DAY 108: July 4, 2020

Day 108. Thanks for going on this journey with me, all. I LOVE YOU SO MUCH.

Praise Song for the Day

ELIZABETH ALEXANDER

A Poem for Barack Obama’s Presidential Inauguration

Each day we go about our business,

walking past each other, catching each other’s

eyes or not, about to speak or speaking.

All about us is noise. All about us is

noise and bramble, thorn and din, each

one of our ancestors on our tongues.

Someone is stitching up a hem, darning

a hole in a uniform, patching a tire,

repairing the things in need of repair.

Someone is trying to make music somewhere,

with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum,

with cello, boom box, harmonica, voice.

A woman and her son wait for the bus.

A farmer considers the changing sky.

A teacher says, Take out your pencils. Begin.

We encounter each other in words, words

spiny or smooth, whispered or declaimed,

words to consider, reconsider.

We cross dirt roads and highways that mark

the will of some one and then others, who said

I need to see what’s on the other side.

I know there’s something better down the road.

We need to find a place where we are safe.

We walk into that which we cannot yet see.

Say it plain: that many have died for this day.

Sing the names of the dead who brought us here,

who laid the train tracks, raised the bridges,

picked the cotton and the lettuce, built

brick by brick the glittering edifices

they would then keep clean and work inside of.

Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.

Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,

the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.

Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,

others by first do no harm or take no more

than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?

Love beyond marital, filial, national,

love that casts a widening pool of light,

love with no need to pre-empt grievance.

In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,

any thing can be made, any sentence begun.

On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,

praise song for walking forward in that light.

Copyright © 2009 by Elizabeth Alexander. All rights reserved.

beautiful questions of the day: what and whom do you love? * how do you show love? * “if the mightiest word is love,” what comes next?

DAY 107: July 3, 2020

“South Korean protesters shout slogans during a protest over the death of George Floyd, a black man who died after being restrained by Minneapolis police officers on May 25, near the U.S. embassy in Seoul, South Korea, Friday, June 5, 2020. The signs read ‘The U.S. government should stop oppression and there is no peace without justice.’ (AP Photo/Ahn Young-joon)” —SYDNEY (AP)

Song of the day: “Show Me Your Peace Sign,” Michael Franti & Spearhead

“There can be no justice without peace, and there can be no peace without justice.” — Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. 

Folks, I sincerely hope I didn’t cause you any alarm with the long radio silence! I posted an update to explain why I wasn’t posting (ha), but it didn’t save. Suffice to say, heatstroke + farewell to a friend in hospice + a long kayaking excursion made for a very full and intense Friday and Saturday, and I needed Sunday to just lie in our one air-conditioned room and rest, recover, and read.

Anyway, I’m back, wrapping up these 108 posts with two essential themes: peace and love.

This beautiful poem by my dear friend and teacher Judyth Hill has been set to music and recorded and/or performed by the Cincinnati Women’s Choir, Mark Fish (composer) and the Ragazzi Boys Chorus, and Michael Conley (composer) and the West Village Chorus of NYC, among others. It is also article 38 in the international Charter for Compassion.

This poem has been misattributed to Mary Oliver all over the internet. Which is a shame, because Mary Oliver was already famous!

Wage Peace 

Judyth Hill

Wage peace with your breath.

Breathe in firemen and rubble,

breathe out whole buildings

and flocks of redwing blackbirds.

Breathe in terrorists and breathe out sleeping children

and freshly mown fields.

Breathe in confusion and breathe out maple trees.

Breathe in the fallen

and breathe out lifelong friendships intact.

Wage peace with your listening:

hearing sirens, pray loud.

Remember your tools:

flower seeds, clothes pins, clean rivers.

Make soup.

Play music, learn the word for thank you in three languages.

Learn to knit, and make a hat.

Think of chaos as dancing raspberries,

imagine grief as the outbreath of beauty

or the gesture of fish.

Swim for the other side.

Wage peace.

Never has the world seemed so fresh and precious.

Have a cup of tea and rejoice.

Act as if armistice has already arrived.

Don't wait another minute.

Copyright 2003 by Judyth Hill. All rights reserved.

beautiful question of the day: how do you, yourself, wage peace?

DAY 106: July 2, 2020

Do yourself a favor and watch the whole “Backlash Blues” video! Nina Simone’s performance is epic, and there’s a lot of great talk from her, plus a comic wayward microphone.

And click on the poem title for a link to the poem page at www.poets.org, where you can click the audio icon to hear Lauren K. Alleyne read this amazing poem.

Borage is flowering in my garden right now, and the bees are so happy. One of its ancient common names is “bee bread.” According to the gardener and seed seller who took the photo above, borage is one of the top three plants to grow to support bees. (The others are viper’s bugloss and phacelia.) Borage was a medieval symbol of courage, and borage flower essence is taken to cultivate that quality. Borage oil has many and strong medicinal properties, too.

Borage flowers and the young leaves are edible. The flowers look gorgeous in lemonades and cocktails and on salads. And there are so few truly blue flowers, just gazing at the blue star-shaped flowers is a great summer pleasure. Like swimming ought to be.

Variations in Blue

Lauren K. Alleyne

           For Frank X Walker

FXW: I don’t know how to swim
Me: What?!
FXW: There were no pools for Black Folk when I was coming up


In sleep’s 3-D theatre: home, 
a green island surrounded
by the blue of ocean. Zoom
to the heart, see the Couva
swimming pool filled with us
—black children shrieking
our joy in a haze of sun; our life-
guard, Rodney, his skin flawless
and gleaming—black as fresh oil
—his strut along the pool’s edge,
his swoonworthy smile; Daddy
a beach-ball-bellied Poseidon,
droplets diamonding his afro;
my brother, hollering as he jumps
into his bright blue fear, his return
to air gasping and triumphant.
And there, the girl I was: dumpling
thick and sun-brown, stripped
down to the red two-piece suit
my mother had made by hand,
afloat in the blue bed of water,
the blue sky beaming above.
When I wake up, I’m in America
where Dorothy Dandridge
once emptied a pool with her pinkie,
and in Texas a black girl’s body
draped in its hopeful, tasseled bikini,
struck earth instead of water,
a policeman’s blue-clad knees
pinning her back, her indigo wail
a siren. I want this to be a dream,
but I am awake and in this place
where the only blue named home
is a song and we are meant to sink,
to sputter, to drown.

Copyright © 2018 by Lauren K. Alleyne. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on April 24, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets. All rights reserved.

beautiful question of the day: what are your own variations in/meditations on the color blue?

DAY 105: July 1, 2020

Dang, it’s July!

According to the Cassell Dictionary of Superstitions, my all-time favorite obscure reference book, only eagles can look directly at the sun.

Gwendolyn Brooks made the sun a lasting metaphor for truth.

Pablo Neruda completed his The Book of Questions just months before his death in 1973. Two questions from that book:

And why is the sun such a bad companion

to the traveler in the desert?

And why is the sun so congenial

in the hospital garden?

A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island

Frank O’Hara

The Sun woke me this morning loud and clear, saying "Hey! I've been trying to wake you up for fifteen minutes. Don't be so rude, you are only the second poet I've ever chosen to speak to personally so why aren't you more attentive? If I could burn you through the window I would to wake you up. I can't hang around here all day." "Sorry, Sun, I stayed up late last night talking to Hal." "When I woke up Mayakovsky he was a lot more prompt" the Sun said petulantly. "Most people are up already waiting to see if I'm going to put in an appearance." I tried to apologize "I missed you yesterday." "That's better" he said. "I didn't know you'd come out." "You may be wondering why I've come so close?" "Yes" I said beginning to feel hot wondering if maybe he wasn't burning me anyway. "Frankly I wanted to tell you I like your poetry. I see a lot on my rounds and you're okay. You may not be the greatest thing on earth, but you're different. Now, I've heard some say you're crazy, they being excessively calm themselves to my mind, and other crazy poets think that you're a boring reactionary. Not me. Just keep on like I do and pay no attention. You'll find that people always will complain about the atmosphere, either too hot or too cold too bright or too dark, days too short or too long. If you don't appear at all one day they think you're lazy or dead. Just keep right on, I like it. And don't worry about your lineage poetic or natural. The Sun shines on the jungle, you know, on the tundra the sea, the ghetto. Wherever you were I knew it and saw you moving. I was waiting for you to get to work. And now that you are making your own days, so to speak, even if no one reads you but me you won't be depressed. Not everyone can look up, even at me. It hurts their eyes." "Oh Sun, I'm so grateful to you!" "Thanks and remember I'm watching. It's easier for me to speak to you out here. I don't have to slide down between buildings to get your ear. I know you love Manhattan, but you ought to look up more often. And always embrace things, people earth sky stars, as I do, freely and with the appropriate sense of space. That is your inclination, known in the heavens and you should follow it to hell, if necessary, which I doubt. Maybe we'll speak again in Africa, of which I too am specially fond. Go back to sleep now Frank, and I may leave a tiny poem in that brain of yours as my farewell." "Sun, don't go!" I was awake at last. "No, go I must, they're calling me." "Who are they?" Rising he said "Some day you'll know. They're calling to you too." Darkly he rose, and then I slept.

[1958]

From The Collected Poems of Frank O’Hara. Copyright © 1971 by Maureen Granville-Smith. Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. All rights reserved.

beautiful questions of the day: what questions do you have for the sun? * what dialogue do you imagine between you and the sun?

DAY 104: June 30, 2020

Minnesota, it turns out, has 11,842 lakes. And Wisconsin has over 15,000! But they don’t lord their lakes over people as Minnesotans do. Hmmm…

Here in Minneapolis, “The City of Lakes,” I live near Lake Hiawatha, which was once Dakota wild rice-growing marshland, and Lake Nokomis, which I just learned was once known as Lake Amelia. If we’re lucky, every year we spend a week with friends on the North Shore of Lake Superior, or Anishinaabe Gichigami ("Anishinaabe's Great Sea"), doing all the good lake things.

Here’s the best lake poem I yet know, by Dean Young, a favorite poet of mine. He once said of his poems, “I want to put everything in.”

Please send your own favorite lake poems! To: info@alzpoetrymn.org

He Said Turn Here

BY DEAN YOUNG

and then Tony showed us the lake

where he had thrown some of his sadness last summer

and it had dissolved like powder

so he thought maybe the lake could take

some of the radiant, aluminum kind

he had been making lately.

And it did.

It was a perfect lake,

none of the paint had chipped off,

no bolts showing, the arms that Dante

and Virgil would have to hack through

not even breaking the surface.

Mumbling Italian to itself,

it had climbed down two wooden stairs

back to the beach now that the rains were done.

How strange to be water so close to the ocean

yet the only other water you get to talk to

comes from the sky. Maybe this is why

it seems so willing to take on

Tony’s sadness which sometimes corrodes

his friends, which is really

many different sadnesses, smaller

and smaller, surrounded by more

and more space, each a world and

at its core an engine like a bee

inside a lily, like buzzing inside

the bee. It seems like nothing

could change its color although

we couldn’t tell what color it was,

it kept changing. In the summer,

Tony says he comes down early each day

and there’s no one around so the lake

barely says a thing when he dives in

and once when his kitchen was on fire in Maine

and he was asleep, the lake came and bit his hand,

trying to drag him to safety

and some nights in New Mexico,

he can hear it howling,

searching for him in the desert

so we’re glad Tony has this lake

and we promise to come back in August

and swim with him across,

maybe even race.

From First Course in Turbulence (University of Pittsburgh Press, 1999). Copyright © 1999 by Dean Young. All rights reserved .

beautiful question of the day: what lakes do you love? * what lake stories do you have?

DAY 103: June 29, 2020

California Redwoods by Scrubhiker (USCdyer) / Flickr / Creative Commons 2.0

Song of the day: “From the Bohemian Forest, Op. 68, B. 182: No. 5, Silent Woods” · Lorin Maazel · Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra · Yo-Yo Ma · Antonín Dvorák · Berliner Philharmoniker

Here’s the poem I referred to in yesterday’s post. I have no idea whether Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things” was influenced by this wonderful poem by poet, songwriter, novelist, diplomat, and NAACP national organizer (beginning in 1920) James Weldon Johnson, but they make fine companions either way. For all his remarkable and varied accomplishments, Johnson is best known for his song “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” composed in 1900.

Have you ever heard the term “forest bathing”? Doesn’t that sound good?

“Forest bathing, or shinrin-yoku, is simply spending time outdoors under the canopy of trees. In Japanese, “shinrin” means forest and “yoku” means bath, or immersing oneself in the forest and soaking in the atmosphere through the senses, according to Dr. Qing Li, who is the president of the Japanese Society of Forest Medicine and one of Japan’s leading forest bathing researchers. His book Forest Bathing: How Trees Can Help You Find Health and Happiness (Viking) was translated into English and published in the U.K. and North America in 2018.”

—From the 2018 article “There’s No Running in Forest Bathing” by Monica Prelle.

If you can’t get out into the woods or under a tree somewhere, do your whole self the favor of recalling times when you have been among trees, or simply imagining that you are. A dreamed forest bathing experience, to the brain, is not so different from a lived one.

Deep in the Quiet Wood

James Weldon Johnson 

Are you bowed down in heart?
Do you but hear the clashing discords and the din of life?
Then come away, come to the peaceful wood,
Here bathe your soul in silence. Listen! Now,
From out the palpitating solitude
Do you not catch, yet faint, elusive strains?
They are above, around, within you, everywhere.
Silently listen! Clear, and still more clear, they come.
They bubble up in rippling notes, and swell in singing tones.
Now let your soul run the whole gamut of the wondrous scale
Until, responsive to the tonic chord,
It touches the diapason of God’s grand cathedral organ,
Filling earth for you with heavenly peace
And holy harmonies.

This poem is in the public domain.

beautiful question of the day: what comes to mind when you think of a beloved tree, or grove or forest?

DAY 102: June 28, 2020

Song of the day: “The White Cliffs of Dover,” The Blue Jays

These four are just a small sample of the conference of birds that was also meeting during our socially distanced visit to my wife’s dad out in the Driftless region of Wisconsin this weekend, where the sweetest stray cat I’ve ever met, Stanley, had also just arrived. He was so relaxed in his transitional space in the garage, he fell off the chair purring while being petted.

From left, we have the magnificent rose-breasted grosbeak (or “fat-nose,” as my father-in-law calls him) and indigo bunting—neither of which I had ever seen in person before!—and the brown-headed cowbird and goldfinch. We also saw three different species of woodpecker and countless ruby-throated hummingbirds. What an amazing thing! I feel fully restored, though we were only there for 21 hours.

Boids! They’re a frequently used metaphor. But I think we just need them. We need to be around them. And of course they are beyond all our needs and projections! And maybe all the more important to notice and protect because of that.

If you have space to plant or some influence at your shared residence, please consider letting anything you grow go to seed at some point and just stay standing through the winter. Birds will survive on the seeds and shelter in the dead foliage, leaf piles, etc. Plus they will perch on the stalks so you can admire them.

I’ll follow up tomorrow with the James Weldon Johnson poem it suddenly occurs to me might have inspired this much-loved poem by farmer-ecologist-poet Wendell Berry. From his bio: “Wendell Berry is the author of more than 40 books of poetry, fiction, and essays; he has farmed a hillside in his native Henry County, KY, for more than forty years.”

The Peace of Wild Things

Wendell Berry

When despair for the world grows in me
and I wake in the night at the least sound
in fear of what my life and my children's lives may be,
I go and lie down where the wood drake
rests in his beauty on the water, and the great heron feeds. I come into the peace of wild things
who do not tax their lives with forethought
of grief. I come into the presence of still water.
And I feel above me the day-blind stars
waiting with their light. For a time
I rest in the grace of the world, and am free.

From New Collected Poems (Counterpoint, 2012). Copyright 2012 by Wendell Berry. All rights reserved.

beautiful question of the day: what wild things bring you a sense of peace?

DAY 101: June 27, 2020

Pride Flag redesign, Daniel Quasar, 2017

Song of the day: “Same Love,” Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, featuring Mary Lambert

HAPPY PRIDE!

May we move ever forward in equality for all people.

Vows (for a gay wedding)

Joseph O. Legaspi

What was unforeseen is now a bird orbiting this field.

What wasn’t a possibility is present in our arms.

It shall be and it begins with you.

Our often-misunderstood kind of love deems dangerous.
How it frightens and confounds and enrages.
How strange, unfamiliar.

Our love carries all those and the contrary.
It is most incandescent.

So, I vow to be brave.
Clear a path through jungles of shame and doubt and fear.
I’m done with silence. I proclaim.

It shall be and it sings from within.

Truly we are enraptured
With Whitmanesque urge and urgency.

I vow to love in all seasons.
When you’re summer, I’m watermelon balled up in a sky-blue bowl.
When I’m autumn, you’re foliage ablaze in New England.
When in winter, I am the tender scarf of warm mercies.
When in spring, you are the bourgeoning buds.

I vow to love you in all places.
High plains, prairies, hills and lowlands.
In our dream-laden bed,
Cradled in the nest
Of your neck.
Deep in the plum.

It shall be and it flows with you.

We’ll leap over the waters and barbaric rooftops.

You embrace my resilient metropolis.
I adore your nourishing wilderness.

I vow to love you in primal ways.
I vow to love you in infinite forms.

In our separateness and composites.
To dust and stars and the ever after.

Intrepid travelers, lovers, and family
We have arrived.

Look. The bird has come home to roost.

From Threshold (CavanKerry Press, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Joseph O. Legaspi. All rights reserved.

beautiful question of the day: how are you showing your pride, and/or solidarity with LGBTQ+ people, today (and beyond today)?

DAY 100: June 26, 2020

Today’s theme—BRAINS!—was inspired by today’s great Poem-a-Day post from the Academy of American Poets. Sasha Debevec-McKenney says: “This poem takes place at Welch Park in Windsor, Connecticut, where I got my front teeth knocked out playing softball when I was thirteen. There is ignorance and violence inherent in comparing anything to a prison—quarantine, your hometown, your own mental illness. The poem says prisons should be abolished, be nice to yourself, go tanning, and always check your privilege.” Excellent advice! Click here for a link to the poem page and the opportunity to hear the poet read this poem out loud.

YOUR BRAIN IS NOT A PRISON! 

Sasha Debevec-McKenney

A prison is the only place that’s a prison.
Maybe your brain is a beehive—or, better:
an ants nest? A spin class?
The sand stuck in an hourglass? Your brain is like
stop it. So you practice driving with your knees,
you get all the way out to the complex of Little League fields,
you get chicken fingers with four kinds of mustard—
spicy, whole grain, Dijon, yellow—
you walk from field to field, you watch yourself
play every position, you circle each identical game,
each predictable outcome. On one field you catch.
On one field you pitch. You are center field. You are left.
Sometimes you have steady hands and French braids.
Sometimes you slide too hard into second on purpose.
It feels as good to get the bloody knee as it does to kick yourself in the shin.
You wait for the bottom of the ninth to lay your blanket out in the sun.
Admit it, Sasha, the sun helps. Today,
the red team hits the home run. Red floods every field.
A wasp lands on your thigh. You know this feeling. 

Copyright © 2020 by Sasha Debevec-McKenney. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 26, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

beautiful questions of the day: what other metaphors and similes might you choose to describe your brain? * how about other things your brain is not?

DAY 99: June 25, 2020

Hollyhocks and Mountains, Gustave Baumann, 1921

Song of the day: “Wildflowers,” Tom Petty

Greetings! Today I was overjoyed to see the first curve of deep pink in the hollyhock buds. I planted this Seed Savers’ Exchange blend of “outhouse hollyhock” seeds—pinks and reds to meant to signal the presence of an outhouse for ladies so proper they couldn’t bring themselves to ask—three years ago. This is the first year they will bloom, and I am so excited I can hardly contain myself. For one thing, the satisfaction of fostering the growing process for a wide variety of plants teaches me constantly and is at the top of the things-that-make-me-happy list. For another, hollyhocks remind me strongly of my other (sort of) hometown, Santa Fe. And all of New Mexico. The drama of tall hollyhock stalks and the green of leaves and red, pink of a thousand shades, peach, white, black, and yellow flowers against adobe walls is one of my favorite sights in the world. I love the hollyhocks of German-born New Mexico painter and printmaker Gustave Baumann the most.

Black flowers aren’t totally black, but the deepest, darkest red, so deep it appears black when out of direct light. I’m happy with the reds and pinks coming, but I need to plant some black hollyhocks for their transcendent beauty and in honor of my beloved friend and teacher, poet Judyth Hill, whose plants in her fabulous former gardens in Sapello, New Mexico—she now lives in Colorado—made their way into many of my own poems. While I was on her dirt canyon road on a walk, I saw—or maybe just truly noticed—showy milkweed for the first time.

Black Hollyhock, First Light

Judyth Hill

That spikey eye, dead center.

A practice of weeping.

A woman cries and cries,

Leaning out of her body as if it was a window.

Becoming then,

a pillar of light,

a basket of leavened fire.

Salt, salt.

A flame,

blowing from storm to blossom

and back.

From Black Hollyhock, First Light (La Alameda Press, 2001). Copyright 2001 by Judyth Hill. All rights reserved.

beautiful question of the day: what is blooming in your world right now?

DAY 98: June 24, 2020

As a little kid, my favorite of all favorite books were the Lang’s Fairy Books: The Lilac Fairy Book, The Olive Fairy Book, the pink, crimson, brown, blue, green, red, orange, yellow, violet and grey—I had Dover paperback versions of all these, given to me for many years of Christmases and birthdays by godparents of whom I have no other recollection.

One of the great things about those books was that they contained tales from cultures all over the world, so I became acquainted with such beings as the bunyip and yōkai along with the European standards like fairies, goblins, sprites, and gnomes.

"Little people” are one element common to fairy tales, myths, and legends of so many cultures, including many Native American tribes. According to good ol’ Wikipedia, “The Native peoples of North America told legends of a race of ‘little people’ who lived in the woods near sandy hills and sometimes near rocks located along large bodies of water, such as the Great Lakes. Often described as ‘hairy-faced dwarfs’ in stories, petroglyph illustrations show them with horns on their head and traveling in a group of 5 to 7 per canoe.[1]”

The Herbal Almanac by Linda Ours Rago (illustrated by Marjorie Stodgell) draws on a lot of ancient herbals, mostly European. It tells us that “Fairies are particularly active between Midsummer [June 22] and St. Peter’s Day, June 29.

“Look for fairies dancing near the thyme under the moon in June. They like to leave their babies asleep in the tiny thyme blossom cradles. If you do see a fairy, never tell anyone—it will bring bad luck.”

The Stolen Child

W. B. Yeats 

Where dips the rocky highland
Of Sleuth Wood in the lake,
There lies a leafy island
Where flapping herons wake
The drowsy water rats;
There we've hid our faery vats,
Full of berrys
And of reddest stolen cherries.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wave of moonlight glosses
The dim gray sands with light,
Far off by furthest Rosses
We foot it all the night,
Weaving olden dances
Mingling hands and mingling glances
Till the moon has taken flight;
To and fro we leap
And chase the frothy bubbles,
While the world is full of troubles
And anxious in its sleep.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Where the wandering water gushes
From the hills above Glen-Car,
In pools among the rushes
That scarce could bathe a star,
We seek for slumbering trout
And whispering in their ears
Give them unquiet dreams;
Leaning softly out
From ferns that drop their tears
Over the young streams.
Come away, O human child!
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than you can understand.

Away with us he's going,
The solemn-eyed:
He'll hear no more the lowing
Of the calves on the warm hillside
Or the kettle on the hob
Sing peace into his breast,
Or see the brown mice bob
Round and round the oatmeal chest.
For he comes, the human child,
To the waters and the wild
With a faery, hand in hand,
For the world's more full of weeping than he can understand.

This poem is in the public domain.

beautiful questions of the day: what stories have you heard—or do you tell—about “little people”? * what are the three tasks in your fairy tale? * what are the three magical objects? * what is the line you must repeat three times?

DAY 97: June 23, 2020

I’m back in action! Though still feeling bleh. Sure hope you are all staying healthy.

On Day 89, the subject was altars. Today I’m zooming in on a single precious object. (Among the many treasured objects on my various altars throughout the house is a little spear of citrine that rests in a tiny pair of ceramic hands given to me by a dear old friend.)

What object or image in your world is deserving of an ode?

Ode to My Socks

Pablo Neruda 

Maru Mori brought me
a pair
of socks
which she knitted herself
with her sheepherder’s hands,
two socks as soft
as rabbits.
I slipped my feet
into them
as though into
two
cases
knitted
with threads of
twilight
and goatskin.
Violent socks,
my feet were
two fish made
of wool,
two long sharks
sea-blue, shot
through
by one golden thread,
two immense blackbirds,
two cannons:
my feet
were honored
in this way
by
these
heavenly
socks.
They were
so handsome
for the first time
my feet seemed to me
unacceptable
like two decrepit
firemen, firemen
unworthy
of that woven
fire,
of those glowing
socks.

Nevertheless
I resisted
the sharp temptation
to save them somewhere
as schoolboys
keep
fireflies,
as learned men
collect
sacred texts,
I resisted
the mad impulse
to put them
into a golden
cage
and each day give them
birdseed
and pieces of pink melon.
Like explorers
in the jungle who hand
over the very rare
green deer
to the spit
and eat it
with remorse,
I stretched out
my feet
and pulled on
the magnificent
socks
and then my shoes.

The moral
of my ode is this:
beauty is twice
beauty
and what is good is doubly
good
when it is a matter of two socks
made of wool
in winter.

