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The Mysterious Sweetness of Oolong Tea, a poem

“When people kill themselves, they think they’re ending the pain, but all they’re doing is passing it on to those they leave behind.” Jeannette Walls, Half Broke Horses

Dedicated to T. M. M. and all the others

She sat on the front stoop, wretched, her
evening tea grown cold, bitter in its cup
The night air heavy and blue, layered and
gloomy, gray moon a reluctant guardian

She was angry, viewed her children
through narrowed eyes, piercing them
like the woodworms in her own heart
After all, they were his fault, and her

hope and trust were soldiers, gravely
wounded, bloodied, broken along the path
of his escape though, as you might expect,
a fresh new-born day gifted the sun

She was gone by then and now the years
have passed, still you’ll find her children
honoring her and her tradition, sitting on
their front stoops by night, sipping oolong tea
They marvel at its mysterious sweetness and
Why? they wonder, such a bitter cup to Mom

© 2019, Jamie Dedes

  • Suicide crisis lines by country
  • Three suicide prevention strategies show real promise
  • “Close to 800 000 people die due to suicide every year, which is one person every 40 seconds. Suicide is a global phenomenon and occurs throughout the lifespan. Effective and evidence-based interventions can be implemented at population, sub-population and individual levels to prevent suicide and suicide attempts. There are indications that for each adult who died by suicide there may have been more than 20 others attempting suicide.” World Health Organization

ABOUT 

Jamie Dedes. I’m a Lebanese-American freelance writer, poet, content editor, blogger and the mother of a world-class actor and mother-in-law of a stellar writer/photographer. No grandchildren, but my grandkitty, Dahlia, rocks big time. I am hopelessly in love with nature and all her creatures. In another lifetime, I was a columnist, a publicist, and an associate editor to a regional employment publication. I’ve had to reinvent myself to accommodate scarred lungs, pulmonary hypertension, right-sided heart failure, connective tissue disease, and a rare managed but incurable blood cancer. The gift in this is time for my primary love: literature. I study/read/write from a comfy bed where I’ve carved out a busy life writing feature articles, short stories, and poetry and managing The BeZine and its associated activities and The Poet by Day jamiededes.com, an info hub for writers meant to encourage good but lesser-known poets, women and minority poets, outsider artists, and artists just finding their voices in maturity. The Poet by Day is dedicated to supporting freedom of artistic expression and human rights.  Email thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, commissions, or assignments.

Testimonials / Disclosure / Facebook

Recent and Upcoming in Digital Publications * The Damask Garden, In a Woman’s Voice, August 11, 2019 / This short story is dedicated to all refugees. That would be one in every 113 people. * Five poems, Spirit of Nature, Opa Anthology of Poetry, 2019 * From the Small Beginning, Entropy Magazine (Enclave, #Final Poems), July 2019 * Over His Morning Coffee, Front Porch Review, July 2019 * Three poems, Our Poetry Archive, September 2019

“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.”  Lucille Clifton

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Brooklyn Book Festival Children’s Day, September 21; 100TPC Read a Poem to a Child Week; “The BeZine” in Solidarity with the Global Youth Climate Strike

A mother reads to her children, depicted by Jessie Willcox Smith in a cover illustration of a volume of fairy tales written in the mid to late 19th century. / Public Domain

“Never trust anyone who has not brought a book with them.” Lemony Snicket [Daniel Handler], Horseradish

The Brooklyn Book Festival was launched in 2006 to address the need for a major free literary event that embraced the diverse constituencies of New York City. The Festival’s mission is to celebrate published literature and support the literary community through programming that connects New York City readers with local, national, and international authors, publishers, and booksellers. To this end the festival develops original programs that are hip, smart, and diverse and collaborates to present free and low-cost programming includes the Festival Day, the Bookend Events, and the BKBF Children’s Day.

