Tales

“ If you are a dreamer, come in. If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar, a hoper, a prayer, a magic-bean-buyer. If you’re a pretender, come sit by my fire, for we have some flax-golden tales to spin. Come in! Come in! ”

-- Shel Silverstein

carfully tended

My desire
is always the same; 
wherever life deposits me:
I want to stick my toe
& soon my whole body
into the water.
I want to shake out a fat broom
& sweep dried leaves
bruised blossoms
dead insects
& dust.
I want to grow
something.
It seems impossible that desire
can sometimes transform into devotion;
but this has happened.
And that is how I've survived:
how the hole
I carefully tended
in the garden of my heart
grew a heart
to fill it

-Alice Walker

'three deep bows to a beautiful son'

Here It Is

2016 by Alice Walker

Here it is
the beauty that scares you
-so you believe-
to death.
For he is certainly gorgeous
and he is certainly where whiteness
to your disbelief
has not wandered off
to die.
No.  It is there, tawny skin, gray eyes,
a Malcolm-esque  jaw.  His loyal parents
may Goddess bless them
sitting proud and happy and no doubt
amazed
at what  they have done.
For he is black too.  And obviously
with a soul
made of everything.
Try to think bigger than you ever have
or had courage enough to do:
that blackness is not where whiteness
wanders off to die: but that it is
like the dark matter
between stars and galaxies in
the Universe
that ultimately
holds it all
together.

-AW

Three deep bows to a beautiful son.

From Alice Walkers Garden. 

saturday poem

life's work

My body is accustomed to compromise.

I learned at a very young age how to 

negotiate space.

How to apologies for the way that my 

body fills all the places that it

occupies and all the places that it 

doesn't.

Teaching my body to grow free, 

and wild, 

and to not be afraid to exist, 

has become my life's work.

-- Key Ballah
Preparing My Daughter For Rain

saturday poem

Reflections

she saw the world from inside out, he saw it upsidedown:

she was a geophysicist.
he was a white faced clown.

They had much in common;
for example, both enjoyed the moon,

she from an interest in its rocks,
craters, and other messages;

he from an interest in its tides,
and its reflection of his own white face.

Of their children , according
to the laws of heredity,

one played a clarinet, one danced a minuet
and two were fortune tellers.

Other children came up in the garden,
dressed as lilac, broom, or apple trees.

All were unable to pass examinations,
but some wrote songs, some played,

and were able to amuse their parents,
as, aging, unable to speak to one another,

they watched the moon together,

he from an interest in its geophysics,
she for its reflection of her own white face.

-- Janet Dube  

(image from  Trio Film (1968) - Yvonne Rainer)

saturday poem

poem from nejma by nayyirah waheed

saturday poem

My single star is gone, the one
I like to call mine. Instead, a thick haze
     of moonlight. Just as my mother did
when she was growing old, I sit in the darkness,
     getting used to how little I can see.

Jim Moore, from 'Disappearing in America' in Invisible Strings.

saturday poem

FAMILY

The Family, the cosmic, transcends our realms of humanity.
Your mother
         father
         sister
         brother
         stranger
         lover
         friend
         and enemy
The birds
The bees
The flowers
The trees
All interstellar entities
Everything that lives and breathes
We are all family.

--Zoe Bedeaux from i-D Soul

saturday poem

poem. from salt. by nayyirah waheed.

saturday poem

I am as heavy
with foreboding
impervious to the light
as the sound
of one palm frond scraping

“Oh, that’s just another pelican”

Thoreau said
“If I could,
I would worship
the parings of my nails.”

--Yvonne Rainer
December 28, 1999 Flamingo Lodge, FL

saturday poem

A cold night crosses

our path

                  The world appears

very large, very

round now       extending

far as the moon does

                                        It is from

the moon this cold travels

                                        It is

the light of the moon that causes

this night reflecting distance in its own

light so coldly

                                          (from one side of

the earth to the other)

                                        It is the length of this coldness

It is the long distance

between two points which are

not in a line        now

                                       not a

straightness       (however

straight) but a curve only,

silver that is a rock reflecting

                                                      not metal

but a rock accepting

distance

                     (a scream in silence

where between the two

points what touches

is a curve around the world

                                                      (the dance unmoving).