From Neruda & Vallejo: Selected Poems, by Pablo Neruda and translated by Robert Bly (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993). All rights reserved.



beautiful question of the day: what is the story of one of your sacred, treasured, or heirloom objects?

DAY 96: June 22, 2020

Wow. Did you ever DREAM such a pie as the one above? Goodness. The strawberry rhubarb pie I made today looks like a smear in comparison, but it was made with ingredients from our garden patch as a birthday gift for my brother (along with a jar of that wild violet jelly), so it’s okay if I didn’t quite go the distance in the crust department.

Pie is one of the great delights of being human, if we’re lucky. Some version of it appears in just about every culture. I love this funny, anthropomorphizing pie poem by Arizona Poet Laureate Alberto Ríos, but surely you must have something to add about pie?

Perfect for Any Occasion

Alberto Ríos 

1.

Pies have a reputation.
And it’s immediate—no talk of potential

Regarding a pie.  It’s good
Or it isn’t, but mostly it is—sweet, very sweet

Right then, right there, blue and red.
It can’t go to junior college,

Work hard for the grades,
Work two jobs on the side.

It can’t slowly build a reputation
And a growing client base.

A pie gets one chance
And knows it, wearing as makeup

Those sparkling granules of sugar,
As a collar those diamond cutouts

Bespeaking Fair Day, felicity, contentment.
I tell you everything is great, says a pie,

Great, and fun, and fine.
And you smell nice, too, someone says.

A full pound of round sound, all ahh, all good.
Pies live a life of applause.

2.

But then there are the other pies.
The leftover pies.  The ones

Nobody chooses at Thanksgiving.
Mincemeat?  What the hell is that? people ask,

Pointing instead at a double helping of Mr.
“I-can-do-no-wrong” pecan pie.

But the unchosen pies have a long history, too.
They have plenty of good stories, places they’ve been—

They were once fun, too—
But nobody wants to listen to them anymore.

Oh sure, everybody used to love lard,
But things have changed, brother—things have changed.

That’s never the end of the story, of course.
Some pies make a break for it—

Live underground for a while,
Doing what they can, talking fast,

Trying to be sweet pizzas, if they’re lucky.
But no good comes of it.  Nobody is fooled.

A pie is a pie for one great day.  Last week,
It was Jell-O.  Tomorrow, it’ll be cake.

From The Dangerous Shirt (Copper Canyon Press, 2009). Copyright © by Alberto Ríos. All rights reserved.

beautiful question of the day: what do you have to say on the subject of pie?

DAY 95: June 21, 2020

There was an annular (partial) solar eclipse this morning. According to CNN, it began at 12:47 a.m. ET (4:47 UTC) on June 21 and crossed a slender path that started at sunrise in Africa and is moving across to China before ending at sunset over the Pacific Ocean. 

I don’t know if anyone reading this is currently in the Eastern Hemisphere, but just in case, here are instructions on safely observing a solar eclipse.

And though it’s not a total eclipse, I have to link you with this beautiful 1982 essay by Annie Dillard, which appeared in her book Teaching a Stone to Talk.

Seeing the Eclipse in Maine

BY ROBERT BLY

It started about noon.  On top of Mount Batte,   

We were all exclaiming.  Someone had a cardboard   

And a pin, and we all cried out when the sun   

Appeared in tiny form on the notebook cover.   

It was hard to believe.  The high school teacher   

We’d met called it a pinhole camera,   

People in the Renaissance loved to do that.   

And when the moon had passed partly through

We saw on a rock underneath a fir tree,   

Dozens of crescents—made the same way—   

Thousands!  Even our straw hats produced   

A few as we moved them over the bare granite.  

We shared chocolate, and one man from Maine   

Told a joke.  Suns were everywhere—at our feet.

From Music, Pictures, and Stories (Holt, Rinehart & Winston, 2002). Copyright 1997 by Robert Bly. All rights reserved.

beautiful question of the day: what magical things might happen during a solar eclipse?

DAY 94: June 20, 2020

Happy Solstice, everyone!

And happy birthday to my “little” brother Damon, 42 today.

Enjoy the longest day!

Summer at North Farm

BY STEPHEN KUUSISTO

Finnish rural life, ca. 1910

Fires, always fires after midnight,

the sun depending in the purple birches

and gleaming like a copper kettle.

By the solstice they’d burned everything,

the bad-luck sleigh, a twisted rocker,

things “possessed” and not-quite-right.

The bonfire coils and lurches,

big as a house, and then it settles.

The dancers come, dressed like rainbows

(if rainbows could be spun),

and linking hands they turn

to the melancholy fiddles.

A red bird spreads its wings now

and in the darker days to come.

From Only Bread Only Light. (Copper Canyon Press, 2000). Copyright © 2000 by Stephen Kuusisto. All rights reserved.

beautiful question of the day: what should we do, on the longest day?

DAY 93: June 19, 2020

Today is Juneteenth! (June + nineteenth.) As Jamaal Bowman explains, “June 19, 1865 marks the day that the Emancipation Proclamation was read to enslaved people in Texas—more than two years after the Emancipation Proclamation was declared. This day later became known as Juneteenth.

“Juneteenth honors Black freedom and resistance. It’s a day when we remember how far we’ve come, but also acknowledge how far we have to go in our fight for equality. It’s a momentous day in American history, and it deserves to be commemorated as such.”

Here in Minnesota, our governor has declared Juneteenth/Freedom Day a state holiday. You can sign a petition to Congress here to finally make Juneteenth a national holiday and day of remembrance.

Grammy-winning Minnesota gospel group Sounds of Blackness released a new song today, “Sick and Tired,” in honor of Juneteenth and the movement for Black liberation; I have linked to an article above, and you can find the song of the day embedded in the article.

There are so many great poems that I’d like to use for today’s post. Here are two poems that are, to me, essential.

A Litany for Survival

BY AUDRE LORDE

For those of us who live at the shoreline

standing upon the constant edges of decision

crucial and alone

for those of us who cannot indulge

the passing dreams of choice

who love in doorways coming and going

in the hours between dawns

looking inward and outward

at once before and after

seeking a now that can breed

futures

like bread in our children’s mouths

so their dreams will not reflect

the death of ours;

For those of us

who were imprinted with fear

like a faint line in the center of our foreheads

learning to be afraid with our mother’s milk

for by this weapon

this illusion of some safety to be found

the heavy-footed hoped to silence us

For all of us

this instant and this triumph

We were never meant to survive.

And when the sun rises we are afraid

it might not remain

when the sun sets we are afraid

it might not rise in the morning

when our stomachs are full we are afraid

of indigestion

when our stomachs are empty we are afraid

we may never eat again

when we are loved we are afraid

love will vanish

when we are alone we are afraid

love will never return

and when we speak we are afraid

our words will not be heard

nor welcomed

but when we are silent

we are still afraid

So it is better to speak

remembering

we were never meant to survive.

From The Collected Poems of Audre Lorde by Audre Lorde. Copyright © 1997 by the Audre Lorde Estate. All rights reserved.

Still I Rise

BY MAYA ANGELOU

You may write me down in history

With your bitter, twisted lies,

You may trod me in the very dirt

But still, like dust, I'll rise.

Does my sassiness upset you?

Why are you beset with gloom?

’Cause I walk like I've got oil wells

Pumping in my living room.

Just like moons and like suns,

With the certainty of tides,

Just like hopes springing high,

Still I'll rise.

Did you want to see me broken?

Bowed head and lowered eyes?

Shoulders falling down like teardrops,

Weakened by my soulful cries?

Does my haughtiness offend you?

Don't you take it awful hard

’Cause I laugh like I've got gold mines

Diggin’ in my own backyard.

You may shoot me with your words,

You may cut me with your eyes,

You may kill me with your hatefulness,

But still, like air, I’ll rise.

Does my sexiness upset you?

Does it come as a surprise

That I dance like I've got diamonds

At the meeting of my thighs?

Out of the huts of history’s shame

I rise

Up from a past that’s rooted in pain

I rise

I'm a black ocean, leaping and wide,

Welling and swelling I bear in the tide.

Leaving behind nights of terror and fear

I rise

Into a daybreak that’s wondrously clear

I rise

Bringing the gifts that my ancestors gave,

I am the dream and the hope of the slave.

I rise

I rise

I rise.

From And Still I Rise: A Book of Poems.  Copyright © 1978 by Maya Angelou. All rights reserved.

beautiful question of the day: how are you honoring/observing Juneteenth today?

DAY 92: June 18, 2020



It felt so fortuitous to meet this beautiful monarch caterpillar in the milkweed that grows amongst my potatoes today, since this morning, in a 5-4 decision, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the Trump administration acted unlawfully when it attempted to end the Deferred Action of Childhood Arrivals, or DACA, thus allowing the program to stay in place for now. YES! Now we need to free those in detention and reunite families.

Monarchs, as you very likely already know, migrate in generations to and from Mexico and the United States. Nature is damaged by, but does not recognize or register, such political constructs. I hope we humans will rise above them too.

Zacuanpapalotls 

BY BRENDA CÁRDENAS

(in memory of José Antonio Burciaga, 1947-1996)                          

                     We are chameleons. We become chameleon.
                             —José Antonio Burciaga 

We are space between—

the black-orange blur

of a million Monarchs

on their two-generation migration

south to fir-crowned Michoacán

where tree trunks will sprout feathers,

a forest of paper-thin wings.

Our Mexica cocooned

in the membranes de la Madre Tierra

say we are reborn zacuanpapalotls,

mariposas negras y anaranjadas

in whose sweep the dead whisper.

We are between—

the flicker of a chameleon’s tail

that turns his desert-blue backbone

to jade or pink sand,

the snake-skinned fraternal twins

of solstice and equinox.

The ashen dawn, silvering dusk,

la oración as it leaves the lips,

the tug from sleep,

the glide into dreams

that husk out mestizo memory.

We are—

one life passing through the prism

of all others, gathering color and song,

cempazuchil and drum

to leave a rhythm scattered on the wind,

dust tinting the tips of fingers

as we slip into our new light.

From Boomerang (Bilingual Press/Editorial Bilingüe, 2009). Copyright © 2009 by Brenda Cardenas.

beautiful question of the day: do you, or does your family, have a migration story?

DAY 91: June 17, 2020

I love bugs. Except for the ugly pale red ones that swell up like ticks while they eat my weaker potato plants. And Jerusalem crickets. And cockroaches, though I admire them. And mosquitoes aren’t my favorite. But I love all I’m learning from making these posts; I had no idea, for example, that mosquitoes were so beautiful! Or that Dhrupad music may have developed partly as a harmonizing with mosquitoes and other insects. Read this and click on the links in the article, it’s fascinating. The poet Lynda Hull is also new to me, and I really love this poem and her work. Thanks for reading and providing me with this inspiration, friends.

There have got to be some great myths and legends about Mosquito out there. If you find one you like, send me a link!

Insect Life of Florida

BY LYNDA HULL

In those days I thought their endless thrum

   was the great wheel that turned the days, the nights.

      In the throats of hibiscus and oleander

I’d see them clustered yellow, blue, their shells

   enameled hard as the sky before the rain.

      All that summer, my second, from city

to city my young father drove the black coupe

   through humid mornings I’d wake to like fever

      parceled between luggage and sample goods.

Afternoons, showers drummed the roof,

   my parents silent for hours. Even then I knew

      something of love was cruel, was distant.

Mother leaned over the seat to me, the orchid

   Father’d pinned in her hair shriveled

      to a purple fist. A necklace of shells

coiled her throat, moving a little as she

   murmured of alligators that float the rivers

      able to swallow a child whole, of mosquitoes

whose bite would make you sleep a thousand years.

   And always the trance of blacktop shimmering

      through swamps with names like incantations—

Okeefenokee, where Father held my hand

   and pointed to an egret’s flight unfolding

      white above swamp reeds that sang with insects

until I was lost, until I was part

   of the singing, their thousand wings gauze

      on my body, tattooing my skin.

Father rocked me later by the water,

   the motel balcony, singing calypso

      with the Jamaican radio. The lyrics

a net over the sea, its lesson

   of desire and repetition. Lizards flashed

      over his shoes, over the rail

where the citronella burned merging our

   shadows—Father’s face floating over mine

      in the black changing sound

of night, the enormous Florida night,

   metallic with cicadas, musical

      and dangerous as the human heart.

From Collected Poems (Graywolf Press, 2006). Copyright © 2006 by the Estate of Lynda Hull. 

beautiful question of the day: when you think of insects, what sounds do you hear? can you reproduce the sounds on paper?

DAY 90: June 16, 2020

My my. The days are very full. And so is this webpage; there is so much data here now that every move I make while editing takes a reeeealllllly long time to register. So, while I have loved doing this, it’s a good thing for my sanity that Day 108 marks the expiration date of this particular project. I will find other ways to reach out and help reduce isolation!

Today’s post is inspired by the birthday of our beloved six-year-old niece, Allie, who was born on a Monday and is indeed fair of face. She has a sensory processing disorder that has created some profound developmental delays, and regular schedules and school have been essential to her well being, so not being able to go to school or some of her therapies and activities has her freaking out pretty much all day, every day. I really feel for her and her parents right now (and so many other kids and parents trying to navigate this time!).

I think maybe this was the first poem I ever memorized; I remember reciting it with my grandmother, who was honestly proud to be a Wednesday’s child and full of woe. She did a lurid cross-stitch of the Wednesday line of the poem below in the 70s, and put it in a bright orange frame. It’s hanging in my studio now.

I’m a Friday kid—how about you?

Children

{Anonymous}

Monday’s child is fair of face,
Tuesday’s child is full of grace,
Wednesday’s child is full of woe,
Thursdays child has far to go,
Fridays child is loving and giving,
Saturday’s child works hard for a living,
And the child that is born on the Sabbath day
Is bonny and blithe, and good and gay.

beautiful question of the day: what does it mean to be a child?

DAY 89: June 15, 2020

Today I led two poetry sessions via Zoom. Our subject was precious objects and images, what kinds of strength they lend us and memories they contain, and the altar spaces—whether religious in nature or not—that we’ve made to house them in our rooms and homes. Everyone described one of their sacred objects as part of group poem creation, and the homework assignment for participants is to make a list of all the items on their altars (or other special spaces and niches), list-poem style. You might do the same!

Considering altars and shrines, I immediately think of Bali, where I was privileged to travel twenty years ago. Beautiful Hindu shrines are everywhere there, and almost every family has them outside, inside, and at their places of work. But one does not need to adhere to any religion to have little altars everywhere.

Today’s poem is the shortest yet—two lines from my dear friend and treasured writing teacher, Judyth Hill.

Two Buddhas in Our Garden

Judyth Hill

One, where you’ve moved him.

The other, where, all last summer, he was.

From Black Hollyhock, First Light (La Alameda Press, 2001). Copyright 2001 by Judyth Hill. All rights reserved.

beautiful question of the day: what lives on your altar?

DAY 88: June 14, 2020

The fabulous Nikki Giovanni was also born on June 7 (1943). What a day! I just discovered this poem by her and am so glad I did. I often start a residency with a “What Is Poetry?” theme—to firmly establish the idea that there is no right or wrong way to think about, read, interpret, or create poetry—and this is a wonderful poem to open discussion.

Poetry

Nikki Giovanni

poetry is motion graceful
as a fawn
gentle as a teardrop
strong like the eye
finding peace in a crowded room
we poets tend to think
our words are golden
though emotion speaks too
loudly to be defined
by silence
sometimes after midnight or just before
the dawn
we sit typewriter in hand
pulling loneliness around us
forgetting our lovers or children
who are sleeping
ignoring the weary wariness
of our own logic
to compose a poem
no one understands it
it never says "love me" for poets are
beyond love
it never says "accept me" for poems seek not
acceptance but controversy
it only says "i am" and therefore
i concede that you are too

a poem is pure energy
horizontally contained
between the mind
of the poet and the ear of the reader
if it does not sing discard the ear
for poetry is song
if it does not delight discard
the heart for poetry is joy
if it does not inform then close
off the brain for it is dead
if it cannot heed the insistent message
that life is precious

which is all we poets
wrapped in our loneliness
are trying to say

From The Women and the Men (William Morrow, 1970). Copyright 1970 by Nikki Giovanni. All rights reserved.

beautiful question of the day: what is poetry, to you?

DAY 87: June 13, 2020

I was so caught up in June 7 as Prince’s birthday that I neglected to note it was also the birthday of the great Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American writer to win a Pulitzer Prize, and also Nikki Giovanni, whom I’ll feature on Day 88.

Brooks’s poetry is always timely, but this one seems especially appropriate right now.

truth

BY GWENDOLYN BROOKS

And if sun comes

How shall we greet him?

Shall we not dread him,

Shall we not fear him

After so lengthy a

Session with shade?

Though we have wept for him,

Though we have prayed

All through the night-years—

What if we wake one shimmering morning to

Hear the fierce hammering

Of his firm knuckles

Hard on the door?

Shall we not shudder?—

Shall we not flee

Into the shelter, the dear thick shelter

Of the familiar

Propitious haze?

Sweet is it, sweet is it

To sleep in the coolness

Of snug unawareness.

The dark hangs heavily

Over the eyes.

From Blacks (Third World Press, 1987). Copyright © 1987 by Gwendolyn Brooks. All rights reserved.

beautiful question of the day: what are some truths you know?

DAY 86: June 12, 2020

I had a wonderful encounter on Thursday, the day so full I forgot to post here: I was digging compost into my pepper, squash, & bean bed when a young turkey hen stepped delicately across our community garden plot and then lay down for a nap or to nest (I don’t think to die) in a patch of walking onions and wildflowers at the edge of the next plot. I could see her tailfeathers brushing the leaves of the rhubarb in our plot.

This felt like a visit from the benevolent Turkey Goddess. So I just did a little research on turkeys in Native myth and culture and found this:

“It is often said that the name turkey comes from a corruption of a Native American name for the bird; however, this is not true. The name of the bird comes from the name of the country Turkey, by way of a colonial mistake (early English settlers mistakenly thought turkeys were a kind of guineafowl, an African bird that English people used to import from Turkey). However, the Spanish name for turkey, guajolote, does come from the Nahuatl (Aztec) name huexolotl. 

“Turkeys play a variety of roles in the folklore of different Native American tribes. In some legends, Turkey is portrayed as a wily, overly-proud trickster character. In others, he is shy and elusive. In parts of Mexico and the American Southwest, turkeys were domesticated and kept as food animals by some tribes, and their role in stories from these tribes is similar to chicken stories from Europe, with the birds mimicking the concerns and activities of human farmers. The Akimel O'odham (Pima) people consider the turkey a rain spirit, and have folk beliefs about turkeys being able to predict the weather. 

”Turkeys are also used as clan animals in some Native American cultures. Tribes with Turkey Clans include the Creek tribe (whose Turkey Clan is named Pinwalgi or Penwvlke), the Shawnee and Miami tribes, the Navajo, the Zuni (whose Turkey Clan name is Tona-kwe), and other Pueblo tribes of New Mexico. The turkey was also the special tribal symbol of the Unalachtigo tribe (a division of the Delaware nation). Turkey feathers have been used in the traditional regalia of many tribes, particularly the feathered cloaks of eastern Woodland Indians like the Wampanoag and the feather headdresses of southern tribes like the Tuscarora and Catawba. The Turkey Dance is one of the most important social dances of the Caddo tribe, associated with songs about war honors and tribal pride. Some other eastern tribes, such as the Lenape, Shawnee, and Seminoles, have turkey dances as well.” —-www.native-languages.org (click the link for more, including links to legends about turkeys from a number of Native nations!)

These Wild Turkeys

Tim Poland

For my own part I wish the Bald Eagle had not been chosen
the Representative of our Country. He is a Bird of bad moral
Character. He does not get his Living honestly… For the Truth
the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird,
and withal a true original Native of America… His is besides,
though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not
hesitate to attack…
—Benjamin Franklin, 1784

we’ve taken to feeding these wild turkeys
and they hate us for it, hold us in contempt,
lured from the burden of forage,
baited into ease and dependence,
it’s our fault and they know it, so they
turn on us, demand we continue what we’ve
started now that the damage is done, their
wildness revised to fistfuls of grain on the ground

*

a hen wanders in from another flock
on the far side of the ridge, saunters in
from the wild to peck the easy corn
with her angry and sated cousins,
the ancient grain a new delight to her,
until a delegation of other hens arrives from
over the ridge, cuts her from this indolent flock,
and nudges her back to the wild fold

*

see the tom by the fallen poplar, wing feathers
chestnut and buff, eyes like polished pebbles,
he does not condescend to display for us,
we do not merit his vanity,
no threat to him, we are pathetic and
worthy of no more than his disdain,
servants to be pecked and prodded if
we are too slow to deliver up the corn

From Rattle #27, Summer 2007

beautiful question of the day: what have you noticed about turkeys?

DAY 85: June 11, 2020

Dirt and Lace works from Sandra Menefee Taylor’s installation Inside Out Outside In: Domestic Commitments installation at The Textile Center, Minneapolis, 2016. Copyright 2019 Sandra Menefee Taylor.

Song of the day: “Red Clay Halo,” Gillian Welch and David Rawlings

I am in love with dirt. I spend a lot of time building soil in gardens at home and in the Dowling Community Garden in South Minneapolis. I remember eating dirt as a kid and finding it not awful. I remember overhearing other little kids singing, “God made dirt/so it won’t hurt” on the playground in kindergarten (they were probably also ritually forcing other little kids to eat dirt as they sang). I love the way things surface from the dirt as they do from the ocean: plastic, glass, and metal rise up through the dirt over the months and gradually show themselves. This year I found a tiny pink ice cream cone and a toy car wheel in the dirt of one of our backyard raised beds. Don’t even get me started on worms.

This Compost

Walt Whitman 

1

Something startles me where I thought I was safest,
I withdraw from the still woods I loved,
I will not go now on the pastures to walk,
I will not strip the clothes from my body to meet my lover the sea,
I will not touch my flesh to the earth as to other flesh to renew me.

O how can it be that the ground itself does not sicken?
How can you be alive you growths of spring?
How can you furnish health you blood of herbs, roots, orchards, grain?
Are they not continually putting distemper'd corpses within you?
Is not every continent work'd over and over with sour dead?

Where have you disposed of their carcasses?
Those drunkards and gluttons of so many generations?
Where have you drawn off all the foul liquid and meat?
I do not see any of it upon you to-day, or perhaps I am deceiv'd,
I will run a furrow with my plough, I will press my spade through the sod and turn it up underneath,
I am sure I shall expose some of the foul meat.

2

Behold this compost! behold it well!
Perhaps every mite has once form'd part of a sick person—yet behold!
The grass of spring covers the prairies,
The bean bursts noiselessly through the mould in the garden,
The delicate spear of the onion pierces upward,
The apple-buds cluster together on the apple-branches,
The resurrection of the wheat appears with pale visage out of its graves,
The tinge awakes over the willow-tree and the mulberry-tree,
The he-birds carol mornings and evenings while the she-birds sit on their nests,
The young of poultry break through the hatch'd eggs,
The new-born of animals appear, the calf is dropt from the cow, the colt from the mare,
Out of its little hill faithfully rise the potato's dark green leaves,
Out of its hill rises the yellow maize-stalk, the lilacs bloom in the dooryards,
The summer growth is innocent and disdainful above all those strata of sour dead.

What chemistry!
That the winds are really not infectious,
That this is no cheat, this transparent green-wash of the sea which is so amorous after me,
That it is safe to allow it to lick my naked body all over with its tongues,
That it will not endanger me with the fevers that have deposited themselves in it,
That all is clean forever and forever,
That the cool drink from the well tastes so good,
That blackberries are so flavorous and juicy,
That the fruits of the apple-orchard and the orange-orchard, that melons, grapes, peaches, plums, will
   none of them poison me,
That when I recline on the grass I do not catch any disease,
Though probably every spear of grass rises out of what was once a catching disease.

Now I am terrified at the Earth, it is that calm and patient,
It grows such sweet things out of such corruptions,
It turns harmless and stainless on its axis, with such endless successions of diseas'd corpses,
It distills such exquisite winds out of such infused fetor,
It renews with such unwitting looks its prodigal, annual, sumptuous crops,
It gives such divine materials to men, and accepts such leavings from them at last.

This poem appeared in Poem-A-Day on April 13, 2013. Browse the Poem-A-Day archive. This poem is in the public domain.

beautiful question of the day: what is your relationship to dirt?

DAY 84: June 10, 2020

Summertime greetings, friends! I’m loving the summer storms, planting beans and squash and flowers, drinking cherry chocolate floats (Alden’s chocolate chocolate chip + cherry soda), and staying outside till dark every night, eating dinner too late.

Summertime always brings back a lot of childhood memories, too, like running through the sprinkler, sneezing in the tall yellow wildflowers by the train tracks, and fueling neighborhood bike rides with prodigious amounts of cheap, bright, satisfying Kool-Aid.

Ode to Kool-Aid

Marcus Jackson

You turn the kitchen
tap’s metallic stream
into tropical drink,
extra sugar whirlpooling
to the pitcher-bottom
like gypsum sand.
Purplesaurus Rex, Roarin’
Rock-A-Dile Red, Ice Blue
Island Twist, Sharkleberry Fin;
on our tongues, each version
keeps a section, like tiles
on the elemental table.
In ninth grade, Sandra
employed a jug of Black Cherry
to dye her straightened
bangs burgundy.
When toddlers swallow you,
their top lips mustache in color
as if they’ve kissed paint.
The trendy folks can savor
all that imported mango nectar
and health-market juice.
We need factory-crafted packets,
unpronounceable ingredients,
a logo cute enough to hug,
a drink unnaturally sweet
so that, on the porch,
as summer sun recedes,
Granddad takes out his teeth
to make more mouth to admit you.