BKBF Children’s Day is presented by the non-profit Brooklyn Book Festival, Inc. and the Brooklyn Book Festival Literary Council.  Be sure to visit www.brooklynbookfestival.org or check out the official Facebook page, follow the Festival on Instagram (@bkbookfest) and on Twitter (@BKBF).

This is a global event. Events scheduled for the “Read A Poem To A Child” initiative will take place from September 23th – 28th and will include readings in bookstores, schoolrooms, community centers, public parks and at private homes. Co-founder Terri Carrion explains that, “All you have to do is read a poem to a child in any setting that is convenient, and you can sign up on our website at http://100tpc.org/sign-up/”

IN SOLIDARITY WITH THE GLOBAL YOUTH CLIMATE STRIKE

CALLING YOUTH & ADULTS

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS of poems, feature articles, fiction, creative nonfiction, art and photography, music videos, documentary videos on climate change for The BeZine blog is open through September 10, 2019. In solidarity with the world’s youth, we’ll post work on Climate Change throughout September. Your original previously published work may be submitted as long as you own the copyright. NO simultaneous submissions.  Please note in your subject line: For the climate change blog. Email submissions to bardogroup@gmail.com. All honors to Contributing Editor Michael Dickel for coming up with this idea.

ABOUT 

Jamie Dedes. I’m a Lebanese-American freelance writer, poet, content editor, blogger and the mother of a world-class actor and mother-in-law of a stellar writer/photographer. No grandchildren, but my grandkitty, Dahlia, rocks big time. I am hopelessly in love with nature and all her creatures. In another lifetime, I was a columnist, a publicist, and an associate editor to a regional employment publication. I’ve had to reinvent myself to accommodate scarred lungs, pulmonary hypertension, right-sided heart failure, connective tissue disease, and a rare managed but incurable blood cancer. The gift in this is time for my primary love: literature. I study/read/write from a comfy bed where I’ve carved out a busy life writing feature articles, short stories, and poetry and managing The BeZine and its associated activities and The Poet by Day jamiededes.com, an info hub for writers meant to encourage good but lesser-known poets, women and minority poets, outsider artists, and artists just finding their voices in maturity. The Poet by Day is dedicated to supporting freedom of artistic expression and human rights.  Email thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, commissions, or assignments.

Testimonials / Disclosure / Facebook

Recent and Upcoming in Digital Publications * The Damask Garden, In a Woman’s Voice, August 11, 2019 / This short story is dedicated to all refugees. That would be one in every 113 people. * Five poems, Spirit of Nature, Opa Anthology of Poetry, 2019 * From the Small Beginning, Entropy Magazine (Enclave, #Final Poems), July 2019 * Over His Morning Coffee, Front Porch Review, July 2019 * Three poems, Our Poetry Archive, September 2019

“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.”  Lucille Clifton

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stands and waits

A moment of beauty and peace with stellar artist, Gretchen Del Rio.

Gretchen Del Rio's avatarGretchen Del Rio's Art Blog

watercolor 8/2019

Standing in shallow water upon long thin legs. Standing and waiting for prey. Herons wait for their prey to come to them. They do not chase down their meal. Always works very well. I have spent hours watching herons standing and waiting. Not boring at all because I’m watching a master fisher. Make a noise and they are likely to take to the air and fly slowly and majestically away looking like a prehistoric reincarnation. A picture of Zen……so still and present. My dog Buddha tried but was never able to catch a heron. He used to crash through the underbrush toward the wader. No brainer. Buddha always lost. He was, however, a very excellent ground squirrel catcher. He would hug the ground and almost imperceptibly advance toward the squirrel colony. At a certain distance he would make his final thrust in a burst of speed. His technique…

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“Love After Love” by Derek Walcott, text with a reading by Linton Kwesi Johnson

