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

we are all one here

John Ashbery, from 'How to Continue.'

it’s necessary to talk about trees

WHAT KIND OF TIMES ARE THESE

There’s a place between two stands of trees where the grass grows uphill
and the old revolutionary road breaks off into shadows
near a meeting-house abandoned by the persecuted
who disappeared into those shadows.

I’ve walked there picking mushrooms at the edge of dread, but don’t be fooled
this isn’t a Russian poem, this is not somewhere else but here,
our country moving closer to its own truth and dread,
its own ways of making people disappear.

I won’t tell you where the place is, the dark mesh of the woods
meeting the unmarked strip of light —
ghost-ridden crossroads, leafmold paradise:
I know already who wants to buy it, sell it, make it disappear.

And I won’t tell you where it is, so why do I tell you
anything? Because you still listen, because in times like these
to have you listen at all, it’s necessary
to talk about trees.

Adrienne Rich

A Pang is more conspicuous in Spring
In contrast with the things that sing
Not Birds entirely – but Minds –
And Winds – Minute Effulgencies
When what they sung for is undone
Who cares about a Blue Bird's Tune –
Why, Resurrection had to wait
Till they had moved a Stone –

Emily Dickinson, ca. 1881. Amherst College Archives & Special Collections, via The Morgan Library.

'anything can happen'

Anything can happen, the tallest towers 

Be overturned, those in high places daunted,
Those overlooked regarded.

Seamus Heaney, from 'Anything Can Happen.'
(via evencleveland)

to the women in my life

Ina Chadwick Wilde, from “The World Traveler.”

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

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, Rise Up and Salute the Sun: The Writings of Suzy Kassem

saturday poem

-- Key Ballah From Preparing My Daughter For Rain

'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

saturday poem

This Is Just To Say

I have eaten
the plums
that were in
the icebox

and which
you were probably
saving
for breakfast

Forgive me
they were delicious
so sweet
and so cold 

--William Carlos Williams

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

i dwell in possibility

I dwell in Possibility –

A fairer House than Prose –

More numerous of Windows –

Superior – for Doors –

Of Chambers as the Cedars –

Impregnable of eye –

And for an everlasting Roof

The Gambrels of the Sky –

Of Visitors – the fairest –

For Occupation – This –

The spreading wide my narrow Hands

To gather Paradise –

 

-- Emily Dickinson