From Neighborhood Register (Cavankerry Press, 2011). Copyright © 2011 by Marcus Jackson.

beautiful question of the day: what are the sounds, tastes, scents, sensations, and sights of summer?

DAY 83: June 9, 2020

Hello! It’s the birthday of both Cole Porter (1891—1964), songwriting genius, and Forrest Bird (1921—2015), inventor of the first reliable, mass-produced respirators and ventilators. Where would we be without these two? They got me thinking about geniuses, and different kinds of genius.

Genius

Billy Collins

Was what they called you in high school

if you tripped on a shoelace in the hall

and all your books went flying.

Or if you walked into an open locker door

you would be known as Einstein,

who imagined riding a streetcar into infinity.

Later, genius became someone

who could take a sliver of chalk and squire pi

a hundred places out beyond the decimal point,

or someone painting on his back on a scaffold,

or a man drawing a waterwheel in a margin,

or spinning out a little night music.

But earlier this week on a wooded path,

I thought the swans afloat on the reservoir

were the true geniuses,

the ones who had figured out how to fly,

how to be both beautiful and brutal,

and how to mate for life.

Twenty-four geniuses in all,

for I numbered them as Yeats had done,

deployed upon the calm, crystalline surface—

forty-eight if we count their still reflections,

or an even fifty if you want to toss in me

and the dog running up ahead,

who were smart enough to be out

that morning—she sniffing the ground,

me with my head up in the light morning breeze.

Source: Poetry (December 2000). Copyright 2000 by Billy Collins. All rights reserved.

beautiful question of the day: who is in a genius, in your estimation, and why?

DAY 82: June 8, 2020

It’s World Oceans Day!

The first poem I wrote and still have as evidence, in a little handmade, hardbound book I made in third grade, was about the ocean. There’s another poem about whales, too. But I’ll spare you the juvenilia and leave this here instead:

The Ocean Inside Him

BY RICK NOGUCHI

After Kenji Takezo fell from a wave,

The turbulence of whitewash confused

His sense of direction.

He breathed in

When he should have

Held tight. By accident, he swallowed

The Pacific. The water poured down his throat,

A blue cascade he could not see.

He felt in his stomach

The heavy life of the ocean.

It wasn’t funny, but he giggled

When a school of fish tickled his ribs.

He went home, the surf not rideable,

It was no longer there,

The water weighted in his belly.

That night, while he slept, the tide moved.

The long arms of the moon

Reached inside him pulling the Pacific free.

When he woke the next morning,

He lay in a puddle of ocean that was his.

From The Ocean Inside Kenji Takezo. Copyright © 1996 by Rick  Noguchi. All rights controlled by the University of Pittsburgh Press, Pittsburgh, PA 15260. 

beautiful question of the day: if the ocean could speak, what would it say? *or*, when the ocean speaks, what does it tell you?

DAY 81: June 7, 2020

Two-and-a-half-story Prince mural in the Purple One’s chosen home of Chanhassen, MN by Maori artist Graham Hoete

Photo also by Graham Hoete. Mural and photo both copyright 2016, Graham Hoete

Song of the day: “Mountains,” Prince and the Revolution

Dearly beloved, we have gathered here today

To get through this thing called life

—Prince, “Let’s Go Crazy”

Today would have been the 62nd birthday of the divine Prince Rogers Nelson (June 7, 1958—April 21, 2016), most beloved child of Minneapolis and one of the greatest creative minds of all time. It is impossible to overstate his influence on the world. Let’s celebrate him today by listening to his music and being good to each other.

This wonderful poem by Ukraine-born poet Lisa Muradyan appears in the excellent Belt Publishing anthology Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology, edited by Frank Bures. If you also love Prince, get yourself a copy.

Maybe tonight I’ll try putting together a found poem in tribute, using lines from a bunch of different Prince songs…

PURPLE RAIN

by Lisa Muradyan

after Purple Rain

In the Talmud there is an angel

whispering to every blade of grass: grow, grow

In the other world, Prince whispers to every dove: cry, cry

and when he asked me about the status of my searching

I nodded and told him I had been purified

in the waters of lake Minnetonka.

Here’s the thing about wearing a blouse—

you put it on one sleeve at a time

become a man one silver hoop earring

at a time. I’ve never understood why

God gave us five fingers on each hand,

I would have made do with two. 

Those were the fingers with which you

touched my outstretched hand

like Michelangelo’s creation of Adam

where I was made into a woman

the ceiling of the Sistine chapel

painted with your raspberry tongue.

—Rattle: Poets Respond
April 24, 2016

beautiful questions of the day: what are your Prince-related memories? * what Prince songs do you love best? * how are you celebrating/will you celebrate the birthday of the Purple One?

DAY 80: June 6, 2020

I saw a young deer down by Minnehaha Creek this afternoon while I was out walking my dog along the pedestrian path that runs right next to the creek, under the street. She was very red. She was also totally unruffled by the busy traffic on the bridge overhead or our passing. She just kept munching. It was a real gift to get to see this beautiful creature in our own neighborhood, and she’s got enough of a corridor along the creek to—I fervently hope—remain safe. I’m reminded of the wonderful Fern, a deer who’s lived for a few years in Pioneers and Soldiers Memorial Cemetery at the busy intersection of Cedar Avenue and Lake Street in Minneapolis.

It was also wonderful to see a deer—the animal who, to me, most fully embodies the quality of gentleness—on this day, in this city.

Click on the poem title for a link to an audio recording of the amazing Maggie Smith reading this poem aloud.

Written Deer

Maggie Smith

Why does this written doe bound through these written woods?
                            —Wisława Szymborska

My handwriting is all over these woods.
No, my handwriting is these woods,

each tree a half-print, half-cursive scrawl,
each loop a limb. My house is somewhere
here, & I have scribbled myself inside it.

What is home but a book we write, then
read again & again, each time dog-earing

different pages. In the morning I wake
in time to pencil the sun high. How
fragile it is, the world—I almost wrote

the word but caught myself. Either one
could be erased. In these written woods,

branches smudge around me whenever
I take a deep breath. Still, written fawns
lie in the written sunlight that dapples

their backs. What is home but a passage
I’m writing & underlining every time I read it.

Copyright © 2018 by Maggie Smith. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 8, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.

beautiful question of the day: what comes to mind for you when you think of deer?

DAY 79: June 5, 2020

Tonight is the full Strawberry Moon, named so by many Native American tribes because it is the time of ripening strawberries—and indeed today I stepped on the first ripe strawberry in my community garden plot! I can’t wait to make homemade strawberry ice cream and strawberry rhubarb pie…

A few Native names for the Strawberry Moon: Odemiini-giizis [Anishinaabemowin (Ojibwe)]; Otaʔeemeene Neepãuk (Mahican Dialect, Stockbridge-Munsee Band of Wisconsin); Aw^hihte (Oneida).

Strawberrying

May Swenson 

My hands are murder-red. Many a plump head
drops on the heap in the basket. Or, ripe
to bursting, they might be hearts, matching
the blackbird’s wing-fleck. Gripped to a reed
he shrieks his ko-ka-ree in the next field.
He’s left his peck in some juicy cheeks, when
at first blush and mostly white, they showed
streaks of sweetness to the marauder.

We’re picking near the shore, the morning
sunny, a slight wind moving rough-veined leaves
our hands rumple among. Fingers find by feel
the ready fruit in clusters. Here and there,
their squishy wounds. . . . Flesh was perfect
yesterday. . . . June was for gorging. . . .
sweet hearts young and firm before decay.

“Take only the biggest, and not too ripe,”
a mother calls to her girl and boy, barefoot
in the furrows. “Don’t step on any. Don’t
change rows. Don’t eat too many.” Mesmerized
by the largesse, the children squat and pull
and pick handfuls of rich scarlets, half
for the baskets, half for avid mouths.
Soon, whole faces are stained.

A crop this thick begs for plunder. Ripeness
wants to be ravished, as udders of cows when hard,
the blue-veined bags distended, ache to be stripped.
Hunkered in mud between the rows, sun burning
the backs of our necks, we grope for, and rip loose
soft nippled heads. If they bleed—too soft—
let them stay. Let them rot in the heat.

When, hidden away in a damp hollow under moldy
leaves, I come upon a clump of heart-shapes
once red, now spiderspit-gray, intact but empty,
still attached to their dead stems—
families smothered as at Pompeii—I rise
and stretch. I eat one more big ripe lopped
head. Red-handed, I leave the field.

From The Complete Love Poems of May Swenson. Copyright © 1991, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company.

beautiful questions of the day: what comes to mind for you when you think of strawberries? * what might happen under the light of the strawberry moon?

DAY 78: June 4, 2020

The Reverend Al Sharpton delivered the eulogy at a memorial service for George Floyd in Minneapolis today. Click here to watch and listen. It is so powerful.

Note the beautiful mural of George Floyd behind the altar; it was painted on the Cup Foods building at 38th and Chicago, where Floyd was killed, by a group of local artists. More on that here.

DAY 77: June 3, 2020

Hi, everyone. I usually avoid tooting my own boot, but I do want to share this poem I wrote with you. It came on a day about six weeks ago, and five weeks into social isolation during this pandemic, when it felt like the only thing that was keeping me going was looking for emergent plant growth and seeing all the new leaves. I walked around our yard, just making a list of the leaves I was seeing, and then had the best time I’d had in weeks working on ordering and arranging the names and figuring out how to end the poem. (Anyone else out there love making lists? I love lists and list poems.)

My friend Monica Edwards Larson of Sister Black Press, who has been finding all sorts of amazing ways to connect with people through art and poetry during this time of isolation, put out a call for poetry to install in her big street-facing window, and I sent her this one, and here it is! In bright, living yellow-green. I could not love this home for this poem more. And I love to think that when people pass by, they might be surprised in the wonderful way I was when I walked past Monica’s one day with my dog on and saw her installation of blessing giveaway poems (see Day 28) festooning the trees in front of her house.

The title was inspired by a writing prompt I read in Twin Cities poet, teacher, and artist Deborah Keenan’s amazing book of writing prompts, From Tiger to Prayer (I’m paraphrasing, as I can’t find the book in the avalanche of books and papers in my studio): “what do you care enough about to write a litany?”

beautiful question of the day: what do you care enough about to write a litany?

DAY 76: June 2, 2020

There’s a big thunderstorm about to break here in Minneapolis. Storms can be scary, I know, but when they are not life-threatening, I find them really thrilling and refreshing. And I’m hoping we’ll get a deep soak to put out some of the fires.

Here is my favorite storm poem (Jean Toomer’s “Storm Ending” is another), a 2013 group poem by participants at Wilder Center for Aging in St. Paul’s Day Room program. (The line spacing is a little off here and there, but I can’t seem to adjust it.) I really miss those folks!

Storm! Boom! Crash!

I'm sure cats don't like electrical storms—

if they could talk 
they'd say so most emphatically.
It's getting really dark,
the lightning flickering,

the trees down.

I'm sure if those cats could talk they'd say 
these storms are not the cat's meow.

From the sixteenth floor,
the wind blew sideways.

A storm was coming in from the east
and the smell hit Blackie 
like a fist in the face.

Angels are wind.
The storm has a master.

Somebody's tree flew 
right over their house.

Sometimes the wind blows the rain so hard

it cracks the windows.

A lot of trees down,

roofs torn right off the houses.
I'm afraid to go outside and look,

afraid to see the power lines down.

A hundred thousand volts on the high lines,
down with such a terrible sound.

It's hard to comprehend

that angels who cause so much destruction

can also give us music and pleasure.
They are our treasure.

I remember slipping on wet grass,

playing outside in summer storms 
when I was little.

I'll tell about the time at my grandpa's place—
we had a lot of wind in North Dakota,

and we had to go down to the cellar.

There were snakes down there!

It's scary,

but then after the storm

can be really pleasant.

It was dark 
and we didn't know what to think—

then, all of a sudden,

a big rainbow came out.

beautiful question of the day: what comes to mind when you think of storms?

DAY 75: June 1, 2020

Song of the day: Dave Brubeck, “Take Five”

Chalk it up to aging eyes, the fact that I cannot see the attributions on the “50 Ways to Take a Break” poster in order to share them with you. Apologies.

Self-care is a challenge for me at the best of times, but I think if I practiced it more, I could be a little more like Nadine…

The Common Women Poems, III. Nadine, resting on her neighbor’s stoop

BY JUDY GRAHN

She holds things together, collects bail,

makes the landlord patch the largest holes.

At the Sunday social she would spike

every drink, and offer you half of what she knows,

which is plenty. She pokes at the ruins of the city

like an armored tank; but she thinks

of herself as a ripsaw cutting through

knots in wood. Her sentences come out

like thick pine shanks

and her big hands fill the air like smoke.

She’s a mud-chinked cabin in the slums,

sitting on the doorstep counting

rats and raising 15 children,

half of them her own. The neighborhood

would burn itself out without her;

one of these days she’ll strike the spark herself.

She’s made of grease

and metal, with a hard head

that makes the men around her seem frail.

The common woman is as common as

a nail.

Judy Grahn, “The Common Women Poems: III. Nadine, resting on her neighbor’s stoop” from love belongs to those who do the feeling: New & Selected Poems (1966-2006) (Red Hen Press, 2008). Copyright © 2008 by Judy Grahn.

beautiful question of the day: how will you take care of yourself today?

DAY 74: May 31, 2020

I’m cramming every ounce of love into this post I can, for our suffering cities, for you, for me, for all of us.

A week or two before the police murder on Monday of George Floyd, a beloved Black Minneapolis community member, I found real pandemic-related comfort in this poem sent by my remarkable friend 신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin, a writer, educator, and healer whose writing and work as an activist truly amaze and humble me. Searching for some balm to offer you in this time of even greater anguish, I thought of it again.

In all the violence and destruction, what shines is the massive efforts by communities of color and so many others here to take care of peoples’ needs, clean up and repair the damage, continue fighting for justice, and head into this evening resolved to protect each other.

These are the people who have been laboring to build a world in which people are free to live unthreatened by violence and poverty. They continue to do so under the greatest duress. If you want to help support some of the wonderful organizations rebuilding the Twin Cities and leading this work, this list is a great place to start. Thank you for helping in any way you can and sending your love out into the world.

신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin is the editor of the best-selling anthology A Good Time for the Truth: Race in Minnesota and lives in Minneapolis, where she co-directs the community organization Poetry Asylum with poet Su Hwang. Her most recent book of poems, Unbearable Splendor, was a finalist for the 2017 PEN USA Literary Award for Poetry and winner of the 2016 Minnesota Book Award for poetry.

THE KOREAN WORD FOR SPRING IS 봄 / BOM

This poem is dedicated to my beautiful community, without whom I would be lost.

A slash walks into the end of a sentence

A respectful distance from the period.

The period is the queen of the sentence.

Who else is a miniature eclipse?

No one. The parentheses are a pair of kind hands.

Can you feel them on your shoulders?

( )

Do the seas of the moon touch you in the evening?

Is the light orange or white tonight?

Will you place it under a pot of water to warm the sky?

Where does all the salt go

When it takes refuge in your body?

Is the word for body harmony?

Is it lightning? What has your skin given today?

Is your heart a boat anchored in a wild sea?

Let us walk to the shore and call in our migrating dreams.

I can read your face like a new book.

Or the pattern of rainfall.

Something bright. Silver? A jewel?

No, a flower and its crown of petals.

May 2020 CE

Mni-Sota

Earth

신 선 영 辛善英 Sun Yung Shin

(all rights reserved.)

beautiful questions of the day: how do you describe your community, or communities? * how do you support each other? * what kind of support are you best at offering? * what kind of support do you need?

DAY 73: May 30, 2020

From Yes Yoko Ono

by Shin Yu Pai

—

STONES

Remove a stone from an unmarked pile.

Choose one pile to add it to—

a mound of joy

or a mound of sorrow.

Or take a stone from a mound of sorrow

and move it to a mound of joy.

From Equivalence by Shin Yu Pai (La Alameda Press, 2003). Copyright 2003 by Shin Yu Pai. All rights reserved.

beautiful questions of the day: what is a weight you are carrying today? * what can you move from a mound of sorrow to a mound of joy?

DAY 72: May 29, 2020

It’s a challenging day, folks. Sending you all love and best wishes for your health and safety. I’ll be back with a poetry post tomorrow.

DAY 71: May 28, 2020

Ink runs from the corners of my mouth.

There is no happiness like mine.

I have been eating poetry.

— from “Eating Poetry” by Mark Strand

Hello! I have spent hours today combing my books and the interwebs for just the right ink poem by an Asian Pacific American poet, but haven’t been able to locate what I’m looking for—a most enjoyable way to spend time, but alas, I am thwarted in my commitment today. (Ink is the second of the Four Treasures of the Study. For more on the Four Treasures, please see Day 69.)

I am happy, though, to bring you this poem by haiku and painting master Yosa Buson, whose delightful self-portrait appears above:

Calligraphy of geese

against the sky—

the moon seals it.

From The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, & Issa, translated and edited by Robert Hass (The Ecco Press, 1994). Copyright 1994, Robert Hass. All rights reserved.

beautiful questions of the day: what does ink look/feel/smell/taste/sound like? * from what substances is ink made? * what are your earliest and/or happiest associations with ink?

DAY 70: May 27, 2020

Happy birthday to my dear friend and writing pal since 1997, poet Rachelle Woods! Thank you, Rachelle, for reading and responding to these posts. You really keep me going.

The second of the Four Treasures of the Study is ink, but I mixed it up, so we’ll go with paper today!

Here is some more wonderful work from my book artist friend Karen Kinoshita (featured here on Day 64), and poet Shin Yu Pai (see Day 69 for more info on the Four Treasures, and Shin Yu Pai). And a bonus two songs today, to appeal to people of all ages (I hope).

From Yes Yoko Ono

by Shin Yu Pai

三

PAINTING FOR THE WIND

Write down your favorite words

on separate scraps of paper.

Leave the paper where there is wind.

The scraps of paper can be lottery receipts,

business cards, or paper napkins.

From Equivalence by Shin Yu Pai (La Alameda Press, 2003). Copyright 2003 by Shin Yu Pai. All rights reserved.

beautiful questions of the day: what does paper look/feel/smell/taste/sound like? * what are your earliest and/or happiest associations with paper?

DAY 69: May 26, 2020

Maru-Sankaku-Shikaku, written as 〇△□, or The Universe by Sengai Gibon (仙厓 義梵), 1750–1837

Song of the day: “Brushstroke,” Nikolai Bjerre

Hello!

I learned recently of the Four Treasures of the Study (or, Four Jewels of the Study, Four Friends of the Study), “an expression used to denote the brush, ink, paper and ink stone used in Chinese and other East Asian calligraphic traditions. The name appears to originate in the time of the Southern and Northern Dynasties (420–589 AD).” —Wikipedia (emphasis mine). Check out the link to find out more; the history is really interesting. I’ve been working on a four-part poem based on these treasures and thought they would make a good sequence for these posts.

Among the Four Treasures, the brush came first. Here is an ekphrastic poem based on the famous Zen painting by the monk Sengai, above, from the fabulous Shin Yu Pai (also featured here on Day 45). Pai is a poet, fiction, and essay writer, visual artist, and curator. She was the fourth Poet Laureate of the city of Redmond, WA, and currently serves as Head of the Obscura Society for Atlas Obscura.

Circle, Triangle, Square

by Shin Yu Pai

when Sengai put brush to paper

he drew three forms, overlapping

square, triangle, circle

a koan for disciples

for scholars to argue and

decipher throughout the ages

the temple walls are four-

sided within them sit

and practice

upon achieving a mind

of enlightenment, see

the circle, an empty teaching

the trinity,

and the confines of

earth-bound existence, or

circle

triangle

square

a lesson

in geometry

intended for children

From Equivalence by Shin Yu Pai (La Alameda Press, 2003). Copyright 2003 by Shin Yu Pai. All rights reserved.

beautiful questions of the day: what is your own response to this painting? * what will you paint or draw with your own brush today?

DAY 68: May 25, 2020

From Elegy for the Birds, Christopher Shotola-Hardt

Song of the day: “Elegy for the Arctic,” Ludovico Einaudi

Loving greetings to you all on this Memorial Day, a good day for poems, music, and art of remembrance and lament.

Today’s poem is by Eugenia Leigh, Korean American poet and author of Blood, Sparrows and Sparrows, the winner of the 2015 Debut-litzer Prize in Poetry and a finalist for the National Poetry Series and the Yale Series of Younger Poets. She teaches writing workshops with incarcerated youths and with Brooklyn High School students and serves as Poetry Editor of Hyphen, a news and culture magazine that celebrates the Asian American diaspora.

“The first draft of this poem was written when a herd of Kundiman fellows was released into the New York Botanical Garden and told to gather poems. We hear often that poetry is not nonfiction—that poems are allowed to bend reality as they’re led—but what troubles me most about this poem is that I don’t remember whether the flowers outside that home were, in fact, daffodils.”—Eugenia Leigh

Elegy Composed in the New York Botanical Garden

Eugenia Leigh

Catmint—tubular, lavender, an ointment
to blur the scar, bloom the skin. My mouth has begun
the hunt for words that heal.

In the garden, I am startled by a cluster
of sun-colored petals marked, Radiation.
Piles of radiation. Orange radiation, huddled together

like families bound by a hospital-bright morning.
And behind them: a force of yuccas
called Golden Swords. A bush or mound

of sheath-like leaves sprouting from a proud center.
And isn’t that the plot?
First the radiation, then the golden sword.

I remember, incurably,
your mother. The laughter that flowered
from her lips. I’m sorry I have no good words

to honor her war. It crumbled me to watch you
overwhelmed by her face
in the daffodils outside your childhood home.

Copyright 2014 by Eugenia Leigh. All rights reserved.

beautiful question of the day: whom and/or what do you memorialize and/or elegize, today?

DAY 67: May 24, 2020

Apologies for the very late post, folks! I could not bring myself to sit inside at the computer today, but instead wrote outside for hours and then worked in the garden till it got dark. Which was exactly what I needed. I hope you got some of what you needed today, too.

One thing I always need is crone wisdom. Here is a great poem on the subject by Mary Oishi, an Albuquerque poet and DJ who for many years spun The Blues Show on KUNM, the University of New Mexico radio station, and acted as KUNM’s Development Director. Her daughter Aja Oishi is also a poet, and the two perform together regularly and recently collaborated on a book of poems called Rock Paper Scissors.

crone vision

by Mary Oishi

     the crone in my young vision

to my surprise was me.

her presence alone

commanded respect.

   nothing less. and

she had no regrets.

oh, she had made mistakes

but they turned out to be 

some of her best teachers

how can I ever become her?

   i cried, broken,

i'm as far from her

as a worm from the moon!

and i was.

square your shoulders,

was all she said.

i'm decades rising

   three words pulling the tides

Copyright 2018 by Mary Oishi. All rights reserved.

beautiful question of the day: what can be seen with crone vision?

DAY 66: May 23, 2020

Synergy, land art by Martin Hill, Lake Wanaka, New Zealand, 2009

Song of the day: “Wade in the Water,” The Staples Singers

It’s raining here in Minneapolis, and apparently the rain will continue through the weekend. That’s fine with me; I love water in any form. Here’s a gorgeous water poem from yet another amazing Minnesota poet, Ed Bok Lee. Lee’s second book, Whorled (Coffee House Press, 2011), received the 2012 American Book Award and a Minnesota Book Award.

As happens from time to time, I was unable to match the true shape and formatting of the poem on this page. Please click on the title of the poem to see it in its intended shape!

Water in Love

Ed Bok Lee

How to love like water loves
when it’s impossible to even taste
all the ghostly sediments
each time you take a sip

Impossible to savor
the salt in your blood
the light and island shorelines
in each living cell

When even the plainest mouthful
tastes more of you than you of it

Sweetest of absences
that frees in wave after wave
debris of thought like the dead,
the drowned, the vanished, and yet
sails your lips
on a voyage toward another’s, plying
all luck and regret

Worship, splash, guzzle, or forget
It clears any difference
Stone washer and mountain dissolver
that will
outlive us, even the memory of
all any eyes touched

Wasp and cactus in a desert
Comet through outer space
Sleep among all the cloud-shepherds’ children

A love so perpetually current
it doesn’t care that you love
without even knowing you love
what you couldn’t survive
three days without

How to love like that: wild
dream-sparkler and meticulous architect
of every snowflake
Wise, ebullient, and generous
as the rain

Deepest of miracles
for a time
borrowing and replenishing
a self
overflowing with fate

From Mitochondrial Night (Coffee House Press, 2019). Copyright © 2019 Ed Bok Lee. All rights reserved.

beautiful question of the day: how are you like water?

DAY 65: May 22, 2020

Greetings, all!

Today’s session features artwork and poetry made by participants from Park Elder Center’s Hmong DayElders program, in sessions with APP-MN poet Diane Jarvenpa and visual artist Michèle Coppin. Read more about “Naming the Artist Within,” our 2017 ekphrastic collaboration with four Minneapolis adult day centers and visual artists Coppin and Holly Nelson, here.

Tou SaiK is a spoken word artist, mentor, hip hop emcee, teaching artist, and organizer residing in St. Paul, Minnesota. With his late grandmother Youa Chang, who performed the traditional Hmong art of kwv txhiaj (Hmong Poetry Chanting), he formed the intergenerational performance duo Fresh Traditions. His forthcoming memoir, My Grandma Can Freestyle, honors Youa Chang and their longtime collaboration. Tou SaiK is featured in New York Times Magazine’s Hmong Hip Hop Heritage documentary. This year, he will release his first Hmong language hip hop album, Ntiaj Teb Koom Tes, which translates to “Unified Worldwide.”