“There is the buried language and there is the individual vocabulary, and the process of poetry is one of excavation and of self-discovery. Tonally the individual voice is a dialect; it shapes its own accent, its own vocabulary and melody in defiance of an imperial concept of language, the language of Ozymandias, libraries and dictionaries, law courts and critics, and churches, universities, political dogma, the diction of institutions. Poetry is an island that breaks away from the main.” Derek Walcott, The Antilles: Fragments of Epic Memory: The Nobel Lecture

The time will come
when, with elation
you will greet yourself arriving
at your own door, in your own mirror
and each will smile at the other’s welcome,

and say, sit here. Eat.
You will love again the stranger who was your self.
Give wine. Give bread. Give back your heart
to itself, to the stranger who has loved you

all your life, whom you ignored
for another, who knows you by heart.
Take down the love letters from the bookshelf,

the photographs, the desperate notes,
peel your own image from the mirror.
Sit. Feast on your life.

– Derek Walcott, Collected Poems, 1948-1984

If you are reading this post from an email subscription, you’ll likely have to link through to the site to view this video reading. 

Derek Walcott, VIII Festival Internacional, 1992 courtesy of Jorge Mejía peralta under CC BY 2.0 license

DEREK WALCOTT Sir Derek Alton Walcott, KCSL, OBE, OCC (1930 – 2017) was a Saint Lucian poet and playwright who was awarded the 1992 Nobel Prize in Literature. His works include the Homeric epic poem Omeros (1990), which critics view as Walcott’s major achievement.

Walcott called himself “an elated, exuberant poet madly in love with English.” He was influenced by modernist poets such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound.

Walcott had a sense of himself as a poet from his early youth. In the poem “Midsummer” (1984), he wrote:

Forty years gone, in my island childhood, I felt that
the gift of poetry had made me one of the chosen,
that all experience was kindling to the fire
Interview: “Derek Walcott, The Art of Poetry No. 37”, The Paris Review, Issue 101, Winter 1986.

At fourteen, Walcott’s first poem, a Miltonic, religious poem, was published in The Voice of St Lucia, the local newspaper. He was condemned by a Catholic priest for his Methodist-inspired poem, which the priest considered as blasphemous. By nineteen, Walcott had self-published his first two collections with a loan from his mother, who paid for the printing: 25 Poems (1948) and Epitaph for the Young: XII Cantos (1949). He recovered the costs and repaid his mom by selling copies to his friends.

ABOUT 

Jamie Dedes. I’m a Lebanese-American freelance writer, poet, content editor, blogger and the mother of a world-class actor and mother-in-law of a stellar writer/photographer. No grandchildren, but my grandkitty, Dahlia, rocks big time. I am hopelessly in love with nature and all her creatures. In another lifetime, I was a columnist, a publicist, and an associate editor to a regional employment publication. I’ve had to reinvent myself to accommodate scarred lungs, pulmonary hypertension, right-sided heart failure, connective tissue disease, and a rare managed but incurable blood cancer. The gift in this is time for my primary love: literature. I study/read/write from a comfy bed where I’ve carved out a busy life writing feature articles, short stories, and poetry and managing The BeZine and its associated activities and The Poet by Day jamiededes.com, an info hub for writers meant to encourage good but lesser-known poets, women and minority poets, outsider artists, and artists just finding their voices in maturity. The Poet by Day is dedicated to supporting freedom of artistic expression and human rights.  Email thepoetbyday@gmail.com for permissions, commissions, or assignments.

Testimonials / Disclosure / Facebook

Recent and Upcoming in Digital Publications * The Damask Garden, In a Woman’s Voice, August 11, 2019 / This short story is dedicated to all refugees. That would be one in every 113 people. * Five poems, Spirit of Nature, Opa Anthology of Poetry, 2019 * From the Small Beginning, Entropy Magazine (Enclave, #Final Poems), July 2019 * Over His Morning Coffee, Front Porch Review, July 2019 * Three poems, Our Poetry Archive, September 2019

“Every pair of eyes facing you has probably experienced something you could not endure.”  Lucille Clifton