'Winter Solstice' by Hilda Morley

new york, 1969

saturday poem

Revolutionary Petunias

The Nature of this flower is to bloom.
Rebellious. Living.
Against the Elemental Crush.
A Song of Color.
Blooming
For Deserving Eyes. 
Blooming Gloriously
For its Self.

Alice Walker

saturday poem

Home

no one leaves home unless
home is the mouth of a shark
you only run for the border
when you see the whole city running as well

your neighbors running faster than you
breath bloody in their throats
the boy you went to school with
who kissed you dizzy behind the old tin factory
is holding a gun bigger than his body
you only leave home
when home won’t let you stay.

no one leaves home unless home chases you
fire under feet
hot blood in your belly
it’s not something you ever thought of doing
until the blade burnt threats into
your neck
and even then you carried the anthem under
your breath
only tearing up your passport in an airport toilets
sobbing as each mouthful of paper
made it clear that you wouldn’t be going back.

you have to understand,
that no one puts their children in a boat
unless the water is safer than the land
no one burns their palms
under trains
beneath carriages
no one spends days and nights in the stomach of a truck
feeding on newspaper unless the miles travelled
means something more than journey.
no one crawls under fences
no one wants to be beaten
pitied

no one chooses refugee camps
or strip searches where your
body is left aching
or prison,
because prison is safer
than a city of fire
and one prison guard
in the night
is better than a truckload
of men who look like your father
no one could take it
no one could stomach it
no one skin would be tough enough

the
go home blacks
refugees
dirty immigrants
asylum seekers
sucking our country dry
niggers with their hands out
they smell strange
savage
messed up their country and now they want
to mess ours up
how do the words
the dirty looks
roll off your backs
maybe because the blow is softer
than a limb torn off

or the words are more tender
than fourteen men between
your legs
or the insults are easier
to swallow
than rubble
than bone
than your child body
in pieces.
i want to go home,
but home is the mouth of a shark
home is the barrel of the gun
and no one would leave home
unless home chased you to the shore
unless home told you
to quicken your legs
leave your clothes behind
crawl through the desert
wade through the oceans
drown
save
be hunger
beg
forget pride
your survival is more important

no one leaves home until home is a sweaty voice in your ear
saying-
leave,
run away from me now
i dont know what i’ve become
but i know that anywhere
is safer than here

-- Warsan Shire

saturday poem

Outwitted

He drew a circle that shut me out--

Heretic, a rebel, a thing to flout.

But Love and I had the wit to win:

We drew a circle that took him in!

 

 

--Edwin Markham

circles of life

Everything
Turns,
Rotates,
Spins,
Circles,
Loops,
Pulsates,
Resonates,
And
Repeats.

Circles
Of life,
Born from
Pulses
Of light,
Vibrate
To
Breathe,
While
Spiraling
Outwards
For
Infinity
Through
The lens
Of time,
And into
A sea
Of stars
And
Lucid
Dreams.

-- Suzy Kassem

Saturday Poem

The world doesn’t just invent itself:
it needs some coaching, a poke,
to remind it that invention
has always been necessary.

 

And there are more subtle necessities,
like jellyfish and unicorns.
Things the earth could not
think up on its own and so
thought us up.

 

— From “The Joke,” a poem in Fancy Clapping by Mark D. Dunn, reviewed at The Rumpus by Jim Zukowski.

Source: therumpus.net

saturday poem

Sleep doesn't divide into halves

The days aren’t discarded or collected, they are bees
that burned with sweetness or maddened
the sting: the struggle continues,
the journeys go and come between honey and pain.
No, the net of years doesn’t unweave: there is no net.
They don’t fall drop by drop from a river: there is no river.
Sleep doesn’t divide life into halves,
or action, or silence, or honor:
life is like a stone, a single motion,
a lonesome bonfire reflected on the leaves,
an arrow, only one, slow or swift, a metal
that climbs or descends burning in your bones.

-- Pablo Neruda (via aconversationoncool)

saturday poem

To flee from memory
Had we the Wings
Many would fly
Inured to slower things
Birds with surprise
Would scan the cowering Van
Of men escaping
From the mind of man

 

Emily Dickinson