Peb Txhais Tes

Our Hands 

Pub mov rau cov noog,

Feed the birds,

des paj,

pick flowers, 

luaj teb,

weed the garden, 

tuav ntxhuv,

pound the rice, 

tuav rab riam,

handle the knife, 

 tsuav peb cov zaub mov,

chop our food, 

npaj pluas mov rau peb tsev neeg.

prepare meals for our family. 

Peb txhais tes

Our hands 

 teeb duab,

draw pictures, 

ntxhua thiab ua zaub mov,

wash and cook, 

pleev duab thiab ua paj ntaub,

paint and do needlework,

sim dab liag laij teb,

use the scythe in the garden plot, 

ntau riam ntau hlau tshiab,

blacksmith new tools, 

ua tsev.

build a house. 

Peb txhais tes muaj zog.

Our hands are strong. 

Peb txhais tes

Our hands 

yog cov tub rog siv phom tua rog,

are the soldiers using weapons in war, 

cog paj zoo nkauj,

planting beautiful flowers, 

nuv ntses nrog tus khuam ntses,

fishing with a hook, 

rub rab koob ncag daim ntaub, 

pulling the needle through the fabric, 

maj mam sau peb cov npe nrog tus xaus qhuas.

patiently writing our names with a pencil. 

Peb yog Hmoob,

We are Hmong, 

qhia peb ua

show us what to do 

es peb yeej ua tau.

and we can do it.

 —By the Poets of Park Elder Center’s Hmong DayElders program, from an APP-MN session led by poet Diane Jarvenpa, January 24, 2017

beautiful questions of the day: think about when you have participated in a meaningful intergenerational collaboration—what happened? * what did you receive? * what did you give?

DAY 64: May 21, 2020

I’m inspired today by the gorgeous and inventive work of another amazing Twin Citian, my book artist friend Karen Kinoshita. Click on her name above for a link to her wonderful blog, “sense of place in artist books,” to see more of her work and that of many other excellent book artists.

What a poem by poet and Fordham University professor Sarah Gambito! Gambito cofounded Kundiman, a nonprofit organization that promotes and serves Asian American writers and writing, along with Joseph O. Legaspi (featured here on Day 54). 

Formatting proved challenging for me again with this poem; please click on the poem title to link to www.poets.org and see how the recipe stanza is meant to appear.

On How to Use this Book

Sarah Gambito

You deserve your beautiful life.

Its expectant icicles, the dread forest
that is not our forest.
And yet, we meet there.
The streams streaming through us.
The leaves leaving through us.

Once I was black-haired
and I sat in my country's lap.

I was so sure she was asking me
what I wanted.

Invite at least 15 people. It's okay if your apartment is small. Put 7 lb of cut up chicken in the biggest pot you own with 2 parts soy sauce 2 parts vinegar and 1 part water. Make sure to completely cover the chicken. Throw in a handful of black peppercorns, lots of bay leaves, and two fistfuls of garlic cloves. Bring to a rolling boil and simmer until chicken is almost falling off the bone (around 45 minutes to 1 hour.) Place chicken on a baking sheet and broil for 10 minutes until the skin is crispy and slightly charred. Boil remaining liquid for 15-20 minutes to reduce and add 1 can coconut milk to make a sauce. Plate chicken and pour sauce over. Serve with so much white rice.

From Loves You (Persea Books, 2019). Copyright © 2019 by Sarah Gambito. All rights reserved.

beautiful questions of the day: is there a family recipe you could write as a poem, include in a poem, or use in artmaking in some other way? * what how-to could you write?

DAY 63: May 20, 2020

“Not everything is taught to us in school. It’s up to us to find out.” —Yuri Kochiyama

Yesterday was the birthday of both civil rights activist Yuri Kochiyama—who passed away at the age of 93 in 2014—and her friend and colleague Malcolm X. I never learned about Kochiyama in school, but she has become one of my heroes in recent years.

Here is a great essay from Scott Kurashige on Kochiyama’s legacy, and a video of Sandra Oh reading one of Kochiyama’s speeches, about her experience of relocation and imprisonment after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued Executive Order 9066, authorizing the internment of tens of thousands of American citizens of Japanese ancestry and resident aliens from Japan. 

I’m so thrilled that the poem I was able to locate about Kochiyama is by Minneapolis poet, creative nonfiction writer, critic, playwright and performance artist David Mura. A Sansei or third generation Japanese American, Mura’s most recent book is A Stranger’s Journey: Race, Identity, and Narrative Craft in Writing (University of Georgia Press, 2018).

SONG FOR AN ASIAN AMERICAN RADICAL: YURI KOCHIYAMA

by David Mura

I open the door

and there she stands hectoring me 

about Malcolm X.
Says impatiently there’s no time 

for sumiye or sake,
exigencies of meter, rhyme. 

She’s so tiny, I’m so
unknowing, the fractions enormous, 

all those years of fires
in Philly, Detroit, Oakland, Harlem, Watts. 

Behind her the night
stalks its stars beyond history 

and I know if I shut
this door each time she vanishes farther 

till nothing remains
but silence and sleep. 

Reader you may think
in the end I’ll let her in.  Don’t 

count on it.  That’s
why she keeps knocking 

night after night.

From Black Renaissance/Renaissance Noire, (Vol. 13, Issue 1) Spring/Summer 2013. Copyright 2013 by David Mura. All rights reserved.

beautiful questions of the day: is there a hero(ine) whose voice urges you to act? * what might you write in praise of them?

DAY 62: May 19, 2020

Hello! Today’s session is inspired by a Zoom class I did this morning for gallery guides at the Weisman Art Museum. The guides do special tours for people with memory loss, and we talked about different APP techniques and poems to use in the galleries. Before our class, the guides submitted suggestions for artworks with which I might pair poems, and “Star Cage” was one. The poem I chose to go with it was Walt Whitman’s “When I Heard the Learn’d Astronomer,” but when one of the guides remarked that it was a hard poem for her to listen to today, given the problem Americans are having listening to and respecting scientists—to our serious detriment—I really got her point. So here’s another wonderful poem about a deeply personal experience of stargazing, from Minneapolis performance poet, writer, activist, and Loft Literary Center program director Bao Phi.

This is the title poem from Phi’s second book of poetry. Both Thousand Star Hotel and his first book of poems, Sông I Sing, are available from Coffee House Press. His first children’s book, A Different Pond, won multiple awards including a Caldecott Honor, an Ezra Jack Keats Honor, an Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association award for best picture book, the Minnesota Book Award for picture books, and the Charlotte Zolotow Award for excellence in children’s book writing.

Thousand Star Hotel

by Bao Phi

Vietnamese people joke that they don’t need a four-star hotel—even the

homeless, sleeping in the wide open, are treated to a thousand star hotel

every night. 1996 in the countryside of Vietnam, I front like I’m better

than a tourist simply because I was born here. Hot-spring water is piped

into a spartan concrete pool, so gray you can tell its color in the pitch

dark. Overhead are the most stars I’ve ever seen in my life. They take what

little breath I have away. The night is so deep and gorgeous without the

light. I can’t swim, not even to save myself, but I still soak and look over-

head. I am self-conscious because my body is rail thin and pale. I am frus-

trated because the hot water fogs up my glasses constantly. I curse my bad

luck, my bad eyesight. What I should have done is kept wiping, and kept 

gazing, if only for a second at a time. Because luck is returning to a home-

land you are too young to embody. Because you’ll never know if you’ll get a 

second chance to be a witness to beauty. Because stars don’t care about incon-

venience; their gorgeousness took an eternity to reach us and they have

done the work and are worth it. So wipe away. See what your parents had

to tear from themselves. And the even less fortunate count the drowned ‘til

they can’t. Only scientists could measure the journey of starlight. A thou-

sand perfect songs you hear by yourself. A thousand belly laughs meant for

someone else. A thousand lines between a thousand points of light until

our ancestors stopped counting and named it all sky. A thousand butter-

flies that never land on you. A thousand windows rolled down to the wind,

eyes always on the road. A thousand gnats, their bodies so light they blow

back from your breath only to seek you again. A thousand breaths during

a thousand dreams folded and folded and folded again, a thousand unfold-

ing, creased things to let go.

From Thousand Star Hotel (Coffee House Press, 2017) Copyright 2017 by Bao Phi. All rights reserved.

beautiful questions of the day: what do you see in the stars? * what questions might you have for them?

DAY 61: May 18, 2020

Today’s poem by Rick Barot comes from the Poetry Society of America’s “Reading in the Dark” series and was chosen by Kazim Ali. I find Ali’s remarks on the poem really interesting; maybe you will too:

“The pastoral—in both its classical and contemporary form—was a fiction to keep us alive through the traumas of empire. That there was an idealized countryside—emptied of both wild animals and plant growth as well as anyone who lived there before it was emptied—made empire, and later industry and capital worth the price that was paid. Isolated in our own houses we might need the pastoral more than ever or we may need it never again. It is hard to tell which when you are in the middle of a moment...

“By its very name, the ambition of Rick Barot’s poem ‘A Poem as Long as California’ is to conflate time and space (i.e. not ‘Large as California’) but also to traffic in an important subgenre of the American pastoral, which is the writing/inscribing of the last-to-be-reached-by-the-settler-government West Coast (before expanding into the Pacific and out into space—stories for another time).

“In any case, Barot’s pastoral is unexpected. It includes things like used car lots and the prayer group chanting in the apartment above his. Jack Spicer (and his own desire to ‘write a poem as long as California’) appears, as does an actual wander through Barot’s urban landscape of his hometown...

“And then a beautiful turn in the closing gesture of the poem: across the world and centuries back in time, a dizzying move that takes California global but also offers the reader a window—yes—into a moment where the pastoral (the distant, the pristine, the perfect) undoes itself in the eye of the artist, who also undoes his own role, relinquishing the role of maker and embracing existence as a person present in a reality not at all of his own making…

“What really happens in Barot’s world (neither distant, nor pristine, nor perfect) is that he is in it, inside it, living it. If a used car lot can be a world, a house can be a world, an eye can be a world, an I can be a world.”

A Poem as Long as California

Rick Barot
 

This is my pastoral: the used car lot
where someone read Song of Myself over the loudspeaker

all that afternoon, to customers who walked among the cars
mostly absent to what they heard,

except for the one or two who looked up
into the air, as though they recognized the reckless phrases

hovering there among the colored streamers,
their faces suddenly loose with a dreamy attention.

This is also my pastoral: once a week,
in the apartment above, the prayer group that would chant

for a sustained hour. I never saw them,
I didn’t know the words they sang, but I could feel

my breath running heavy or light
as the hour’s abstract narrative unfolded, rising and falling,

sometimes changing in abrupt turns
of speed, as though a new voice had taken the lead.

And this, too, is my pastoral: reading in my car
in the supermarket parking lot, reading the Spicer poem

where he wants to write a poem as long
as California. It was cold in the car, then it was too dark.

Why had I been so forlorn, when there was so much
just beyond, leaning into life? Even the cart

pushed against a concrete island, the forgotten melon
in its basket like a lost green sun.

And this is my pastoral: reading again and again
the paragraph in the novel by DeLillo where the family eats

the take-out fried chicken in their car,
not talking, trading the parts of the meal among themselves

in a primal choreography, a softly single consciousness,
while outside, everything stumbled apart,

the grim world pastoralizing their heavy coats,
the car’s windows, their breath and hands, the grease.

If, by pastoral, we mean a kind of peace,
this is my pastoral: walking up Grand Avenue, down 6th

Avenue, up Charing Cross Road, down Canal,
then up Valencia, all the way back to Agua Dulce Street,

the street of my childhood, terrifying with roaring trucks
and stray dogs, but whose cold sweetness

flowed night and day from the artesian well at the corner,
where the poor got their water. And this is

also my pastoral: in 1502, when Albrecht Dürer painted
the young hare, he painted into its eye

the window of his studio. The hare is the color
of a winter meadow, brown and gold, each strand of fur

like a slip of grass holding an exact amount
of the season’s voltage. And the window within the eye,

which you don’t see until you see, is white as a winter sky,
though you know it is joy that is held there.
 

Copyright 2017 by Rick Barot. All rights reserved.

beautiful question of the day: what and who are present in your own pastoral?

DAY 60: May 17, 2020

Today/yesterday I took a day just for myself, and obsessively compiled a Spotify playlist of cover songs that I think equal, eclipse, or truly reinvent the originals. Here is a link if you want to listen! You don’t have to pay to listen, but you will have to sign up for the free version of Spotify to do so if you don’t already have an account.

Please note, the playlist reflects my age (46) and kind of weird, wide-ranging tastes, and the song content has nothing to do with the playlist image, which I just found funny. Enjoy!

DAY 59: May 16, 2020

There is so much we can learn from and about wondrous bees, who see patterns and colors on flowers that are invisible to our own eyes and organize immediately to prevent illness from spreading through their hives. We’d starve without them, and they’re endangered everywhere because of habitat loss and pesticides.

One thing you can do to help the bees is let the early volunteers bloom, like dandelions and creeping Charlie. Here are some other easy things you can do to help save the bees, without becoming a beekeeper.

And you can read and create and distribute bee poetry, writing, music, visual art, etc.!

What words for “bee” do you know in languages besides English? What bee songs do you know?

Here is a gorgeous, bittersweet bee song from Richard Thompson to go with this gorgeous, bittersweet poem from the wonderful University of Minnesota Press 2016 anthology If Bees Are Few: A Hive of Bee Poems. University of Mississippi professor, poetry editor of Orion magazine, and Pushcart Prize winner Aimee Nezhukumatathil is the author of the forthcoming book of illustrated nature essays, World of Wonders: In Praise of Fireflies, Whale Sharks, & Other Astonishments (2020, Milkweed Editions), and four previous poetry collections. Her most recent chapbook is LACE & PYRITE, a collaboration of nature poems with the poet Ross Gay.

Bee Wolf

Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Not a bee. Not a wolf. A wasp. 

Once I saw one try to lift a lizard off a wall.

The lizard did nothing, only 

held its pink suction toes a bit tighter.

But after a few stings, the lizard’s

tongue flicked furious, and it fell.

I’ve felt it too. When a man you love 

won’t love you back, almost nothing 

can pry your sticky fingers from a phone, 

even if you just want to hear the pause 

in his voice you know so well—so well 

you could pick out his exact breath 

in a darkened room full of men. A mother

bee wolf teaches its babies well. To dig

an underground cell of soil almost 

a yard deep, she carries a pebble at a time back 

to the surface in her shiny mandibles. 

Paints a white spot with her furry legs 

on the place where her baby should start 

digging once it’s ready to try the lavender air. 

This new wasp will find a lizard of her very 

own. At least she has a direction—I am sick 

with the lack. I need a mark, a tattoo 

etched on the arch of my foot, telling me 

to hold on, clutch only what is mine.

From If Bees Are Few: A Hive of Bee Poems, ed. James P. Lenfestey (University of Minnesota Press, 2016).

beautiful question of the day: what comes to mind when you think of bees?

DAY 58: May 15, 2020

It’s National Endangered Species Day. When I learned that, while casting about for a session theme today, I couldn’t help but think of what was recently declared the most endangered river in the U.S., a place I know and deeply love, the Gila River. Of course, if a river is endangered, all its species of flora and fauna are, too. The Gila runs through New Mexico and Arizona and in Sonora, Mexico, and is home to the endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher. If you click on the name of the bird, above, you can link to an Audubon article about the Southwestern willow flycatcher and hear its song.

When I think of rivers, and fierce advocates for all life on our planet, I think of Chinese-born Twin Citian Wang Ping, who is a poet, writer, photographer, professor, performance, multimedia and collaborative artist, and the founder of the Kinship of Rivers project. She has traveled all over the world creating art and poetry in praise of and protection for rivers. I’ve just begun reading her extraordinary memoir, Life of Miracles Along the Yangtze and Mississippi. Click here for a gorgeous video of Wang Ping reading this poem down by the Mississippi.

excerpt from The River in our Blood: A Sonnet Crown (XIII)

by Wang Ping

Every blade of grass turns with its own angel

Every breath we make churns your heartbeats

A child becomes a Father’s man in the ocean’s cradle

A wave is a wave is a wave regardless of our defeats

A lie bends and bends around the purple night

At twilight the mask unveils a scorched soul

A cycle of 64 days of riches from the scorpio kite

The way is open, then shuts with a gaping O

The hammer, anvil and stirrup, the smallest bone

In the sea of cochlea, a sound, a spiral, a million fingers

Bushing ecstasy to the seat of a heavenly throne

A ripple is a ripple is a ripple forever seeking the seekers

This is the gift I owed you from future and past

This is my skin in the river wild and fast.

beautiful questions of the day: what or who comes to mind when you think of endangered species? * can you research one that you are drawn to and write a poem in praise of and protection for it?

DAY 57: May 14, 2020

I love and deeply identify with this poem by New Mexico poet, translator, and professor Arthur Sze, whose tenth and most recent book of poems, Sight Lines (2019), just won the National Book Award. Sze was the city of Santa Fe’s first Poet Laureate and has taught at the Institute for American Indian Arts there since 1984; he is now Professor Emeritus at IAIA.

A little more on the gingko: “The ginkgo tree, also known as the maidenhair, is sometimes referred to as a ‘living fossil’ because, despite all the drastic climate changes, it has remained unchanged for more than 200 million years. It is a living link to the times when the dinosaurs ruled the earth.” —Julija Televičiūtė, www.boredpanda.com

The Shapes of Leaves

Arthur Sze 

Ginkgo, cottonwood, pin oak, sweet gum, tulip tree:
our emotions resemble leaves and alive
to their shapes we are nourished.

Have you felt the expanse and contours of grief
along the edges of a big Norway maple?
Have you winced at the orange flare

searing the curves of a curling dogwood?
I have seen from the air logged islands,
each with a network of branching gravel roads,

and felt a moment of pure anger, aspen gold.
I have seen sandhill cranes moving in an open field,
a single white whooping crane in the flock.

And I have traveled along the contours 
of leaves that have no name. Here
where the air is wet and the light is cool, 

I feel what others are thinking and do not speak,
I know pleasure in the veins of a sugar maple,
I am living at the edge of a new leaf.

From The Redshifting Web: Poems 1970-1998 (Copper Canyon Press, 1998). Copyright © 1998 by Arthur Sze. All rights reserved. 

beautiful questions of the day: what leaves do you notice, emerging around you? * do they correspond with your emotions in any way? * what comes to mind when you see or hear the phrase “a new leaf”?

DAY 56: May 13, 2020

Today’s poem and theme came right to my inbox this morning from poet, translator, novelist, and professor Marilyn Chin, featured today on The Academy of American Poets’ poem-a-day post/email (this month’s guest curator is the amazing Monica Youn, featured here on Day 47/May 4). About her poem, Chin writes: “You ask: Who is this elusive wild woman sage poet? I answer: Elle est toi! Elle est moi!”

I love when poems end with questions. All four at the end of Chin’s poem would make great writing prompts.

From www.merriam-webster.com:

sage: adjective

1a: wise through reflection and experience; b: archaic : GRAVE, SOLEMN; 2: proceeding from or characterized by wisdom, prudence, and good judgment sage advice

sage: noun (1)

1: one (such as a profound philosopher) distinguished for wisdom; 2: a mature or venerable person of sound judgment

Who are your sages, your wise elders? Are you one of them? One sage in my world is the extraordinary artist Yayoi Kusama, now 91 (she painted the above self-portrait at 80). Kusama has said, “I fight pain, anxiety, and fear every day, and the only method I have found that relieves my illness is to keep creating art. I followed the thread of art and somehow discovered a path that would allow me to live.” 

This post is for all the sages, crones, and wise elders I have known and loved throughout 23 years of collaborative writing and 46 years of life. Your wisdom, your stories, your lives are all essential.

Sage #3

Marilyn Chin

(This poem’s about looking for the sage and not finding her)

Some say she moved in with her ex-girlfriend in Taiwan
Some say she went to Florida to wrestle alligators

Some say she went to Peach Blossom Spring
To drink tea with Tao Qian

Miho says she’s living in Calexico with three cats
And a gerbil named Max

Some say she’s just a shadow of the Great Society
A parody
Of what might-have-been

Rhea saw her stark raving mad
Between 23rd and the Avenue of the Americas
Wrapped in a flag!

I swear I saw her floating in a motel pool
Topless, on a plastic manatee, palms up

What in hell was she thinking?

What is poetry? What are stars?
Whence comes the end of suffering?

Copyright © 2020 by Marilyn Chin. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 13, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

beautiful questions of the day: where (might some say) are your sages? * what questions do you have for them?

DAY 55: May 12, 2020

O glorious lilacs! I can’t get enough. Did you know you can pluck a blossom from a cluster and drink a little lilac juice from the base of the flower?

If you happen to live in the Twin Cities Metro area and can make it over to the intersection of Summit Avenue and Lexington in St. Paul, hurrah—you will be at the threshold of a most amazing tunnel of lilacs, two straight blocks running through the middle of Summit’s wide boulevard. Check it out, if you’re able. But wherever you are, enjoy this lilac transmission.

“I love writing prompts and often make them up—if I end up with something, even a phrase, it’s more than what I had. I’d been wanting to write odes to something abstract and thought of lines of poetry that were familiar from childhood: Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore’ ... Forward the Light Brigade ... Do I dare / Disturb the universe? I came up with about a half dozen. Months later, I was invited to participate in Whitman’s 200th birthday celebrations and wrote several using his lines. ‘When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd,’ written after Lincoln’s assassination, is a poem that always moves me.” —Kimiko Hahn

Kimiko Hahn is the author of eight books of poetry. Her first, The Unbearable Heart (Kaya Press, 1996), won an American Book Award. Click on the poem title for a link to an audio recording of Hahn reading the poem.

Ode to the Whitman Line “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom'd”

Kimiko Hahn 

I cannot consider scent without you, I cannot 
think that color so gay, so Japanese, so vernal 
without you; not assassination or any death in any spring. I think of you 
and I am man-and-woman, flawed as a Lincoln, 
welcoming as a window-box, and so tenderly alliterative as to draw one near— 
at times, perhaps, to withdraw from all—yes, 
without you I am without pulse in that dooryard, that blooming unfurling

so tell me finally, is last as in the last time or to make something last
—to hold, to hold you, to memorize fast— 

Copyright © 2019 by Kimiko Hahn. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on December 12, 2019, by the Academy of American Poets.

beautiful question of the day: what does the scent of lilacs bring to mind for you?

DAY 54: May 11, 2020

Happy National Eat What You Want Day! (Why only one day?)

Do listen to the Cab Calloway song. It’s delightful. “Pass me a pancake, mandrake!”

Here’s a great food poem by Joseph O. Legaspi, whose first book of poetry, Imago (CavanKerry Press, 2007), won a Global Filipino Literary Award. In 2004, Legaspi cofounded Kundiman, the foremost national organization “dedicated to nurturing generations of writers and readers of Asian American literature.” (From www.kundiman.org.) Born in the Philippines and raised in Los Angeles, Legaspi now lives and teaches in New York City.

Feasting

by JOSEPH O. LEGASPI

Bitaug, Siquijor, Philippines

Three women dragged the spiky, bulky mass

onto a bamboo table on the side of an island

road. A raised hunting knife glinted in sunlight,

then plunged with a breathless gasp, slicing into

the unseen. To a passerby they were a curious

wall, a swarm of onlookers, barrio children

and younger women, buzzing with a rising

gleeful cadence as a mother busied herself

with the butchering. Surprisingly, a citrusy,

sugary scent sweetened the stranger’s face

when offered the yellow flesh like thickened

petals, licorice to the touch, he stood awed

at the monstrous jackfruit, bloodless armadillo

halved, quartered, sectioned off for feasting.

His tongue tingled ripely. This country’s foreign

to me, he continued, but I’m not foreign to it.

Source: Poetry (July/August 2017)

beautiful questions of the day: on what occasions do you feast? * with whom would you like to share a feast? * what foods do/would you serve at a feast?

DAY 53: May 10, 2020

Throughout 14 years of poetry sessions in elder living communities, I’ve found that family is the toughest subject. Mother’s and Father’s Day-themed sessions in particular bring up a lot of sad, difficult, and traumatic memories, and it is rare for any of the poet-participants to still have living parents (though they may believe their parents are still living). While older adults are adults, and it would be disrespectful to shy away from all content that addresses real lived experience and allows people to express the full range of human emotion, I’ve learned to repeat frequently that it’s okay to not have a happy story to share, and it’s important to acknowledge that not everyone had parents, or loving parents, or parents who stuck around. Like the rest of being human, this day is a mixed bag.

That said, whatever your relationship to mothers and motherhood, I wish you joy today as you think of those who have acted as mother figures in your life—including yourself.

One reason I love this poem by Amy Uyematsu is the presence of math, which doesn’t always show up in poetry. Uyematsu, a sansei (third-generation Japanese American) poet, was raised in southern California by parents who had been interned in American camps during World War II. She earned her undergraduate degree in mathematics at UCLA and was a high school math teacher for over 25 years. She now teaches creative writing and is the author of several prize-winning books of poetry and coeditor of the seminal anthology Roots: An Asian American Reader (1971).

A Practical Mom

by AMY UYEMATSU

can go to Bible study every Sunday

and swear she’s still not convinced,

but she likes to be around people who are.

