin
The world’s regeneration may begin.

“Fashion” from The Hand in the Dark and Other Poems, by Ada Cambridge –  Kessinger Publishing, 2004 edition

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1954 – Fiona Pitt-Kethley born, British poet, novelist, travel writer, anthology editor, and freelance journalist. She now lives in Spain with her husband, chess grandmaster James Plaskett, and “some feral cats.” Her poetry collections include: Sky Ray Lolly; Private Parts; The Perfect Man; Double Act; and Memo From a Muse.

The Anatolian Fertility Goddess

by Fiona Pitt-Kethley

Across the Golden Horn in Karakoy,
a maze of ancient, crooked, cobbled streets
contains the brothels of old Istanbul.
A vendor at the bottom of the hill
sells macho-hot green chilli sandwiches.
A cudgel-wielding policeman guards the gate.

One year, dressed as a man, I went inside
(women and drunks are not allowed in there).
I mingled with the mass of customers,
in shirt, grey trousers, heavy walking boots.
A thick tweed jacket flattened out my breasts.
A khaki forage cap concealed my hair.

The night was young, the queues at doors were short.
Far down the street a crowd of men stood round
and watched a woman dancing in a house.
Her sixty, sixty, sixty figure poured inside
a flesh-tone, skin-tight, Lycra leotard,
quivered like milk-jelly on a shaken plate.

I’ve seen her type before in small museums –
primeval blobs of roughly sculpted stone –
the earliest form of goddess known to man.

“The Anatolian Fertility Goddess” from Selected Poems, © 2008 by Fiona Pitt-Kethley – Salt Publishing

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November 22

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1819 – George Eliot born as Mary Anne Evans; English novelist, poet, journalist, and translator; a leading novelist of the Victorian era, best known for The Mill on the Floss, Silas Marner, and Middlemarch. Because she was considered plain, and not likely to marry, her father sent her to a series of boarding schools from age five to age sixteen. She had little formal education after age sixteen, when her mother died, and she was called home to take over running the house. However, her father’s role as estate manager of the Arbury Hall Estate allowed her access to the estate’s extensive library, but also showed her the great contrast between the ease and comfort of the landowner’s life compared with the lives of the people who worked on the estate. In 1850, she moved to London, determined to become a writer, and became assistant editor (1851-1854) of the left-wing journal The Westminster Review. Though officially only an assistant, she did most of the actual work of producing the journal. Evans caused a scandal when she moved with critic George Henry Lewes, who was already married, and had three children. It was at this time that she began using the pen name George Eliot. Even when her private life became public, it did not affect the popularity of her novels. A friendship with Princess Louise, Queen Victoria’s daughter, who was an admirer of her work, helped the couple become more accepted in polite society. Lewes died in 1878. Two years later, she married John Cross, who was 40 years her senior. She died at age 61 of kidney disease in December 1880.  

In a London Drawingroom

by George Eliot

The sky is cloudy, yellowed by the smoke.
For view there are the houses opposite
Cutting the sky with one long line of wall
Like solid fog: far as the eye can stretch
Monotony of surface & of form
Without a break to hang a guess upon.
No bird can make a shadow as it flies,
For all is shadow, as in ways o’erhung
By thickest canvass, where the golden rays
Are clothed in hemp. No figure lingering
Pauses to feed the hunger of the eye
Or rest a little on the lap of life.
All hurry on & look upon the ground,
Or glance unmarking at the passers by
The wheels are hurrying too, cabs, carriages
All closed, in multiplied identity.
The world seems one huge prison-house & court
Where men are punished at the slightest cost,
With lowest rate of colour, warmth & joy.

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1922 – Maureen Cannon born in the Bronx, NY; prolific American poet of light verse; her father was an editor and theatre critic at The New York Journal-American. She earned a BA in English from Barnard College, and was writing poetry as a young mother, but didn’t submit any poems for publication until she was in her 40s. She went on to become a regular contributor to The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, Ladies’ Home Journal, Light Quarterly, and Reader’s Digest. Over 1,000 of her short verses appeared in print during her lifetime. She died at age 84 in January 2007.  

Is Anybody Home?

by Maureen Cannon

     I used to grow old
     When they put me on ‘hold’
As I waited, in silence, a martyr.
     But the fashion today
     Is to make music play,
And to soothe with a gentle sonata,
     Or a silvery flute,
     Or the song of a lute
Guaranteed to prevent me from groaning
     As I glance at the clock.
     Listen, don’t give me Bach,
Give me simply the person I’m PHONING!

“Is Anybody Home?” © by Maureen Cannon, originally published in Light Quarterly

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November 23

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1916 – P. K. Page born in Swanage, in Dorset UK; Canadian poet, author, scriptwriter, playwright, essayist, librettist, and painter. Her family moved to Canada when she was three years old, and her father became a Canadian army officer. After her marriage to diplomat W. Arthur Irwin, they were posted to Australia, Brazil, Mexico, and Guatemala. Her poem “Planet Earth” was read in 2001 as part of the UN celebration of the International Year of Dialogue Among Civilizations. Page wrote screenplays for Canada’s National Film Board, and published ten volumes of poetry, eight books for children, a novel, short stories, a collection of her non-fiction writings, and a memoir. She died at age 93 in 2010.

This Heavy Craft

by P.K. Page

The wax has melted
but the dream of flight
persists.
I, Icarus, though grounded
in my flesh
have one bright section in me
where a bird
night after starry night
while I’m asleep
unfolds its phantom wings
and practices.

“This Heavy Craft” from Kaleidoscope: Selected Poems, by P.K. Page – Porcupine’s Quill, 2010 edition

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