We have the same conversation

every few years—I’ll ask her if she stops

to admire the perfect leaves

of the Japanese maple

she waters in her backyard,

or tell her how I can gaze for hours

at a desert sky and know this

as divine. Nature, she says,

doesn’t hold her interest. Not nearly

as much as the greens, pinks, and grays

of a Diebenkorn abstract, or the antique

Tiffany lamp she finds in San Francisco.

She spends hours with her vegetables,

tasting the tomatoes she’s picked that morning

or checking to see which radishes are big enough to pull.

Lately everything she touches bears fruit,

from new-green string beans to winning

golf strokes, glamorous hats she designs and sews,

soaring stocks with their multiplying shares.

These are the things she can count in her hands,

the tangibles to feed and pass on to daughters

and grandchildren who can’t keep up with all

the risky numbers she depends on, the blood-sugar counts

and daily insulin injections, the monthly tests

of precancerous cells in her liver and lungs.

She’s a mathematical wonder with so many calculations

kept alive in her head, adding and subtracting

when everyone else is asleep.

From Stone Bow Prayer (Copper Canyon Press, 2005). Copyright © 2005 by Amy Uyematsu.

beautiful question of the day: what is your experience of being mothered and/or mothering?

DAY 52: May 9, 2020

The poet Ai Ogawa (1947—2010) self-identified as Japanese, Choctaw-Chickasaw, Black, Irish, Southern Cheyenne, and Comanche. She was born Florence Anthony, but changed her name to Ai (“love” in Japanese) after learning in her late teens that her biological father was Japanese. Ai was most famous for her powerful persona poems and dramatic monologues in poetic form. She won the National Book Award in 1999 for Vice: New and Selected Poems, the book in which this poem appears.

Conversation

by AI

for Robert Lowell

We smile at each other

and I lean back against the wicker couch.   

How does it feel to be dead? I say.

You touch my knees with your blue fingers.   

And when you open your mouth,

a ball of yellow light falls to the floor   

and burns a hole through it.

Don’t tell me, I say. I don't want to hear.   

Did you ever, you start,

wear a certain kind of silk dress

and just by accident,

so inconsequential you barely notice it,   

your fingers graze that dress

and you hear the sound of a knife cutting paper,   

you see it too

and you realize how that image

is simply the extension of another image,   

that your own life

is a chain of words

that one day will snap.

Words, you say, young girls in a circle, holding hands,   

and beginning to rise heavenward

in their confirmation dresses,

like white helium balloons,

the wreaths of flowers on their heads spinning,

and above all that,

that’s where I’m floating,   

and that’s what it’s like

only ten times clearer,

ten times more horrible.   

Could anyone alive survive it?

From Vice: New and Selected Poems (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1999). Copyright © 1999 by Ai.

beautiful questions of the day: if you could have a conversation with someone(s) no longer living, who would it be? * what would you like to ask them? * what do you think they might have to tell you?

DAY 51: May 8, 2020

“ha*pa (hä’pä) adj. 1. Slang. of mixed racial heritage with partial roots in Asian and/or Pacific Islander ancestry. n. 2. Slang. a person of such ancestry. [der./Hawaiian: Hapa Haole (half white)]

“‘You don’t look Chinese.’

“A random time, a random place, and I’m still here. I know this routine inside out. I’ve got it memorized, can do it blindfolded. If I answer ‘English or ‘Irish,’ I’ll get the ‘No, what else are you?’ response. If I answer ‘part Chinese,’ it’s more along the lines of ‘Yeah, I can see it in your… (insert physical feature.)’ And if I answer ‘American,’ I’m in for a longer conversation than I’m usually in the mood for.

“‘What are you?’

“I answer the question every day of my life—depending on the day itself, the location, my hair, or what I’m eating or doing.”

—From part asian · 100% hapa: portraits by kip fulbeck

Check out this video on artist, writer, slam poet, and educator Kip Fulbeck’s The Hapa Project, which comprises portraits of people of all ages who identify as hapa, along with their responses to the “What are you?” question in their own handwriting. You can find more of these beautiful portraits on The Hapa Project website and Facebook pages.

Whatever your racial background, may your exploration today help you never to ask the exhausting, alienating question, “What are you?” of another human being again!

***Please note: There is some controversy over who is entitled to use the term “hapa,” but certainly it is respectful for those who do not share the identity to refrain from using it.

Here’s one of Fulbeck’s portraits. The poetic response is our text for today.

beautiful questions of the day: what questions are you tired of being asked about yourself? * what—if any—physical traits have defined you in the eyes of others, and how has that made you feel?

DAY 50: May 7, 2020

Today’s poem is from Korean American poet and poetry slam champion, playwright, essayist, teacher, activist, and curator Franny Choi, a Kundiman Fellow who founded the Brew & Forge Book Fair, a fundraising project that brings together readers and writers to build capacity in social justice community organizations. 

You may be unfamiliar with the words in the title; hangul is the the alphabetic script in which Korean is written, and the abecedarian is an ancient poetic form “guided by alphabetical order. Generally each line or stanza begins with the first letter of the alphabet and is followed by the successive letter, until the final letter is reached.” (www.poets.org)

Click on the poem title below to link to a great audio recording of Choi reading the poem, and to see the poem as it is meant to appear (with less space between the lines. I’m no expert at web design and have not yet figured out how to avoid this. Apologies to Franny Choi!).

Some great resources for further reading and listening this month:

• Monica Youn, whose poem “Stealing The Scream” I featured a few posts ago, is the guest curator for www.poets.org’s poem-a-day email this month! Sign up for poem-a-day emails here.

• SPOOKY STORIES TO SCARE THE COVID-19 AWAY is a virtual event taking place on East Side Freedom Library's Facebook every Friday evening in May, with videos posted after the live broadcasts appear. “Lao American artist Saymoukda Duangphouxay Vongsay and the East Side Freedom Library bring you ghoulish tales from the Asian diaspora told by six APIA artists: 신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin, Ka Vang, May Lee-Yang, Naomi Ko, Eric Sharp, and Daniel P. Tran. From ghosts who haunt to connect with the living to demons who manifest to teach valuable lessons, these tales will leave you with nowhere to hide as you watch them while being sheltered-in-place. Enjoy!” (I listened last week to 신 선 영 Sun Yung Shin’s reading of “The Fox Daughter” and was mesmerized. Check it out!)

• The Coalition of Asian American Leaders (CAAL) is celebrating this month “by uplifting the diverse stories within our Asian Minnesotan population through our #MinneAsianStories campaign. This year our theme is ‘This is Home.’ We curated a series of stories that capture the vibrancy, resilience, and complexity of our people, and how they are making Minnesota home.” Sign up here to receive these stories in your inbox. 

Hangul Abecedarian 

by FRANNY CHOI

Genghis Khan, my father says, using a soft G,

Never saw our peninsula with his own eyes.

Don’t quote me on that—

Recall isn’t my strong suit. I’ve convinced myself

Memorizing dates, for example, is outmoded.

Better to learn the overall movements,

Social conventions rising and falling,

Empires and their changing mascots.

Genghis sired so many, they say, his children’s

Children’s children’s genes sowed an entire

Continent of grasslands. If  you press your ear

To my blood’s topography, you’ll hear hooves

Pounding, though I can’t remember when it started, or

Whose king it is coming in the distance.

Source: Poetry (December 2019)

beautiful question of the day: what do you know of your ancestors?

DAY 49: May 6, 2020

Today’s poem comes from Twin Cities-based writer, performer, and teacher May Lee-Yang, whom APP-MN is proud and fortunate to have as a member of our advisory committee. Her theater-based works include The Korean Drama Addict’s Guide to Losing Your Virginity and Confessions of a Lazy Hmong Woman, and in 2014, she launched Letters to Our Grandchildren, a theater/food/storytelling/video project with Hmong elders. She is a former Playwright Center McKnight Fellow, a former Bush Leadership Fellow, and a co-founder of F.A.W.K. (Funny Asian Women…K), a collaborative to empower Asian women through comedy. She is currently completing a memoir about her relationship with ghosts. 

How I Lost My Name

by May Lee-Yang

When I was born,
my father named me

Maiv Muam Nkauj Lig Lis

He believed my siblings and I
could be kings,
if given exceptional names

When we came to the United States
I became May Moua Gao Lee
The INS forgot "Lig"
Thinking it was the same as my last name
A mistake,
On our part

In first grade, my sister told me
how to spell my name
M-A-Y-M-O-U-A-G-H-O-S-T-L-E-E
She giggled;
I didn't know why

In seventh grade, I was May Moua
But our principal called me May Moo
Other kids thought Moua was my last name

By ninth grade, I was just May
Though it was still too complicated to remember
Was it pronounced "My?"

When I married
People thought my first name was Maylee
My last name Yang
They still don't pay attention when I correct them

Last week,
a friend said
I had the simplest name in the world
When I told her my full name
Maiv Muam Nkauj Lig Lis
that it meant Mongolia
where legends say we originated
she wondered why I changed it in the first place

Copyright 2016 by May Lee-Yang

beautiful question of the day: what is the story of something you have lost?

DAY 48: May 5, 2020

Cinco de Mayo greetings, everyone!

Here is a favorite poem of mine, a sonnet by the great Chinese American poet Li-Young Lee, who has lived in Chicago with his family for many years and is the recipient of countless awards, including an American Book Award for his memoir The Winged Seed: A Remembrance.

Lee “has said that he considers every poem to be a ‘descendent of God.’” (from www.poetryfoundation.org).

I Ask My Mother to Sing

BY LI-YOUNG LEE

She begins, and my grandmother joins her. 

Mother and daughter sing like young girls. 

If my father were alive, he would play 

his accordion and sway like a boat.

I’ve never been in Peking, or the Summer Palace, 

nor stood on the great Stone Boat to watch 

the rain begin on Kuen Ming Lake, the picnickers 

running away in the grass.

But I love to hear it sung; 

how the waterlilies fill with rain until 

they overturn, spilling water into water, 

then rock back, and fill with more.

Both women have begun to cry. 

But neither stops her song.

From Rose (BOA Editions, Ltd., 1986). Copyright ©1986 by Li-Young Lee.

beautiful question of the day: when you think of your family and music, what comes to mind?

DAY 47: May 4, 2020

May the Fourth be with you!

I’ve been reading poems by the unendingly brilliant Korean-American poet Monica Youn all afternoon. I hope you will go and seek out more, but for now I’ll share this one with you, from her first book, Barter. Like everything by Youn, I could read this poem again and again and feel a frisson the whole time, every time. And I will never look at the painting again without thinking of this poem; “Stealing the Scream” has actually occurred, for me, in that Youn’s poem has forever eclipsed the painting in my imagination.

In searching articles related to the painting, I found this very interesting short piece positing that the appearance of rare mother-of-pearl clouds may have freaked Edvard Munch out a whole lot, inspiring the painting.

Of Youn’s third book, Blackacre (also from Graywolf Press), Robin Coste Lewis wrote, “Youn transforms English itself, a vast landscape of repressed histories, into a seemingly black acre, too, an unexplored site, where suddenly the fraught relationships between the body, time, and history are stunningly articulated simultaneously.”

Stealing The Scream

Monica Youn

It was hardly a high-tech operation, stealing The Scream.
That we know for certain, and what was left behind--
a store-bought ladder, a broken window,
and fifty-one seconds of videotape, abstract as an overture.

And the rest? We don't know. But we can envision
moonlight coming in through the broken window,
casting a bright shape over everything--the paintings,
the floor tiles, the velvet ropes: a single, sharp-edged pattern;

the figure's fixed hysteria rendered suddenly ironic
by the fact of something happening; houses
clapping a thousand shingle hands to shocked cheeks
along the road from Oslo to Asgardstrand;

the guards rushing in--too late!--greeted only
by the gap-toothed smirk of the museum walls;
and dangling from the picture wire like a baited hook,
a postcard: "Thanks for the poor security."

The policemen, lost as tourists, stand whispering
in the galleries: ". . .but what does it all mean?"
Someone has the answers, someone who, grasping the frame,
saw his sun-red face reflected in that familiar boiling sky.

From Barter by Monica Youn, published by Graywolf Press, May 2003. Copyright © 2003 by Monica Youn. All rights reserved.

beautiful question of the day: what gives you chills (of excitement, delight, fear, surprise, disquiet)?

DAY 46: May 3, 2020

“My parents came to this country as Hmong refugees from Laos after the country collapsed and the Vietnam War ended. I wrote this poem for them, who were so viciously uprooted and ripped away from their landscape of belonging, all of which had been prompted by a government’s political agenda. I grieve for a country that I know they can never truly return to.” —Mai Der Vang (from www.poets.org)

Click here to link to the poets.org page for this poem from Mai Der Vang’s debut collection, Afterland, which was longlisted for a National Book Award in Poetry in 2017. You can listen to a great audio recording of her reading it.

Dear Exile,

Mai Der Vang 

Never step back    Never a last
Scent of plumeria

When my parents left
You knew it was for good 

     It’s a herd of horses never
           To reclaim their    steppes

You became a moth hanging
Down from the sun

Old river    Calling to my mother
Kept spilling out of her lungs

Ridgeline vista closed
Into the locket of their gaze

                     It’s the Siberian crane
           Forbidden    to fly back after winter

You marbled my father’s face
Floated him as stone over the sea

Further    Every minute
Emptying his child years to the land

You crawled back in your bomb

           It’s when the banyan must leave
     Relearn to cathedral its roots

From Afterland (Graywolf Press, 2017). Copyright © 2017 by Mai Der Vang.

beautiful questions of the day: if you were to write a letter to something other than a human or humans (“dear ______,”)—a place, for example, or a state of being, a concept, a scientific phenomenon, an inanimate object, an animal, etc.—to what would you write? * what would you say in this letter?

DAY 45: May 2, 2020

Wow, Day 45!

I am getting so much pleasure from researching and creating these posts every day, folks. If you are enjoying perusing them even a fraction as much, great! In the absence of in-person poetry sessions with my older friends, the practice of doing this each day is a grounding pleasure.

May is Asian Pacific American Heritage Month. (So is every month.) Today and for the rest of the month, I’ll feature Asian Pacific American poets, starting with one of my art idols, Shin Yu Pai. Pai is a poet, fiction and essay writer, visual artist, and curator. She was the fourth Poet Laureate of the city of Redmond, WA, and currently serves as Head of the Obscura Society for Atlas Obscura.

I gave myself the pleasure of rereading Pai’s first book, Equivalence, while sitting outside this morning with my coffee, listening to the wind and birdsong and looking up at the chartreuse flowers and new scarlet leaves of the red maple. I’ll probably post a bunch of her poems in this portable poetry session-a-day series, but will start with this one because it mentions cake twice.

Things Which Give Pleasure

by Shin Yu Pai

The fifty-franc bill bearing the image of Le Petit Prince.

A handsome stranger gives up his seat for you on the Metro.

Tapas, sushi, carrot cake.

Chanel No. 5.

Friday night date at the Metropolitan Museum of Art with one

you adore. Rodin sculptures: Cupid and Psyche, The Kiss.

Modigliani portraits, long heads and no eyeballs.

Eating violets hand-picked from the lawn by a friend,

remembering Easter cake garnished with purple blossoms.

The lunar new year, a new suit of clothes, and a haircut.

Spring day: licorice root tea shared with a curly-haired boy.

He brews it in a pot for you. Who cares if neither of you

can afford a kettle?

From Equivalence (La Alameda Press, 2003). Copyright 2003 by Shin Yu Pai.

beautiful question of the day: what are the things that give you pleasure?

DAY 44: May 1, 2020

“And I wanted to write, in all seriousness, why does poetry get a month and workers get only one day?” —Mark Nowak

Workers of the World, Unite!

Happy May Day, all.

I urge you to check out the link to this *amazing* exhibition at the 21c Museum in Louisville, Labor & Materials, which I was extremely fortunate to see in person last spring. Lina Puerta was one of the featured artists. Check out more of her work, too (as always, by clicking on the artist name next to the image).

Today I searched forever for the poem that felt right for this post, which is dedicated to our heroic elder care community workers. They are now doing all the labor of keeping body and soul together for institutionalized elders during the pandemic’s forced absence of family, friends, and volunteers.

Without these healthcare providers, personal care attendants, cooks, servers, cleaners, therapeutic recreation staff, and social workers, so many older people would be living in total isolation and dying alone, right now—15% of older Minnesotans, for example. Thank you, dear friends, for being there. Thank you for your always brave, always essential, always compassionate and difficult work. We miss you, we love you, and we are eternally grateful for you. We wish we could be there with you, to lighten your load.

San Mateo County, California Poet Laureate Aileen Cassinetto solicited online submissions of lines for this collaborative poem. For every line submitted, she donated $1 to the San Mateo County Health Foundation’s COVID-19 fund to support hospitals and clinics. As of April 10, 125 lines of poetry had been contributed. Here they are.

Love in the Time of COVID-19, A Community Poem for Healthcare Workers and Other Frontliners

Our loved ones have proven their immense bravery, at times volunteering to care for those sick and putting their own lives at risk.

This poem is for all the people who work so we can be safe at home. We love you to the moon and back.

Your voice holds me

when your arms cannot.

You spoke calming words to me

as I slipped into sleep

And yours were the first eyes I saw

as I came out from under the fog

Wingless angels dressed in scrubs,

footfall on our steps,

a tap on the window,

a neighbor’s wave,

a newly-sewn mask tossed

(in a plastic bag), to the front

of the door: “run it through the washer

first,” she calls, waves, and departs.

(Fifteen years ago, at fifteen,

just arrived from El Salvador,

she walked into my Jefferson High

ESL class. Today, she is a hero,

daily risking her life for her patients,

while her own children wait

in their fog-shrouded home.)

Earth angels, haloes shining bright,

working with this virus in the air!

We will not despair

You support us

You surround us

Because of you, the world

will get brighter,

socially un-distancing.

Bless the arms that hold you today.

We’re all joining hands,

guests on this planet,

across many lands.

We are forever grateful

to the warriors who save lives.

Time to recognize the real heroes,

brilliant shadows, as we’ve never

seen before. God calls us

to opportunity, it is for each

of us to claim. Our neighbor

is our brother, is our sister,

is our keeper, is our healer.

As soldiers, you stand tall,

ready for the next patient who calls.

Your love and care exemplify

heroism without compare.

Without you, our country would be

facing an even larger catastrophe.

Doctors and nurses and other

frontliners, with help to give.

Some deliver goods,

some clean and scrub,

stock the shelves,

and work so hard

so we can stay in our space.

You can do it, you can make it,

single mom working two shifts,

exhausted nursing home staff

fighting against depression

and confusion. Dementia.

Dressing up in silly costumes,

dancing down the halls,

Holding ipads high

so loved ones can see,

their elderly parent

who are unable to communicate,

reassuring them

that everything will be okay.

Smiling faces,

heads pounding,

tirelessly ensuring

the outside world

stays ‘outside’

and residents stay safe.

For the inner strength,

courage and compassion

with which you serve,

our eternal devotion, you so deserve.

For all your efforts,

may you be blessed

a thousand fold. Where we are,

the tired ghosts of fearful uncertainty

welcome the laughter

that champions the heart,

for the speed of love turns out

to be the speed of light.

A gentle reminder:

Be safe. Be well.

Be kind. Which is to say,

shelter in safety and love.

Everybody’s home

and nobody’s alone.

beautiful questions of the day: what does May Day mean to you? * to what worker or workers would you dedicate a poem today?

DAY 43: April 30, 2020

Excellent news on this last day of National Poetry Month! Current U.S. Poet Laureate Joy Harjo has been appointed to a second term! Harjo, of the Muscogee (Creek) Nation, is the first Native American U.S. Poet Laureate.

So for today, in her honor, a double feature of Harjo’s “Eagle Poem,” plus a musical version with her singing and playing the guitar and saxophone. Enjoy.

Eagle Poem

Joy Harjo 

To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can't see, can't hear,
Can't know except in moments
Steadily growing, and in languages
That aren't always sound but other
Circles of motion.
Like eagle that Sunday morning
Over Salt River. Circled in blue sky
In wind, swept our hearts clean
With sacred wings.
We see you, see ourselves and know
That we must take the utmost care
And kindness in all things.
Breathe in, knowing we are made of
All this, and breathe, knowing
We are truly blessed because we
Were born, and die soon within a
True circle of motion, 
Like eagle rounding out the morning
Inside us. 
We pray that it will be done
In beauty.
In beauty.

From In Mad Love and War (Wesleyan University Press, 1990). © 1990 by Joy Harjo.

beautiful question of the day: what message would you like to send to the Creator/your God/Goddess/gods and goddesses/the universe, today?

DAY 42: April 29, 2020

Congratulations to Minneapolis poet Su Hwang of Poetry Asylum, who won a Minnesota Book Award last night for her fabulous debut poetry collection, Bodega. I love the whole book, and this poem for its sense of the family car as “center/of my universe,” the child riders inside as isolated from the outside world—and deliberately from their parents’ bickering—as astronauts floating in space.

To Infinity & Beyond

Our Ford Granada was the center 
                          of my universe: fake wood

                                          paneled doors, beige interior, piano
                                                        sized hood. Cityscapes whizzed by

like a movie shot from a train
                          barreling down wobbly tracks

                                          ready to fly off the rails. Everything
                                                        stood as entertainment; I spied

dueling squirrels, fleets of buses,
                          mothers lulling strollers, swarms of

                                          pigeons & chess players in the park…
                                                        All the ways to keep

from listening to them bicker,
                          neither able to yield or raise

                                          a white flag as father launched
                                                        the station wagon like a rocket ship--

bricks for feet—burning rubber to
                          orbit the diorama of the solar system

                                          I made for Mr. McGee’s science class
                                                        to travel to Styrofoam Jupiter, Mars,

then back. When fuel ran low, my brother & I’d
                          blow fiery breath against rear windows

                                          then stamp closed hands, draw in toes:
                                                        collage of teeny footprints

of intrepid astronauts doomed
                          to hike the craters of the ashen moon

                                          (One of these days Alice...one of these days,                                                         
bam, zoom, straight to the moon!) & drift

past the deaf expanse of space alone.

From Bodega (Milkweed Editions, 2019). Copyright 2019 by Su Hwang.

beautiful questions of the day: what was it like, riding in the family car (if you had one)? * when you think about traveling with your family, where do you go, physically and in your imagination?

DAY 41: April 28, 2020

Yesterday marked a national letter writing campaign to save the United States Postal Service, which is being threatened with defunding by the federal government. It was also the day on which we lost the great Irish feminist poet Eavan Boland, who died of a stroke at 75.

To honor Boland, reach out to each other (without screens, which can be nice), and save the post office, let’s send more letters! There’s nothing like getting a letter, especially a handwritten one, or a postcard in the mail. Stamps and cancel marks from different places are fascinating and beautiful. And I don’t know about you, but I love writing longhand. It activates parts of my brain that typing does not. With a good pen, writing is a deep sensory pleasure.

If you really want to have some fun, you can take your letter writing a step further and create and send mail art. Google it! The possibilities are endless.

Click here to link to the New Yorker, where you can listen to an audio recording of Boland reading the poem. And do click on the artist’s name above for more envelope art—you will not be disappointed.

The Lost Art of Letter Writing

by Eavan Boland

The ratio of daylight to handwriting
Was the same as lacemaking to eyesight.
The paper was so thin it skinned air.

The hand was fire and the page tinder.
Everything burned away except the one
Place they singled out between fingers

Held over a letter pad they set aside
For the long evenings of their leave-takings,
Always asking after what they kept losing,

Always performing—even when a shadow
Fell across the page and they knew the answer
Was not forthcoming—the same action:

First the leaning down, the pen becoming
A staff to walk fields with as they vanished
Underfoot into memory. Then the letting up,

The lighter stroke, which brought back
Cranesbill and thistle, a bicycle wheel
Rusting: an iron circle hurting the grass

Again and the hedges veiled in hawthorn
Again just in time for the May Novenas
Recited in sweet air on a road leading

To another road, then another one, widening
To a motorway with four lanes, ending in
A new town on the edge of a city

They will never see. And if we say
An art is lost when it no longer knows
How to teach a sorrow to speak, come, see

The way we lost it: stacking letters in the attic,
Going downstairs so as not to listen to
The fields stirring at night as they became

Memory and in the morning as they became
Ink; what we did so as not to hear them
Whispering the only question they knew

By heart, the only one they learned from all
Those epistles of air and unreachable distance,
How to ask: is it still there?

beautiful question of the day: what will you say, in the letter you write today?

DAY 40: April 27, 2020

I gave myself a wonderful writer’s gift yesterday and took an online workshop with the gifted herbalist, teacher, writer, and community organizer sára abdullah of earth seed holistic. Of the workshop, “Writing in the Weeds,” abdullah writes: “What lessons do 'weeds' have for our creative and social movements? ... By building relationships with plants that are grounded in deep listening principles, we are able to access stories of ancestral resilience and resourcefulness to challenge dominant ideologies and envision possibilities for a loving, regenerative, transformative world.”

One of the so-called “weeds” we discussed was the glorious dandelion—aka bitterwort, fairy clock, fortune teller, swine’s snout, milk witch, peasant’s cloak, and lion’s tooth (dente de leão in Portuguese). One writer in the workshop told us the word for dandelion in Arabic is al-hindba. What other names for dandelion do you know, in folk terminology and languages besides English?

Did you know that the entire dandelion plant is edible? (Though you may want to skip the stem and seeds.) In the spirit of today’s session, I plan to harvest some young dandelion leaves for use in veggie enchiladas. Have you ever drunk dandelion wine? I haven’t—please write and tell me what it’s like!

Dandelion is known as the great spring liver tonic, digestive bitter, and blood purifier. Its tough, long roots draw deeply, so it is considered powerful in bringing hidden truths to the surface.

When I think of dandelions, I think of what may be (to me) the world’s most beautiful fountain, the Berger Dandelion Fountain in Minneapolis’s Loring Park. I have fond memories of splashing in it illegally after Pride parades during my teenage years. Check it out.

Today’s poem is by my brilliant friend, the Albuquerque poet Lisa Gill. Of her amazing book Mortar & Pestle, she writes: “In 2003, I was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, which is a chronic neurological disorder. In this book, I chose to explore human physicality and the medicinal herbs which offer solace. Working with the plants was a metaphorical way of making peace with the general human condition and my specific disease.”

Taraxacum officinale  /  Dandelion

by Lisa Gill

When trepidation goes to seed

even the wind wishes me well,

dispersing the once bright knots

of fear with breath.

How common the exhalation.

How exultant.

To release the turbid

and propagate simple hope.

Today I want for nothing

because I want again everything.

Ordinary longing,

my appetite has returned

with a roar and a prayer.

Pat a big cat

or a priest’s shorn head.

I am playing children’s games,

the serious work of distraction,

the work of wishing well.

From Mortar & Pestle (New Rivers Press, 2006). Copyright 2006 by Lisa Gill.

beautiful questions of the day: what and/or whom do you wish well, today? * what truth do you need to bring to the surface today?

DAY 39: April 26, 2020

“I have always imagined paradise will be a kind of library.” —Jorge Luis Borges

Somehow I missed World Book Day on April 23. That’s okay; every day is book day!

Click on the artwork title above for more views of this piece, and on the artist’s name to view more of his extraordinary altered book work.

Emily Dickinson wrote her almost 1800 poems in small, hand-sewn books called fascicles. You can see images of them on the Emily Dickinson Museum website, which tells us that “Dickinson shared about 500 of her poems with more than forty correspondents. This private form of distribution seems to have appealed to the poet more than did formal publication. Sometimes she sent the same poem to more than one reader, as in the example of ‘A Route of Evanescence,’ which she shared with at least six recipients.”

Once, while working with kindergarteners, I introduced a poem by Emily Dickinson and one of the kids shouted, “Emily Chickenskin?!?” We all about died laughing and I have not been able to think of Dickinson without Chickenskin since. You’re welcome.

There is no Frigate like a Book (1286)

BY EMILY DICKINSON

There is no Frigate like a Book

To take us Lands away

Nor any Coursers like a Page

Of prancing Poetry –

This Traverse may the poorest take

Without oppress of Toll –

How frugal is the Chariot

That bears the Human Soul –

Source: The Poems of Emily Dickinson Edited by R. W. Franklin (Harvard University Press, 1999)

beautiful questions of the day: what can you find, in the pages of a book? * to which books do you return? * if you were to write a book, what would it be about? * if you were to write the book of today, what would its first line be? its last?

DAY 38: April 25, 2020

I heard frogs singing last night! The first time this season. They sounded kind of like this. Last summer on Madeline Island in Lake Superior, I was thrilled to hear frogs that sounded like boinging rubber bands.

One amazing fact I just learned from the Irish Peatland Conservation Council: “Frog bones form a new ring every year when the frog is hibernating, just like trees do. Scientists can count these rings to discover the age of the frog.”

Something I like to do in group poetry sessions is ask everyone if they know the word for our theme of the day in any languages besides English. For frog, I know the Spanish, rana; French, grenouille; and Portuguese, rã. What others do you know?

When I think of frogs, I can’t help but think of the beloved Frog and Toad books by Arnold Lobel. A bonus item today is this very funny, totally true to form recent McSweeney’s piece called, “Frog and Toad are Self-Quarantined Friends.”

Amphibious species, frogs in particular, are the earliest indicators of the health of our water and ecosystems. Love Earth, love the frogs.

[My mother saw the green tree toad]

BY LORINE NIEDECKER

My mother saw the green tree toad

on the window sill

her first one

since she was young.

We saw it breathe

and swell up round.

My youth is no sure sign

I’ll find this kind of thing

tho it does sing.

Let’s take it in

I said so grandmother can see

but she could not

it changed to brown

and town

changed us, too.

From Collected Works, edited by Jenny Penberthy (University of California Press, 2002). Copyright © 2002 Regents of the University of California.

beautiful questions of the day: what do you think of, when you think of frogs? * do you know any fairy tales or myths about them? * what is a positive indicator, to you, of the health and safety of your habitat?

DAY 37: April 24, 2020

Greetings, all, and a peaceful, joyful Ramadan to all who observe!

The Islamic month of fasting, prayer, reflection, giving, and community, Ramadan began last evening with the appearance of the crescent moon, hilāl, and will end at the appearance of the next. This is an especially holy month; Muslims hold that all scripture was revealed during Ramadan.

In years past, communities would gather at sundown for iftar, the breaking of the fast. This year, gatherings will look very different. I’m happy to see that here in Minneapolis, “beginning the first day of Ramadan and lasting the duration of the holy holiday, prayer from the mosque will be played over loudspeaker in the Cedar-Riverside neighborhood and is expected to reach thousands of residents.” —CAIR-MN (The Council on American-Islamic Relations Minnesota)

Do yourself a favor and take some time today to check out more of the work of calligraffitist eL seed, who does place-specific, large-scale work all over the world. Its beauty and power is really beyond my capacity to describe. He painted the Jara Mosque in his hometown of Gabes, Tunisia, during Ramadan, 2012. Click on his name to the right of the photo to watch an amazing 4-minute video of the project (with excellent music) and see more and closer images of Madinati.

"The objective is to inspire people from different backgrounds to come together, to bring love, and unite."

—eL seed

Click here to for a link to a great audio recording of award-winning poet, fiction, nonfiction, and crossgenre writer, editor, critic, essayist, translator, and professor of literature Kazim Ali reading this gorgeous poem.

Ramadan 

BY KAZIM ALI

You wanted to be so hungry, you would break into branches,

and have to choose between the starving month’s

nineteenth, twenty-first, and twenty-third evenings.

The liturgy begins to echo itself and why does it matter?

If the ground-water is too scarce one can stretch nets

into the air and harvest the fog.

Hunger opens you to illiteracy,

thirst makes clear the starving pattern,

the thick night is so quiet, the spinning spider pauses,

the angel stops whispering for a moment—

The secret night could already be over,

you will have to listen very carefully—

You are never going to know which night’s mouth is sacredly reciting

and which night’s recitation is secretly mere wind—

From The Fortieth Day (BOA Editions Ltd., 2008). Copyright © 2008 by Kazim Ali.

beautiful questions of the day: what is sacred, to you? * what text is sacred to you (isn’t doesn’t have to be scripture)? * what happens, between crescent moon and crescent moon? * what kinds of hunger and thirst have you known?

DAY 36: April 23, 2020

“The violets in the mountain have broken the rocks.”

—Tennessee Williams

So much in the world of outside and nature is new and changing right now. Yesterday I noticed, among others, three new things that made me extremely happy:

1. The first butterfly I’ve spotted this season, a Mourning Cloak;

2. maple buds bursting open;

3. and violets blooming.

Violets are a traditional ingredient in love spells and considered useful for protection against malevolent spirits. It is apparently lucky to dream of them, but unlucky to bring more than one bloom indoors at a time. According to www.thehouseoftwigs.com, they “are a versatile flower that can be used in decoctions and as a poultice and are gentle enough to be applied directly to the skin. The leaves are antiseptic and are useful in treating minor scratches, cuts and insect bites. The plant can be used fresh and taken as a decoction or inhalation to help ease sore throats and hoarseness. It can also be used to aid in easing water infections and back pain associated with the bladder.”

Now, when I think of violets, I will always think of my friend Martha, a resident at Lyngblomsten Care Center in St. Paul, MN, who offered up a recipe for violet jelly during a poetry session last year:

Thank you for sweet violets

For violet jelly

I made it with my mother-in-law, Marian

You pick a quart of blossoms

Fill a jar with water and shake it good

Get the sand and dirt off them

And rinse them, pour the water away

Repeat with boiling water to get the color

Use a package of Sure-jell 

And follow the directions with the sugar

Pour the jelly into jars

And use paraffin to seal it

Save it for the church bazaar

Or give it to friends for Christmas

It’s beautiful

Violets

BY ALICE MOORE DUNBAR-NELSON

I had not thought of violets of late,

The wild, shy kind that spring beneath your feet

In wistful April days, when lovers mate

And wander through the fields in raptures sweet.

The thought of violets meant florists' shops,

And bows and pins, and perfumed papers fine;

And garish lights, and mincing little fops

And cabarets and soaps, and deadening wines.

So far from sweet real things my thoughts had strayed,

I had forgot wide fields; and clear brown streams;

The perfect loveliness that God has made,—

Wild violets shy and Heaven-mounting dreams.

And now—unwittingly, you've made me dream

Of violets, and my soul's forgotten gleam.

Source: Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, ed. Camille Dungy (Copyright 2009 by the University of Georgia Press)

beautiful questions of the day: what three new things do you notice happening outside—or outside your window—today? * what seems fragile, but is actually the opposite?

DAY 35: April 22, 2020

I am the Earth

And the Earth is me.

—from “Earth Day” by Jane Yolen

Happy Earth Day!

How will you take time today to celebrate, praise, cultivate, preserve, protect, connect with this wondrous home planet of ours? It might be a good day to learn something new about its creatures and ecosystems, for instance this 50-foot-wide spiral marine organism called a siphonophore. (!!)

If you can’t get outside right now, can you instead take a deep breath of a potted plant, stroke its leaves, sink your fingertips in the dirt?

I adore this ultra-powerful poem by the great Lucille Clifton, and the incantatory quality of its repetition, celebrating Earth as both encompassing and embodied by its endless, beautiful facets of blackness.

the earth is a living thing

Lucille Clifton 

is a black shambling bear
ruffling its wild back and tossing
mountains into the sea

is a black hawk circling 
the burying ground circling the bones
picked clean and discarded

is a fish black blind in the belly of water
is a diamond blind in the black belly of coal

is a black and living thing 
is a favorite child
of the universe
feel her rolling her hand
in its kinky hair
feel her brushing it clean

From Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton (BOA Editions, Ltd., boaeditions.org). Copyright © 1991 by Lucille Clifton.

beautiful questions of the day: who/what is Earth? * what does Earth look/feel/smell/sound/taste like? * how would you praise it/her/them/him? * what is one of the places on Earth you love most? * how would you tell the story of that place? * how would you tell the story of the Earth? * what do you notice happening on Earth right now, whether far away or nearby?

DAY 34: April 21, 2020

A friend of mine has been going out with his wife to fly kites on Raspberry Island in the Mississippi River, these windy early spring days. He says there’s nothing like hanging on to a parafoil kite on a windy day and feeling it pull you along. I realize, it’s been forever since I flew a kite. What about you?

As with all the Beautiful Questions, I encourage you to think beyond the literal and enjoy using metaphor and your imagination.

Who Has Seen the Wind?

BY CHRISTINA ROSSETTI

Who has seen the wind? 

Neither I nor you: 

But when the leaves hang trembling, 

The wind is passing through. 

Who has seen the wind? 

Neither you nor I: 

But when the trees bow down their heads, 

The wind is passing by.

Source: The Golden Book of Poetry (1947)

beautiful questions of the day: when have you seen the wind? * to what would you compare the wind? * what is wind made of? * what does it carry?

DAY 33: April 20, 2020

To what purpose, April, do you return again?
Beauty is not enough.
You can no longer quiet me with the redness
Of little leaves opening stickily.
I know what I know.

—Edna St. Vincent Millay, from “Song of a Second April”

In April 

Rainer Maria Rilke 

Again the woods are odorous, the lark
Lifts on upsoaring wings the heaven gray 
That hung above the tree-tops, veiled and dark, 
Where branches bare disclosed the empty day. 

After long rainy afternoons an hour 
Comes with its shafts of golden light and flings 
Them at the windows in a radiant shower, 
And rain drops beat the panes like timorous wings. 

Then all is still. The stones are crooned to sleep 
By the soft sound of rain that slowly dies; 
And cradled in the branches, hidden deep 
In each bright bud, a slumbering silence lies.

beautiful question of the day: what would you write, in a postcard to April?

DAY 32: April 19, 2020

Hi there! It’s my 46th birthday today. A lovely day so far—the sun is shining, my five-year-old niece sang me the happy birthday song, I’m getting a flood of sweet messages from people I love and like, it’s warm enough for a bundled up social-distanced picnic with my brother at a state park later today, and we’ll have chocolate fondue with homemade poundcake, bananas, and mandarin oranges for dessert while watching a documentary about giraffes. A good day!

My one birthday tradition is to try something new on the day, every year. The pandemic makes for plenty of that, but I may also try to do a cartwheel.

Love to you all. Thanks so much for being here.

A Happy Birthday

Ted Kooser 

This evening, I sat by an open window
and read till the light was gone and the book
was no more than a part of the darkness. 
I could easily have switched on a lamp, 
but I wanted to ride this day down into night,
to sit alone and smooth the unreadable page 
with the pale gray ghost of my hand.

From Delights and Shadows (Copper Canyon Press, 2004). Copyright © 2004 by Ted Kooser.

beautiful questions of the day: what are your birthday traditions? * with whom do you share a birthday? * what is something new you’d like to try?

DAY 31: April 18, 2020

Happy National Record Store Day! In honor of the day—and because I couldn’t choose—I’m posting two songs instead of one, something to please every generation (I hope).

I also urge you to support your local record store, if you’re fortunate enough to be able to do so right now, by ordering something from them online. I’m going to give myself an early birthday treat by patronizing The Electric Fetus—Prince’s favorite record store—today.

The manifesto of the Cloud Appreciation Society, from the beautiful The Cloud Collector’s Handbook by Gavin Pretor-Pinney:

*

We believe that clouds are unjustly maligned and that life would be immeasurably poorer without them.

We think that they are Nature’s poetry, and the most egalitarian of her displays, since everyone can have a fantastic view of them.

We pledge to fight ‘blue-sky thinking’ wherever we find it. Life would be dull if we had to look up at cloudless monotony day after day.

We seek to remind people that clouds are expressions of the atmosphere’s moods, and can be read like those of a person’s countenance.

We believe that clouds are for dreamers and their contemplation benefits the soul. Indeed, all who consider the shapes they see in them will save money on psychoanalysis bills.

And so we say to all who’ll listen:

Look up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and always remember to live life with your head in the clouds!

*

I dream of adding Mark Strand and Wendy Mark’s extraordinary visual art and poetry collaboration, 89 Clouds, to my library. But it is out of print, there are few copies circulating, and those available cost like three hundred bucks. The next best thing is this Brain Pickings article by Maria Popova, which features many images of Wendy Mark’s gorgeous cloud paintings.

Also coveting for the library: A Cloud a Day, also by Gavin Pretor-Pinney, with a cloud image and story for each day of the year.

*

From 89 Clouds

by Mark Strand

1. A cloud is never a mirror

2. Words about clouds are clouds themselves

3. If snow falls inside a cloud, only the cloud knows

5. A cloud dreams only of triangles

12. If a parrot is lost in a cloud, it turns into a rainbow

13. Clouds are drawn by invisible birds

14. Clouds are in love with horizons

18. The cloud that was gone would never come back

20. Clouds are thoughts without words

25. A cloud without you is only a clod

35. Every lake desires a cloud

52. A cloud is a cathedral without belief

54. A cloud is mansion without corners

55. A cloud lit from within is somebody’s study

67. Clouds cannot see what we do under the umbrella

80. A poet looks at a cloud the way a man looks at a shrub

beautiful question of the day: what else is there to say about clouds?

DAY 30: April 17, 2020

Nasir al-Mulk Mosque, Iran

Photo by Mohammad Reza Domiri Ganji

Song of the day:

“Strawberry Fields Forever,” The Beatles

Good day, all. Today’s session is inspired by an old issue of the magazine mental floss (which sadly lives online only, now). I opened the paper January/February 2015 issue yesterday to an article titled “37 New Ways to See the World”—a fine writing prompt!

#1, “How to See Infinity in a Room,” particularly apt for our moment, features Mohammad Reza Domiri Ganji’s incredible photos of Iranian architecture. (Click on his name above to read an interview and see many more of his photos.)

From “How to See Infinity in a Room”: “Photographing inside many of Iran’s mosques requires a permit, so many spaces remain unseen except by those who worship. But that’s not the only rule in these spaces. Since the 11th century, Islamic architects have avoided depicting animals, people, and other formerly pagan icons inside holy places. Instead, they’ve taken pains to decorate the walls with complex patterns, called arabesque, which resemble vines, leaves, and flowers.

“The result of all these rules? Some of the most visually stunning and mathematically impressive architecture on the planet. The interconnecting geometric patterns represent the infinity of Allah and everything stretching beyond the material world. In fact, the designs get as close as artists have ever come to making truly infinite patterns. A 2007 study found that Islamic artisans knew as far back as the 13th century how to make interlocking patterns that don’t repeat. Called quasicrystals[!], these patterns are so mathematically complex that it took scientists until the 1970s—more than 700 years!—to learn how to make them.”

Such patterns—and the mathematicians, scientists, philosophers, alchemists, and poets of the Islamic Golden Age—are recurrent themes in the fiction, essays, and poetry of the great Jorge Luis Borges, a progenitor of speculative fiction who was also a polyglot, translator, and director of the Argentine National Library. His vision began to fade in his early thirties, and in his mid-fifties, within several years of becoming director of the library, Borges was completely blind. Themes of infinite libraries, cities, dreams, and parallel universes became even more significant in his work after he lost his sight.

Sometimes when writing, I like to start with a title—often an overheard or randomly seen phrase, like “Piggyback Impulse III” (a model of tractor I once drove behind). My challenge for whomever accepts it today: write your poem titled “How to See Infinity in a Room.” Send it to me, Zoë, at info@alzpoetrymn.org, along with your snail mail address—if I get enough submissions, I will make a chapbook and send you a contributor copy!

Enjoy—

Written in a Copy of The Geste of Beowulf

BY JORGE LUIS BORGES

I ask myself from time to time what reasons

Move me to study, as my night comes on 

And with no hope of mastery or precision,

The language of the harsh Angles and Saxons.

Wasted by the years, my memory

Keeps letting fall the word repeated in vain,

And in much the same way my life goes on

Weaving and unweaving its weary history.

Perhaps (I tell myself) it’s that the soul

Knows in some secret and sufficient way

That, destined, as it is, never to die,

Its vast grave sphere encompasses the whole.

Beyond this arduous task, beyond this verse,

Waits, inexhaustible, the universe.

Translated by R.G. Barnes

beautiful questions of the day: what is infinite, neverending, inexhaustible? * in the space you now occupy, what place, object, or living thing are you willing to imagine as a gateway to the infinite, and why? * what other how-to can you write?

DAY 29: April 16, 2020

Woven Chronicle 

Reena Saini Kallat (2011-2016)

Part of the Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ current (closed) exhibition, When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Art and Migration

(Installation view of the exhibition, "Insecurities: Tracing Displacement and Shelter," October 1, 2016—January 22, 2017, MOMA, NY. Photographer: Jonathan Muzikar. Digital image © The Museum of Modern Art/Licensed by SCALA / Art Resource, NY)

Song of the day: 

“Coming Home,” Leon Bridges

Folks, if you’re able, tonight at 7:00pm CDT, join Su Hwang and Sun Yung Shin of Poetry Asylum—with special guests Heid Erdrich, Roy Guzmán, and Michael Torres—for “Poetics of Home,” an evening of conversation, poetry readings and prompts in the Minneapolis Institute of Arts’ virtual Third Thursday series.

Here’s what MIA says about the event: “Inspired by Warsan Shire’s poem ‘Home,’ which has become a rallying call for many refugees around the world, you are invited to reflect on the poetics of home during these unprecedented times of global, radical tumult. In connection to our special exhibition, When Home Won’t Let You Stay: Art and Migration, these poets will address themes of home, im/migration, diaspora, displacement, disruption, violence, resistance, and resilience through the lens of the four elements, the four corners of the earth.”

Click here for the event link and all the info you need to join.

Here’s another, tiny poem on the subject of home:

Home

BY GLENNA LUSCHEI

Dog at my pillow.

Dog at my feet.

My own toothbrush.

Copyright ©2014 by Glenna Luschei

beautiful questions of the day: what is home, to you? * do you have more than one home? * what does home look/feel/sound/taste/smell like?

DAY 28: April 15, 2020

Today’s poem and visual artwork are again one. A couple of weeks ago on a beautiful, sunny day, walking my dog back home from a visit to our community garden plot, I passed by my friend Monica’s house. There were about twenty gorgeous letterpress prints of this poem excerpt clothespinned to the branches of a tree in her front yard, with a sign saying, PLEASE TAKE A POEM. The waking-up garden, the generous gift—so characteristic of Monica and her artmaking—the poem itself, and the serendipity of walking by at the right time to receive it all felt like a massive dose of grace. (I had to tuck the poem in my bag, and it got a little crumpled on the way home—apologies.) I want to pass that feeling on to you.

Some beautiful synonyms for the word blessing: benediction (“good speech”), benison, invocation… in Portuguese, blessing is bênção. I love Bebel Gilberto’s lyrics—one repeated line translates to, “in sadness there is always hope.”

beautiful question of the day: what poem would you like to give as a gift, or what blessing would you offer, to anyone passing by your home?

DAY 27: April 14, 2020

I had the good fortune of catching The Loft Literary Center’s “Literary Stretch Break” on Facebook Live this morning—part of The Loft’s Wordplay Festival, which has been moved online this year and has already featured a lot of great readings and conversations with writers. Check out the schedule—it looks amazing! (The festival is free to attend, but please consider making a donation to the Loft if you can.)

This morning’s featured writer was Rick Barot, who read from his fourth book of poetry, The Galleons, published by Milkweed Editions in February of this year. He also read a few poems in progress, which he called micro-prose poems. Each of these stunning short poems began with the line, “During the pandemic, I praised…”

Thank you, Rick Barot and The Loft, for the inspiration. It’s songs of praise, today, including this beautiful incantatory poem by Joy Harjo, Muscogee (Creek) U.S. poet laureate, teacher, nonfiction writer and memoirist, saxophonist and vocalist. Harjo said, “we have to hone our craft so that the form in which we hold our poems, our songs attracts the best.”

Praise the Rain

BY JOY HARJO

Praise the rain; the seagull dive

The curl of plant, the raven talk—

Praise the hurt, the house slack

The stand of trees, the dignity—

Praise the dark, the moon cradle

The sky fall, the bear sleep—

Praise the mist, the warrior name

The earth eclipse, the fired leap—

Praise the backwards, upward sky

The baby cry, the spirit food—

Praise canoe, the fish rush

The hole for frog, the upside-down—

Praise the day, the cloud cup

The mind flat, forget it all—

Praise crazy. Praise sad.

Praise the path on which we're led.

Praise the roads on earth and water.

Praise the eater and the eaten.

Praise beginnings; praise the end.

Praise the song and praise the singer.

Praise the rain; it brings more rain.

Praise the rain; it brings more rain.

From Conflict Resolution for Holy Beings (W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2015). Copyright © 2015 by Joy Harjo. 

beautiful question of the day: (during the pandemic,) what do you praise?

DAY 26: April 13, 2020

Today’s April 13 session is dedicated to numbers, in honor of the much feared and maligned number thirteen. There’s even a word for the fear of the number: triskaidekaphobia. Some say the old superstition comes from the number of attendees at the Last Supper, but apparently the fear is pre-Christian.

As a champion of the underdog, I am in favor of the number thirteen—it’s a prime number, there are thirteen full moon cycles in a year… and here’s a painting by e. e. cummings with the number in the title! I didn’t know until today that Edward Estlin Cummings was also a visual artist. If you click on the painting title, you can see more of his works in the Whitney Museum of American Art.

One thing I did know about cummings is, he wrote a poem a day, every day, from the age of eight to the age of twenty-two. If he wrote a poem every single day of his eighth and twenty-second years including all his ages in between, that would be 5,475 poems of juvenilia alone. So why didn’t I post a cummings poem? Many of his books and poems have numbers for titles. I was just too charmed by this playful Kenneth Koch poem.

The Cassell Dictionary of Superstitions says: “Certain numbers, particularly single figures, have always been considered to have magical significance. In ancient times, the science of numerology allowed for divination of the future through the use of numbers. Ever since then people have put great faith in ‘lucky’ numbers, while avoiding contact with those that are thought ill-omened… Counting is itself a magical act that can be turned to one’s advantage.”

The Magic of Numbers 

BY KENNETH KOCH

The Magic of Numbers—1

How strange it was to hear the furniture being moved around in the apartment upstairs!

I was twenty-six, and you were twenty-two.

                                   The Magic of Numbers—2

You asked me if I wanted to run, but I said no and walked on.

I was nineteen, and you were seven.

                                   The Magic of Numbers—3

Yes, but does X really like us?

We were both twenty-seven.

                                   The Magic of Numbers—4

You look like Jerry Lewis (1950).

                                   The Magic of Numbers—5

Grandfather and grandmother want you to go over to their house for dinner.

They were sixty-nine, and I was two and a half.

                                   The Magic of Numbers—6

One day when I was twenty-nine years old I met you and nothing happened.

                                   The Magic of Numbers—7

No, of course it wasn’t I who came to the library!

Brown eyes, flushed cheeks, brown hair. I was twenty-nine, and you were sixteen.

                                  The Magic of Numbers—8

After we made love one night in Rockport I went outside and kissed the road

I felt so carried away. I was twenty-three, and you were nineteen.

                                  The Magic of Numbers—9

I was twenty-nine, and so were you. We had a very passionate time.

Everything I read turned into a story about you and me, and everything I did was turned into a poem.

From The Collected Poems of Kenneth Koch, published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. Copyright © 2005 by The Kenneth Koch Literary Estate. 

beautiful question of the day: what are your lucky, magical, or significant numbers, and why?

DAY 25: April 12, 2020

Happy Easter, peeps who observe! Are you eating marshmallow Peeps? It’s snowing here in Minneapolis, flakes so big I can hear them landing in the backyard mud puddles. Easter egg hunts will happen indoors here today, I bet.

I learn at least one new thing every time I research these posts, which is a great bonus. Before today, I didn’t know that a Ukrainian Easter egg was called a pysanka (plural pysanky), and that, as this interesting article about the history and process of making pysanky states: “according to folklore, pysanky can help ward off evil from overtaking the world.” Great! Bring em on!

From the Cassell Dictionary of Superstitions by David Pickering: “Children born on Easter Day are deemed especially fortunate… less well known is an ancient German superstition that rabbits lay eggs on Easter Day (hence the widely recognised figure of the Easter Bunny). The chocolate Easter eggs of modern times, incidentally, hark back to the hard-boiled eggs that used to be dyed red in memory of Christ’s blood and were given to children in former times to preserve their health over the next twelve months. The egg imagery is further passed down to the present time through the various egg-rolling and egg-hunting games still carried out… all were originally meant to ensure good fortune in the coming months.”

Here’s a recipe for gorgeous Pane di Pasqua, a round Italian Easter bread baked with a whole, uncracked (and often dyed) raw egg in the center. The egg cooks through as the bread bakes.

One of my favorite quotes about poetry is from an unknown eight-year-old poet who said, “Poetry is an egg with a horse inside.” I love how the Jamaican-English poet and children’s author James Berry’s poem plays with that idea of the egg as magic, as bounty.

A Nest Full of Stars

James Berry

Only chance made me come and find
my hen, stepping from her hidden
nest, in our kitchen garden.

In her clever secret place, her tenth
egg, still warm, had just been dropped.

Not sure of what to do, I picked up
every egg, counting them, then put them
down again. All were mine.

All swept me away and back.
I blinked, I saw: a whole hand
of ripe bananas, nesting.

I blinked, I saw: a basketful
of ripe oranges, nesting.

I blinked, I saw: a trayful
of ripe naseberries, nesting.

I blinked, I saw: an open bagful
of ripe mangoes, nesting.

I blinked, I saw:
a mighty nest full of stars.

naseberry: sapodilla plum with sweet brown flesh

From The Nest Full of Stars by James Berry, illustrated by Ashley Bryan (HarperCollins, 2004). Copyright © 2004 by James Berry.

beautiful question of the day: visualize—and illustrate, if you are inclined!—a beautiful, magical egg, and then consider: what might be inside it?

DAY 24: April 11, 2020

***Note: If you are a sighted person, I hope you’re easily able to view the images on this page; please do drop me a line at info@alzpoetrymn.org if you can’t. I have heard from one person that she’s unable to see the images, but I’m unsure if this has something to do with the site, the image sizes, etc.

Good day, all. Today’s visual artwork and poem are one! And what a wonderful form for a poem, not to mention an idea of healing—a sun with lines for rays, many choices for the reader, and no ending or beginning. I also love the way the lines begin at a physically “safe” distance from the central phrase, but the poem does everything else possible to draw us close. Click on “Poets.org” above for a link to an audio recording of Juan Felipe Herrera reading the poem. Born in California to migrant farmworkers, the much-awarded Herrera is an activist and performer, educator and former U.S. Poet Laureate who has written many books of poetry, children’s literature, and a novel in verse.

Speaking of “concrete” poetry—heh heh, sorry—Public Art St. Paul’s Sidewalk Poetry project has put out a call for sidewalk chalk poems! If you’re able to get out and chalk a poem on the sidewalk, this might be a great opportunity to experiment with form. How will the shape of your poem echo its meaning, even invite participation in its own creation, like Herrera’s?

If you can’t get outside right now, Sidewalk Poetry People’s Chalk Edition 2020 wants photos of your poems on paper, too.

beautiful questions of the day: how does healing begin? * what message(s) do you want to send to those who might stop and read your sidewalk poetry today?

DAY 23: April 10, 2020

It’s National Siblings Day. In its honor, above, I’m sharing the first photo of my brothers that I ever took with my own camera. I love how it’s become discolored over time, and how antic the scene looks. My little brothers are 38 and 41 now, no longer wearing a path running circles in the backyard, and truly good men—kind, compassionate, empathetic, passionate about justice, smart, and funny. I’m proud to be their sister and their friend.

There are the brothers and sisters who are our parents’ other children, and then there are the other sisters and brothers we meet throughout our lives, friends and comrades so close they become chosen family. My parents only produced one girl—me—but I’ve been very lucky to have friends so dear they feel like the sisters I missed having growing up.

Today it had to be this poem by the late, great Lucille Clifton, winner of the Ruth Lilly Prize and the National Book Award, the first two-time nominee for the Pulitzer Prize, poet laureate of the State of Maryland and Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at St. Mary’s College of Maryland, mentor to countless other poets and, as you will hear and read, a sister. Please click on the poem title below for a link to an audio recording of Clifton’s amazing introduction to and reading of the poem!

sisters 

BY LUCILLE CLIFTON

for elaine philip on her birthday

me and you be sisters.

we be the same.

me and you

coming from the same place.

me and you

be greasing our legs

touching up our edges.

me and you

be scared of rats

be stepping on roaches.

me and you

come running high down purdy street one time

and mama laugh and shake her head at

me and you.

me and you

got babies

got thirty-five

got black

let our hair go back

be loving ourselves

be loving ourselves

be sisters.

only where you sing

i poet.

From The Collected Poems of Lucille Clifton (BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org). Copyright © 1987 by Lucille Clifton. 

beautiful question of the day: what would you say in praise of your own sister(s) or brother(s) (related to you or no)?

DAY 22: April 9, 2020

“The telling of our story begins with wide-open arms. The Seder bids us to invite those who are hungry to partake of our meal. It also bids us to invite those who are hungry in spirit—lonely, lost, heartsick. We bring everybody into the circle, regardless of gender, sexuality, race, age, and religion. The freedom we aspire to depends on our sharing.” —Rabbi Ellen Bernstein

Chag Pesach sameai-ch! Happy Passover, friends.

Last night began Passover, or Pesach, the major Jewish spring festival which commemorates the liberation of the Israelites from Egyptian slavery. (This year, Passover ends on the evening of April 16.) All over the world last night, Jewish families and communities celebrated with a ritual dinner—the Seder. Of course this year was different, as we are all unable to gather. But people are finding new ways to share ritual. I saw a lot of Seder plate photos on social media yesterday.

The poet, novelist, playwright, memoirist, publisher, activist, and former editor of Tikkun Magazine, Marge Piercy, is especially well known for her liturgical and spiritual poems. Her book Pesach for the Rest of Us: Making the Passover Seder Your Own includes many of her famous poems about Pesach, as well as blessings, recipes, and family history and ritual.

A Haggadah is a compilation of biblical passages, prayers, hymns, and rabbinic literature meant to be read during the Passover Seder. There are many different versions, and many Haggadot include illumination by artists.

The seder's order

BY MARGE PIERCY

The songs we join in

are beeswax candles

burning with no smoke

a clean fire licking at the evening

our voices small flames quivering.

The songs string us like beads

on the hour. The ritual is

its own melody that leads us

where we have gone before

and hope to go again, the comfort

of year after year. Order:

we must touch each base

of the haggadah as we pass,

blessing, handwashing,

dipping this and that. Voices

half harmonize on the brukhahs.

Dear faces like a multitude

of moons hang over the table

and the truest brief blessing:

affection and peace that we make.

From The Crooked Inheritance (Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 2006), copyright © 2006 by Marge Piercy. 

beautiful questions of the day: if you celebrate Passover, how is your celebration different this year? * how can we gather when we are unable to do so corporeally? * what would you humbly ask to pass over you, your loved ones, your community, your town, your nation, the world?

DAY 21: April 8, 2020

“Don’t follow in the footsteps of the old poets, seek what they sought.” —Matsuo Bashō (1644-1694)

What’s worth celebrating, if not a Super Pink Moon? (Click the link for a collection of some of the best photos of last night’s spectacular moon.)

A friend from the Santa Fe, NM writing group that I was in for 13 years once read us all a series of ridiculous proscriptions from a poetry journal: “No poems about fathers, cancer, or the moon.” She responded with a beautiful poem that included all three and sent it to the journal.

There’s no end of great moon poems, songs, and works of art. Thanks to my friend Tracy May, who posted her painting, above, in response to my call for art for today’s post. How about creating some of your own Pink Moon art? Or a moon-song playlist?

My own favorite moon poems are from the great haiku poets, like Matsuo Bashō, Yosa Buson, and especially Kobayashi Issa (who went by Issa, which means “ a cup of tea”). Haiku (or hokku) are short, unrhymed poems that often juxtapose two images to capture a moment a moment of insight. Bashō said, “One should know that a hokku [haiku] is made by combining things.” The traditional form is three unrhyming lines in five, seven, and five syllables, but you don’t have to stick to the syllable count when you write your own moon haiku.

Here are three moon haiku, and one more for encouragement:

Face of the spring moon—

about twelve years old,

I’d say.

—Issa

My arm for a pillow, 

I really like myself

under the hazy moon.
 

—Buson

Washing the saucepans—

the moon glows on her hands

in the shallow river.

—Issa

From now on, 

it’s all clear profit,   

every sky.

—Issa (observing his 50th birthday)

All poems and quotes in today’s post are taken from The Essential Haiku: Versions of Bashō, Buson, and Issa, edited by Robert Hass, Ecco, 1994.

beautiful questions of the day: what does the moon feel/taste/sound/smell/look like? * do you know any legends or myths about the moon (make one up!)? * what are your questions for the moon? * what element(s) will you juxtapose with the moon in your own moon haiku?

DAY 20: April 7, 2020

Happy Super Pink Full Moon, all—the biggest full moon we’ll see this year.

I had a hard time choosing the art for our “sixth sense”-themed portable poetry session today, but I finally came around to this fabulous painting of Joan of Arc seeing visions in her backyard, the painting I probably love most in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in NYC. It’s so huge that when you stand in front of it, Joan appears to be about your own size; you could be in her garden, five hundred years in the past.

The beautiful, essential questions in this poem by Washington State poet laureate Claudia Castro Luna could be great prompts for writing or poem creation; how might we “make manifest/what the mind knows/but the eye cannot yet see” or “pluck Hope/from the terraced gardens/where it grows?”

María Cristina Hanging Chrysalis

Claudia Castro Luna

What would I do
for a smidgeon
of your rebellion María?
As a woman to trust
the halo of your intuition
I know you know
courage plummets
easily from cliffs of doubt
both imposed and self harvested—
How to make manifest
what the mind knows
but the eye cannot yet see?
How to pluck Hope 
from the terraced gardens
where it grows?
I think about the nature of change
the transfiguration from grain to woman
the audacity of salt to embolden water into ocean
the urge to break free

From Killing Marías: A Poem for Multiple Voices (Two Sylvias Press, 2017). Copyright © 2016 by Claudia Castro Luna.

beautiful questions of the day: do you believe in a sixth sense? * if so, how would you describe your own version of it? * what examples from your own life make you believe? * when you listen to your intuition, what does it tell you?

DAY 19: April 6, 2020

Could it be I am actually getting today’s post out by noon? Woohoo!

All our senses fade with age, including the sense of taste. But isn’t it kind of lovely that sweetness supposedly lasts the longest of all the qualities of taste? Now is a traditional time for bitter, cleansing flavors and herbs, and foraging wild greens like dandelion, plantain, lamb’s quarters, and the heart-shaped leaves of violets for cleansing spring tonics. The sweetness and sugar in this wonderful poem by Marcus Jackson feel like a good balance for the literal and figurative bitterness of the current moment.

May you savor the taste of everything that passes your lips!

Ode to Kool-Aid

Marcus Jackson

You turn the kitchen
tap’s metallic stream
into tropical drink,
extra sugar whirlpooling
to the pitcher-bottom
like gypsum sand.
Purplesaurus Rex, Roarin’
Rock-A-Dile Red, Ice Blue
Island Twist, Sharkleberry Fin;
on our tongues, each version
keeps a section, like tiles
on the elemental table.
In ninth grade, Sandra
employed a jug of Black Cherry
to dye her straightened
bangs burgundy.
When toddlers swallow you,
their top lips mustache in color
as if they’ve kissed paint.
The trendy folks can savor
all that imported mango nectar
and health-market juice.
We need factory-crafted packets,
unpronounceable ingredients,
a logo cute enough to hug,
a drink unnaturally sweet
so that, on the porch,
as summer sun recedes,
Granddad takes out his teeth
to make more mouth to admit you.

Copyright © 2011 by Marcus Jackson. “Ode to Kool-Aid” originally appeared in Neighborhood Register (Cavankerry Press, 2011).

beautiful questions of the day: what is the flavor of childhood? * what is the flavor of spring (or summer, fall, winter)? * what is the flavor of home? * what is the flavor of ____ (choose your own emotion)?

DAY 18: April 5, 2020

“Without music, life would be a mistake.” ―Friedrich Nietzsche

There’s a lot to talk about within the scope of the sense of hearing, but I want to go right to music, today. Virtually every part of the human brain engages with music. It elicits memory like nothing else, even in the latest stages of dementia. (If you haven’t seen the documentary Alive Inside, about the effect of music on older adults with Alzheimer’s and dementia, do! It is fabulous.) And I don’t know about you, but when I’m low, if nothing else helps, music will.

The wonderful writer, neurosurgeon, and musician Oliver Sacks once described how he musicked himself down a mountain when he was injured and alone on a Norwegian fjord. Singing a tune to himself and moving to its rhythm, he managed to bump down 6,000 feet of rock on his butt and survive. I imagine music saves lives less literally every day. (Anything by Sacks is a great read, but if you are into music, and music and the brain, you will love his Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain.)

Please note that formatting on this webpage does not show this magnificent poem by the late U.S. poet laureate Mark Strand as it normally appears—the lines ought to be closer together. You can click on the title of the poem to see the poem on another page, as it ought to appear. The density of it seems important, to communicate the speed at which the music morphs and overcomes the speaker with memory, like a changing storm cloud.

The Everyday Enchantment of Music

Mark Strand 

A rough sound was polished until it became a smoother sound,

which was polished until it became music. Then the music was polished until

it became the memory of a night in Venice when tears of the sea fell from the Bridge

of Sighs, which in turn was polished until it ceased to be and in its place stood the

empty home of a heart in trouble. Then suddenly there was sun and the music came

back and traffic was moving and off in the distance, at the edge of the city, a long line

of clouds appeared, and there was thunder, which, however menacing, would

become music, and the memory of what happened after Venice would begin, and

what happened after the home of the troubled heart broke in two would also begin.

From Almost Invisible (Knopf, 2012). Copyright © 2012 by Mark Strand.

beautiful questions of the day: listen to a song or piece of music—what does it call to mind? does it bring back memories, suggest a place, make you see certain colors, create a mood? what kind of enchantment does it create in you?

DAY 17: April 4, 2020

“[the sense of smell is] The fallen angel of the senses… a potent wizard that transports us across thousands of miles and all the years we have lived.”

—Helen Keller

Wow, I did not know from Little Jimmy Dickens until today. Ha!

There’s a surprising shortage of nose-related songs. NB, we could change that…

The poem below, by doctor, writer, and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet William Carlos Williams, is another joyful discovery for today. (Fun fact I learned about WCW: his paternal grandmother’s name was Emily Dickinson.)

I cannot make a post about the miraculous sense of smell without including this “odorifics” clip from Harold and Maude, the greatest March-December love story ever told.

And I have begun reading a book that has sat neglected for a while, like so many on my nonfiction shelf—Jacobson’s Organ and the Remarkable Nature of Smell, by Lyall Watson. The first chapter is titled “A nose is born.”

Enjoy!

Smell!

William Carlos Williams 

Oh strong-ridged and deeply hollowed
nose of mine! what will you not be smelling?
What tactless asses we are, you and I, boney nose,
always indiscriminate, always unashamed,
and now it is the souring flowers of the bedraggled
poplars: a festering pulp on the wet earth
beneath them. With what deep thirst
we quicken our desires
to that rank odor of a passing springtime!
Can you not be decent? Can you not reserve your ardors
for something less unlovely? What girl will care
for us, do you think, if we continue in these ways?
Must you taste everything? Must you know everything?
Must you have a part in everything?

This poem is in the public domain.

beautiful questions of the day: what is the scent of childhood? * what is the scent of home? * what comes to mind when you smell ____ (what can you find, in the world around you, to smell and consider)?

DAY 16: April 3, 2020

If

I open my hand, a

Night-bird will land, silent as

Glass.

—from “Asking All” by Mary McGinnis, from her book See With Your Whole Body

Greetings, everyone.

And R.I.P. to the great Bill Withers, who passed away yesterday at the age of 81 from heart complications. I probably use his beautiful song “Grandma’s Hands” more than any other, in poetry sessions. (And “Lovely Day,” “Lean on Me,” and “Ain’t No Sunshine When She’s Gone.”) Listen closely to the lyrics and you’ll hear how Withers creates a full, vivid, and deeply loving portrait of his grandma—in a two-minute song!—by simply using her own words and describing some of the ways she used her hands to pray and make music, to soothe, nourish, protect, and help.

Meditating on the sense of touch may very well be painful or frustrating right now, as we wait for the time when we are free to hug, kiss, and shake hands with each other again. But one marvelous thing about the brain is its capacity to register imagined experiences as real, lived ones. If you are prevented from touching someone(s) you love right now, can you close your eyes and imagine doing so? Can you describe the textures of the skin of their hands, foreheads, cheeks? Think of textures your hands love and have loved. Imagine stroking velvet, smooth bark, thick fur.

Is there an object you can safely, comfortably hold that feels really good in your hand? Hang onto it longer than you normally would. Hang onto it as you read this wonderful poem by Virginia Poet Laureate Tim Seibles, and concentrate on how your touch translates its textures, weight, and shape.

Ode to My Hands

Tim Seibles

Five-legged pocket spiders, knuckled
starfish, grabbers of forks, why
do I forget that you love me:
your willingness to button my shirts,
tie my shoes—even scratch my head!
which throbs like a traffic jam, each thought
leaning on its horn. I see you

waiting anyplace always 
at the ends of my arms—for the doctor,
for the movie to begin, for 
freedom—so silent, such 
patience! testing the world
with your bold myopia: faithful,
ready to reach out at my 
softest suggestion, to fly up 
like two birds when I speak, two 
brown thrashers brandishing verbs
like twigs in your beaks, lifting 
my speech the way pepper springs 
the tongue from slumber. O! 

If only they knew the unrestrained 
innocence of your intentions, 
each finger a cappella, singing
a song that rings like rain
before it falls—that never falls!
Such harmony: the bass thumb, the
pinkie's soprano, the three tenors
in between: kind quintet x 2
rowing my heart like a little boat
upon whose wooden seat I sit
strummed by Sorrow. Or maybe 

I misread you completely
and you are dreaming a tangerine, one
particular hot tamale, a fabulous
banana! to peel suggestively,
like thigh-high stockings: grinning
as only hands can grin 
down the legs—caramel, cocoa, 
black-bean black, vanilla—such lubricious 
dimensions, such public secrets!
Women sailing the streets 
with God's breath at their backs. 
Think of it! No! Yes:
let my brain sweat, make my 
veins whimper: without you, my five-hearted 
fiends, my five-headed hydras, what 
of my mischievous history? The possibilities
suddenly impossible—feelings 
not felt, rememberings un-
remembered—all the touches 
untouched: the gallant strain 

of a pilfered ant, tiny muscles 
flexed with fight, the gritty 
sidewalk slapped after a slip, the pulled 
weed, the plucked flower—a buttercup! 
held beneath Dawn's chin—the purest kiss,
the caught grasshopper's kick, honey,
chalk, charcoal, the solos teased
from guitar. Once, I played 
viola for a year and never stopped

to thank you—my two angry sisters, 
my two hungry men—but you knew
I just wanted to know
what the strings would say 
concerning my soul, my whelming
solipsism: this perpetual solstice
where one + one = everything
and two hands teach a dawdler
the palpable alchemy
of an unreasonable world. 

Copyright © 2010 by Tim Seibles.

beautiful question of the day: what textures, objects, experiences, and gifts would you simply have to include in an ode to your own hands, or an ode to the sense of touch? (try writing this poem of praise!)

DAY 15: April 2, 2020

***Update, April 4: For anyone visiting this post after April 2, I’m adding a link to an extraordinary essay by my amazing poet, writer, and teaching artist friend Naomi Cohn: “In Light of a White Cane,” published one month ago today on Terrain.org.

Or, if the eyes fail,

If the optical bodies of sight die,

Sight still lives while I live,

Sight is immortal in me,

Free of the bond of outward vision—

The inner sense of life,

The living-looking.

—from “Eyes,” by Laura Riding Jackson

I have begun to believe that everyone has at least a little intermittent ESP, maybe a very specific kind they don’t even recognize. My own is music-related. From time to time, I hear a song in my head and turn on the radio to find it playing, or hear it out in the world somewhere later that day. Yesterday it was this most mesmerizing and gorgeous of slow-dance tunes by The Flamingoes. I sang it in the kitchen while making lunch, and last night it popped up as a major theme in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer! This happens often enough that I interpret it, generally, as a signal to trust my intuition, which is sometimes thought of as a kind of sixth sense.

So let’s explore those six senses over these next six days. Today, thanks to that double dose of The Flamingoes, I’ll start with the sense of sight. (If you have time, click on the eye miniature link to learn more about these bizarre, beautiful, Georgian-era English love tokens.) I’m also thinking about how, in this time when we are wearing masks to try and protect each other from illness, the eyes are the only part of our faces others may see.

I often use this stunning poem by Lisel Mueller in poetry sessions specifically about aging and its gifts. It is unusual in its protest against the idea of aging as degradation. Mueller, a National Book Award- and Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, translator, and educator, fled the Nazis for the U.S. with her family as a teenager in 1939 and settled in the Midwest. She lived in the Chicago area for decades before her death this year, just days after her 96th birthday.

Monet Refuses the Operation

BY LISEL MUELLER

Doctor, you say there are no haloes

around the streetlights in Paris

and what I see is an aberration

caused by old age, an affliction.

I tell you it has taken me all my life

to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,

to soften and blur and finally banish

the edges you regret I don’t see,

to learn that the line I called the horizon

does not exist and sky and water,

so long apart, are the same state of being.

Fifty-four years before I could see

Rouen cathedral is built

of parallel shafts of sun,

and now you want to restore

my youthful errors: fixed

notions of top and bottom,

the illusion of three-dimensional space,

wisteria separate

from the bridge it covers.

What can I say to convince you

the Houses of Parliament dissolve

night after night to become

the fluid dream of the Thames?

I will not return to a universe

of objects that don’t know each other,

as if islands were not the lost children

of one great continent.  The world

is flux, and light becomes what it touches,

becomes water, lilies on water,

above and below water,

becomes lilac and mauve and yellow

and white and cerulean lamps,

small fists passing sunlight

so quickly to one another

that it would take long, streaming hair

inside my brush to catch it.

To paint the speed of light!

Our weighted shapes, these verticals,

burn to mix with air

and change our bones, skin, clothes

to gases.  Doctor,

if only you could see

how heaven pulls earth into its arms

and how infinitely the heart expands

to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

From Second Language, Louisiana State University Press, 1996. Copyright © 1996 by Lisel Mueller.

beautiful questions of the day: what is something you know or notice that you wish you could help others see? * when we look into your eyes, what might the rest of us see there? * look into the eyes of someone you see nearby; how would you describe them, and what do you see there?

DAY 14: April 1, 2020

Happy April Fool’s Day, friends! And first day of National Poetry Month. Can you believe it’s April? I’ve been posting these portable poetry sessions for two weeks now. If you’re following these posts, or even using them in your own solo, partner, or small group poetry sessions, please let me (Zoë) know by dropping a line at info@alzpoetrymn.org! I’d love to read any associated poems, stories, etc. Thank you.

I have great respect for the figure of the so-called fool. Because she has shown utter humility in ridiculing herself at every opportunity, and a complete lack of concern for status, decorum, or societal logic, the fool is often the only one who can speak truth to the king (without getting her head lopped off). It’s easy to imagine that much diplomacy is accomplished through humor. The spiritual role of the holy fool of Russia/Byzantium, who exposes pride and hypocrisy in religion and the clergy, seems to have lots of cultural analogues: Zen Buddhism; the ecstatic poetry of Ghalib, Rumi, and Hafiz; Frank Zappa…

In the tarot, the Fool card is very auspicious. It signifies new adventures and beginnings, spontaneity, originality, innocence, improvisation, faith in the universe and its mysteries, and living in the moment—all the essential ingredients for art-making, and the most fruitful qualities to bring to art-making with those with dementia.

One of my favorite ecstatic poets is Tukaram, a 17th-century Hindu poet and saint of the Bhakti devotional movement, which did not discriminate based on caste or gender. Tukaram’s stature in the literature of the Marathi language has been compared to Shakespeare’s in English and Goethe’s in German.

From Wikipedia: “In one of his poems, Tukaram self-effacingly described himself as a ‘fool, confused, lost, liking solitude because I am wearied of the world, worshipping Vitthal (Vishnu) just like my ancestors were doing but I lack their faith and devotion, and there is nothing holy about me’.”[21]

Here are two funny, humble, wise poems by Tukaram:

I could not lie anymore so I started to call my dog “God.”
First he looked 
confused,

then he started smiling, then he even 
danced.

I kept at it: now he doesn’t even 
bite.

I am wondering if this 
might work on 
people?

I
was invited 
to a fancy event and when
I got there one of the guests said,

“Tukaram, your shirt is on backwards and so are
your pants,

and it looks like your hair never heard the word comb,
and your shoes don’t 
match.”

I replied,

“thanks, I noticed all that before leaving,
but why try to fool
anyone.”

From Love Poems From God: Twelve Sacred Voices from the East and West, edited and translated by Daniel Ladinsky, copyright 2008, Penguin Group.

beautiful question of the day: with full permission to speak truth to power—like the holy fool—what do you have to say, and how can you use humor to say it?

DAY 13: March 31, 2020

Good day, all. Today’s portable poetry session was inspired by an exchange with my friend Ronna Hammer, an amazing poet, artist, and APP-MN supporter.

To me, Wisława Szymborska’s ekphrastic poem inspired by Vermeer’s painting says more than most novels, and in just six lines. No wonder she won the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Wait—Ekphrastic?, you may ask. What’s that? Ekphrasis is an artistic response to another piece of art. Any media can be involved. We have had great fun composing ekphrastic poetry in response to visual art and music, and creating visual art in response to music and poetry, in APP sessions for people with and without memory loss.

This painting and poem appear together in the indispensable Sunlight on the River: Poems about Paintings, Paintings about Poems, edited by Scott Gutterman. Support your local bookstore and order a copy! Along with Szymborska’s Map: Collected and Last Poems.

And enjoy experimenting with ekphrasis of all kinds. Try looking at another work of art and composing a poem in response, drawing in response to a song you love, composing a tune based on a poem, etc., etc., etc.

Vermeer

Wisława Szymborska

As long as the woman from Rijksmuseum
in painted silence and concentration
day after day pours milk
from the jug to the bowl,
the World does not deserve
the end of the world.

From Poems New and Collected, copyright 2000 by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co.

beautiful question of the day: what are the human creations and qualities that redeem the human world, for you?

DAY 12: March 30, 2020

Greensleeves was my delight,
Greensleeves my heart of gold

—From “Greensleeves,” a traditional English folk song not written by Henry VIII, as it turns out

Is there a particular color you gravitate toward? I might qualify as obsessed with the color green and its endless variety: verdigris, celadon, Scheele’s green—have you ever heard of that shade? Yikes. I learned about it in one of my now favorite reference books of all time, The Secret Lives of Color by Kassia St. Clair, which tells the fascinating and often bizarre stories behind seventy-five different hues.

Green may get a bad rap in terms of human emotion, being associated with envy, jealousy, and nausea; but after long Minnesota winters, the first flush of green is like water to a parched throat. I’m sitting in a room with leaf green walls, looking out my window at the dark green boughs of my neighbors’ pine. On the windowsill are a Kelly green-and-white domino, a container for bubble solution the shape and color of a cartoon frog, a tiny faux-verdigris picture frame, and an accumulation of greenish rocks.

I love this poem by Debra Kang Dean (click the link for her comments on the poem and a link to an audio recording of her reading it) for so many reasons: the single splash of color in the poem, the woman’s long green coat; the narrator’s curiosity about this character she sees “every day that I’m here”; and the moment of connection that ends their state of proximate strangerhood.

Soak up some color today, whether it’s in the objects that surround you, what you can see out your window, what you notice while out walking around, or what you discover in online museum collections or art books.

It’s Not Easy Being Green

Debra Kang Dean

Whatever her story is, today
and every day that I’m here,
she’s here in her long, quilted green coat,
 
her companion—a beagle?—
nose to the ground, its tail
a shimmy. Unlidded to
 
lidded trash can they go, and
all along the fence lining the stream,
looking, I think, for whatever
 
salvageable cast-offs can be found.
By all appearances, she doesn’t need to,
but who knows, maybe she does.
 
The day after the first snow, she’d stopped,
asked, What’s that you’re doing? and, to my answer,
Yes, she’d said, of course, taiji.
 
Today, as I turned southwest
into Fair Lady Works the Shuttles, in it
lost, there they were, close by, again,
 
her companion sniffing along the fence
at court’s edge, and she, standing by. I want
to believe by now that she and I have gone
 
beyond just being fair-weather friends
as, moving on without pause, we simply
smile, nod, say, Hello. Or don’t.

Copyright © 2018 by Debra Kang Dean. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on October 29, 2018, by the Academy of American Poets.

beautiful questions of the day: if you were to choose a color to describe your mood right now, what would it be? * what else comes to mind when you envision this color? * how many shades of this color can you name (make some up)?

DAY 11: March 29, 2020

It’s still rainy here, and blustery, and seems a great day for disappearing into other stories. This morning and early afternoon, I’ve been completely absorbed in Hilary Mantel’s novel The Mirror & the Light, the last in a trilogy about Thomas Cromwell, Henry VIII & co. (She won the Booker Prize for the first two novels in the trilogy, Wolf Hall and Bring Up the Bodies.)

What’s better for a break from one’s own story than reading someone else’s? Here’s a great poem about the fluidity of fiction and reality by Danusha Laméris.

Fictional Characters

BY DANUSHA LAMÉRIS

Do they ever want to escape?
Climb out of the curved white pages
and enter our world?

Holden Caulfield slipping in the side door
of the movie theater to catch the two o’clock.
Anna Karenina sitting in the local diner,
reading the paper as the waitress
in a bright green uniform
serves up a cheeseburger and a Coke.

Even Hector, on break from the Iliad,
takes a stroll through the park,
admires a fresh bed of tulips.  

Who knows? Maybe
they were growing tired
of the author’s mind,
all its twists and turns,

or they were finally weary
of stumbling around Pamplona,
a bottle in each fist,
eating lotuses on the banks of the Nile.

Perhaps it was just too hot
in the small California town
where they’d been written into
a lifetime of plowing fields.

Whatever the reason, here they are,
content to spend the day
roaming the city streets, rain falling
on their phantasmal shoulders,
enjoying the bustle of the crowd.

Wouldn’t you, if you could?
Step out of your own story
to lean for an afternoon against the doorway
of the five-and-dime, sipping your coffee,

your life somewhere far behind you,
all its heat and toil nothing but a tale
resting in the hands of a stranger,
the dingy sidewalk ahead wet and glistening.

From the November 2009 issue of The Sun Magazine

beautiful questions of the day: if you could borrow the life of a fictional character—if only temporarily—whose would it be? * which novelist would write a fictionalized history of your adventures? * what songs would be on the soundtrack to the movie of your life? * which actor would play you?

DAY 10: March 28, 2020

Hello, everyone. It’s a very mild day here in Minneapolis, and the light rain feels refreshing and life-giving. The greening has begun!

I know not everyone is crazy about overcast days, but after fifteen years in New Mexico, rain feels like relief to me almost every time. And I love the way it gives me an added layer of permission to lie around reading.

In group poetry sessions, I often pass around a rain stick for poets to play with before and as we recite this lovely early poem by the great Harlem Renaissance luminary, Langston Hughes. He is best known for his poetry, but was also a playwright, a folklorist, a fiction writer whose first novel won the Harmon gold prize, an editor, anthologist, and translator. His former residence in Harlem is now a New York City landmark, and 127th Street, where it is located, has been renamed “Langston Hughes Place.”

April Rain Song

BY LANGSTON HUGHES

Let the rain kiss you.
Let the rain beat upon your head with silver liquid drops.
Let the rain sing you a lullaby.

The rain makes still pools on the sidewalk.
The rain makes running pools in the gutter.
The rain plays a little sleep-song on our roof at night —

and I love the rain.

From The Dream-Keeper and Other Poems (1932)

beautiful question of the day: what do you love about the rain?

DAY 9: March 27, 2020

“What a strange thing! to be alive beneath cherry blossoms.” —Kobayashi Issa

Good medicine this early afternoon: an open window in the studio, the sound of birds and neighbor kids playing outside, and this gorgeous poem by Ada Limón, whose latest book of poetry, Bright Dead Things (Milkweed Editions, 2015), was a finalist for the National Book Award and the National Books Critics Circle Award. Click here for a link to an audio recording of her reading the poem.

Instructions on Not Giving Up

Ada Limón 

More than the fuchsia funnels breaking out
of the crabapple tree, more than the neighbor’s
almost obscene display of cherry limbs shoving
their cotton candy-colored blossoms to the slate
sky of Spring rains, it’s the greening of the trees
that really gets to me. When all the shock of white
and taffy, the world’s baubles and trinkets, leave
the pavement strewn with the confetti of aftermath,
the leaves come. Patient, plodding, a green skin
growing over whatever winter did to us, a return
to the strange idea of continuous living despite
the mess of us, the hurt, the empty. Fine then,
I’ll take it, the tree seems to say, a new slick leaf
unfurling like a fist to an open palm, I’ll take it all.

Copyright © 2017 by Ada Limón. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on May 15, 2017, by the Academy of American Poets.

beautiful question of the day: what are your own instructions on not giving up?

DAY 8: March 26, 2020

Well, better late than never. I pledge to post here every day, but I’d better not make promises about what time of day I’ll do it. For those of you reading and even using these posts, thank you!

Nobody took better advantage of being stuck inside for long periods than genius painter and iconically famous self-portraitist Frida Kahlo. If you click on the title of her painting above, you can link to a really interesting article about the painting, which includes this line: “One of the Aztec calendars even had a day, Ozomatli, dedicated to monkeys and linked to the god of flowers and song.” At the ends of their shows, the band Ozomatli dances their audiences out of the performance venue and onto the street, where everyone can continue dancing.

You may already know this gorgeous poem by N. Scott Momaday, a Kiowa/Cherokee writer who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1969 for his first novel, House Made of Dawn. Momaday went on to win many other prizes and honors, including a National Medal of Arts and an Academy of American Poets Prize. He has written numerous other books of poetry, fiction, plays, and children’s stories, and has taught at the University of Arizona since 1982.

Many thanks to my friend, mentor, and former North High teacher, the gifted poet and artist George Roberts, who first introduced me to this poem in maybe 1989?

The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee

BY N. SCOTT MOMADAY

I am a feather on the bright sky

I am the blue horse that runs in the plain

I am the fish that rolls, shining, in the water

I am the shadow that follows a child

I am the evening light, the lustre of meadows

I am an eagle playing with the wind

I am a cluster of bright beads

I am the farthest star

I am the cold of dawn

I am the roaring of the rain

I am the glitter on the crust of the snow

I am the long track of the moon in a lake

I am a flame of four colors

I am a deer standing away in the dusk

I am a field of sumac and the pomme blanche

I am an angle of geese in the winter sky

I am the hunger of a young wolf

I am the whole dream of these things

You see, I am alive, I am alive

I stand in good relation to the earth

I stand in good relation to the gods

I stand in good relation to all that is beautiful

I stand in good relation to the daughter of Tsen-tainte

You see, I am alive, I am alive

N. Scott Momaday, “The Delight Song of Tsoai-talee” from In the Presence of the Sun: Stories and Poems, 1961-1991 (St. Martin's Press LLC, 1992). Copyright ©1991 by N. Scott Momaday.

beautiful questions of the day: how would you represent yourself in a self-portrait? what colors might predominate? what is the setting? what significant animals, objects, or symbols might appear?

DAY 7: March 25, 2020

Hello, everyone! Our theme for the day is names. Not just the ones you were given at birth, but the others, too, as in this powerhouse of a poem by Patricia Smith, winner of the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, a Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award, a Carl Sandburg Literary award and many other honors. She is not only a poet, fiction writer, playwright, teacher, and former journalist; she is also spoken word artist and a four-time individual champion of the National Poetry Slam (and the most successful poet in the competition’s history). Among her current projects is a biography of Harriet Tubman and a collaborative novel.

Apologies for formatting issues today. I could not get the poem to appear in my standard font and still keep its shape.

In addition to considering the Beautiful Questions below, try making a list of all the names you’ve been known by, including nicknames (you could include the mean ones… or not) and family and societal roles (my list would include “Zozette,” “Zozo,” “Zero,” “sister,” “Hey waitress,” “poet,” etc.).

Thanks to my teaching artist friend Sandra Menefee Taylor and her beautiful work with artists at Wilder Center for Aging in St. Paul for inspiration today.

Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah

Patricia Smith 

My mother scraped the name Patricia Ann from the ruins
of her discarded Delta, thinking it would offer me shield
and shelter, that leering men would skulk away at the slap
of it. Her hands on the hips of Alabama, she went for flat
and functional, then siphoned each syllable of drama,
repeatedly crushing it with her broad, practical tongue
until it sounded like an instruction to God, not a name.
She wanted a child of pressed head and knocking knees,
a trip-up in the doubledutch swing, a starched pinafore
and peppermint-in-the-sour-pickle kinda child, stiff-laced
and unshakably fixed on salvation. Her Patricia Ann
would never idly throat the Lord’s name or wear one
of those thin, sparkled skirts that flirted with her knees.
She'd be a nurse or a third-grade teacher or a postal drone,
jobs requiring alarm-clock discipline and sensible shoes.
My four downbeats were music enough for a vapid life
of butcher-shop sawdust and fatback as cuisine, for Raid
spritzed into the writhing pockets of a Murphy bed.
No crinkled consonants or muted hiss would summon me.

My daddy detested borders. One look at my mother's
watery belly, and he insisted, as much as he could insist
with her, on the name Jimi Savannah, seeking to bless me
with the blues-bathed moniker of a ball breaker, the name
of a grown gal in a snug red sheath and unlaced All-Stars.
He wanted to shoot muscle through whatever I was called,
arm each syllable with tiny weaponry so no one would
mistake me for anything other than a tricky whisperer
with a switchblade in my shoe. I was bound to be all legs,
a bladed debutante hooked on Lucky Strikes and sugar.
When I sent up prayers, God's boy would giggle and consider.

Daddy didn't want me to be anybody's surefire factory,
nobody's callback or seized rhythm, so he conjured
a name so odd and hot even a boy could claim it. And yes,
he was prepared for the look my mother gave him when
he first mouthed his choice, the look that said, That's it,
you done lost your goddamned mind. She did that thing
she does where she grows two full inches with righteous,
and he decided to just whisper Love you, Jimi Savannah
whenever we were alone, re- and rechristening me the seed
of Otis, conjuring his own religion and naming it me.

From Shoulda Been Jimi Savannah (Coffee House Press, 2012) by Patricia Smith. Copyright © 2012 by Patricia Smith.

beautiful questions of the day: what is the story of your name?—and, or—what does your name mean to you? do you relate to it?—and, or—if you could choose a pseudonym or a pen name, what would it be?

DAY 6: March 24, 2020

Greetings, all! It’s the new moon, an ideal time for planting seeds and new beginnings of all kinds.

Here’s a much-loved poem by James Wright, winner of the Yale Series of Younger Poets award in 1957 and a Pulitzer Prize in 1972. Wright was born in Ohio and taught at the University of Minnesota and Macalester College for many years. There is so much tenderness in much of his work that I love his scathing “The Minneapolis Poem” (major downer alert) all the more. That poem is anthologized, along with a great tribute/response poem by Dobby Gibson, in the excellent Under Purple Skies: The Minneapolis Anthology, edited by Frank Bures.

Beginning

BY JAMES WRIGHT

The moon drops one or two feathers into the field.   

The dark wheat listens.

Be still.

Now.

There they are, the moon's young, trying

Their wings.

Between trees, a slender woman lifts up the lovely shadow

Of her face, and now she steps into the air, now she is gone

Wholly, into the air.

I stand alone by an elder tree, I do not dare breathe

Or move.

I listen.

The wheat leans back toward its own darkness,

And I lean toward mine.

From Above the River: The Complete Poems and Selected Prose (Wesleyan University Press, 1990). Copyright © 1990 by James Wright.

beautiful question of the day: what is an example of a new beginning from your own life, or one you can imagine?

DAY 5: March 23, 2020

Another happy birthday greeting, this to my old friend Sophia in upstate New York. Sophia means “wisdom,” a fine theme for any day. Here’s another favorite poem from the peerless Naomi Shihab Nye. Read more about her under Day 4’s post. And if you want to learn about gods and goddesses of wisdom from cultures around the world, get your paws on a copy of the amazing Dictionary of Ancient Deities by Patricia Turner and Charles Russell Coulter. You could cross-reference for days.

My Wisdom

BY NAOMI SHIHAB NYE

When people have a lot

they want more

When people have nothing

they will happily share it

*

Some people say

never getting your way

builds character

By now our character must be

deep and wide as a continent

Africa, Australia

giant cascade of stars

spilling over our huge night

*

Where did the power go?

Did it enjoy its break?

Is power exhausted?

What is real power?

Who really has power?

Did the generator break?

Do we imagine silence

more powerful because

it might contain everything?

Quiet always lives

inside noise.

But does it get much done?

*

Silence waits

for truth to break it

*

Calendars can weep too

They want us to have better days

*

Welcome to every minute

Feel lucky you’re still in it

*

No bird builds a wall

*

Sky purse

     jingling

           change

*

Won’t give up

our hopes

            for anything!

*

Not your fault

You didn’t make the world

*

How dare this go on and on?

cried the person who believed in praying

God willing     God willing        God willing

There were others who prayed

   to ruins & stumps

*

Open palms

     hold more

*

Refuse to give

   mistakes

      too much power

*

Annoying person?

Person who told me to stay home

and do what other girls do?

If you disappeared

I still might miss you

*

Babies want to help us

They laugh

for no reason

*

Pay close attention to

a drop of water

on the kitchen table

*

You cannot say one word about religion

and exclude Ahmad

Naomi Shihab Nye, "My Wisdom" from The Tiny Journalist. Copyright © 2019 by Naomi Shihab Nye. Reprinted by permission of BOA Editions, Ltd., www.boaeditions.org.

beautiful question of the day: what is your wisdom?

DAY 4: March 22, 2020

Happy birthday to my friend and fellow poet and teaching artist Barbara Tarrant, who introduced me to this wonderful poem by Naomi Shihab Nye in an assisted living poetry session she helped facilitate several years ago.

I’m thinking today of the small things that give our lives flavor, things so essential we might forget to praise them.

Naomi Shihab Nye, born in St. Louis to a Palestinian refugee father and a German-Swiss mother, lived in Ramallah in Palestine, the Old City in Jerusalem, as a teenager. She has received many honors and awards for her poetry and children’s fiction, including the National Book Critics Circle Lifetime Achievement Award and four Pushcart Prizes. Her work centers heritage, peace, compassion, and moments of human unity.

Shihab Nye’s book Red Suitcase is of the well-worn volumes on my shelf. If you have an extra couple minutes, read “What Brings Us Out.”

The Traveling Onion

Naomi Shihab Nye 

“It is believed that the onion originally came from India. In Egypt it was an 
object of worship —why I haven’t been able to find out. From Egypt the onion 
entered Greece and on to Italy, thence into all of Europe.” — Better Living Cookbook

When I think how far the onion has traveled
just to enter my stew today, I could kneel and praise
all small forgotten miracles,
crackly paper peeling on the drainboard,
pearly layers in smooth agreement,
the way the knife enters onion
and onion falls apart on the chopping block,
a history revealed.
And I would never scold the onion
for causing tears.
It is right that tears fall
for something small and forgotten.
How at meal, we sit to eat,
commenting on texture of meat or herbal aroma
but never on the translucence of onion,
now limp, now divided,
or its traditionally honorable career:
For the sake of others,
disappear.

From Words Under the Words: Selected Poems. Copyright © 1995 by Naomi Shihab Nye. 

beautiful question of the day: what are some of the seemingly small things that make you happy, or that you couldn’t do without?

DAY 3: March 21, 2020

I woke up this morning with these lines in my head, from Alberto Ríos’s poem “When Giving is All We Have”: One river gives/ its journey to the next.

For me, those lines recall this poem by the great Chickasaw poet, novelist, essayist and environmentalist Linda Hogan. Born in Denver, Colorado, Hogan’s awards include a Lifetime Achievement Award from the Native Writers Circle of the Americas and the PEN Thoreau Prize. I recently read her amazing historical novel, Mean Spirit—about the Osage tribe during the Oklahoma oil boom—which won the Oklahoma Book Award and the Mountains and Plains Book Award, and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in fiction in 1991.

There are so many great songs about rivers. How many can you think of and sing together? I included this song from Twin Cities band The Cactus Blossoms since it’s about my home river (what is/are yours?), but Sam Cooke’s “A Change is Gonna Come,” Ella Fitzgerald’s or Julie London’s “Cry Me a River,” Al Green’s “Take Me to the River,” Joni Mitchell’s “River,” Paul Robeson’s “Old Man River,” Peter Gabriel’s “Washing of the Water” and Louis Armstrong’s “Up a Lazy River” are all at the top of my rivers playlist.

Journey

BY LINDA HOGAN

The mouth of the river may be beautiful.
It doesn't remember the womb of its beginning.
It doesn't look back to where it's been
or wonder who ahead of it polished the rough stones.

It is following the way
in its fullness,
now like satin,
now cresting,
waters meeting, kindred
to travel gathered together,
all knowing it flows
one way, shining or in shadows.
And me, the animal
I ride wants to drive forward,
its longing not always my own,
overrunning its banks and bounds,
edgeless, spilling along the way

because, as I forget,
it knows everything
is before it.

"Journey" by Linda Hogan. Text as published in Rounding the Human Corners: Poems (Coffee House Press, 2008). © Linda Hogan. 

beautiful question of the day: if the river could speak, what would it tell you?

DAY 2: March 20, 2020

Yesterday was the Spring Equinox, the earliest it’s arrived in many years, apparently. Soon we’ll see the first flowers here in Minnesota, including the pasqueflower (Pulsatilla grande). Thanks to my dear friend and fellow APP-MN teaching artist, Julie Landsman, who gave me the gorgeous Phaidon coffee table book, Plant, in which I found this image. (Plant is one book everyone should have. Each page has a different botanical art image, and the artists range from unknown creators working over a thousand years ago to contemporary artists working in every medium imaginable.)

Here’s my favorite rendition of my favorite spring song, and my favorite spring poem—even though it’s titled “Winter Poem”. I found it in the best anthology of poetry on my shelf: Black Nature: Four Centuries of African American Nature Poetry, edited by Camille Dungy. Gary Glazner will be reading poems from this anthology on his Facebook Live Poetry Walk today—join us if you can!

Nikki Giovanni, born in Knoxville, Tennessee, is the author of numerous volumes of poetry, nonfiction, and children’s literature. She is a distinguished speaker and lecturer, and a professor at Rutgers University who has won numerous awards and accolades, including seven NAACP Image Awards, the Langston Hughes Award for Distinguished Contributions to Arts and Letters, the Rosa Parks Women of Courage Award and over twenty honorary degrees from colleges and universities. She even has a species of bat named for her! The Micronycteris giovanniae. “Writing is ... what I do to justify the air I breathe” —NG

Winter Poem

BY NIKKI GIOVANNI

once a snowflake fell
on my brow and i loved
it so much and i kissed
it and it was happy and called its cousins
and brothers and a web
of snow engulfed me then
i reached to love them all
and i squeezed them and they became
a spring rain and i stood perfectly
still and was a flower

beautiful question of the day: what signs of spring do you see, hear, feel, taste, smell?

DAY 1: March 19, 2020

Happy last day of the astrological year, folks. Happy first portable poetry session-a-day!

When this poetry session-a-day idea first occurred to me, the following poem by Jimmy Santiago Baca began playing in my memory right away.

Jimmy Santiago Baca, born in Santa Fe, New Mexico, learned to read and began writing poetry while incarcerated as a teenager and young man. (Click on his name below for poetryfoundation.org’s bio.) He has gone on to teach and mentor countless other incarcerated writers, including through his nonprofit, Cedar Tree, which serves institutionalized writers; write a dozen books of poetry, memoir, fiction, and nonfiction; and win many honors, including an Hispanic Heritage Award for Literature and an American Book Award. “Through language I was free.” —JSB

I Am Offering this Poem

BY JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA

I am offering this poem to you,

since I have nothing else to give.

Keep it like a warm coat

when winter comes to cover you,

or like a pair of thick socks

the cold cannot bite through,

                         I love you,

I have nothing else to give you,

so it is a pot full of yellow corn

to warm your belly in winter,

it is a scarf for your head, to wear

over your hair, to tie up around your face,

                         I love you,

Keep it, treasure this as you would

if you were lost, needing direction,

in the wilderness life becomes when mature;

and in the corner of your drawer,

tucked away like a cabin or hogan

in dense trees, come knocking,

and I will answer, give you directions,

and let you warm yourself by this fire,

rest by this fire, and make you feel safe

                         I love you,

It’s all I have to give,

and all anyone needs to live,

and to go on living inside,

when the world outside

no longer cares if you live or die;

remember,

                         I love you.

Jimmy Santiago Baca, "I Am Offering This Poem" from Immigrants in Our Own Land and Selected Early Poems. Copyright © 1990 by Jimmy Santiago Baca. Reprinted by permission of Jimmy Santiago Baca.

Source: Immigrants in Our Own Land and Selected Early Poems (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1990)

beautiful question of the day: what do you have to give?