Flowers in the spring, the moon in autumn,
a cool breeze in summer, snow in winter.
If your mind isn’t clouded by unnecessary things,
This is the best season of your life.”
Wumen Huikai (1183–1260) was a Zen Master famous as the compiler of and commentator on the koan collection, The Gateless Gate
This afternoon I have a memorial service for a treasured friend, Leslie, who is a member of my Support Group for People with Life Threatening Illness. She was dear and will be missed and my heart is heavy, much too heavy. Hence I am unable to bring you an American She-Poet, the usual Thursday post … but look for one next Thursday.
Tomorrow (prescheduled): More on the interfaith eco-poetry slam that was held on June 30th in Israel.
A little bit of big wisdom, especially for activists, courtesy of Michael Watson (Dreaming the World).
Carpe Diem.
Love, Jamie
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They come like thistle and thorn,
and write their rage upon my body.
They come like locusts and
feed on the fields of my soul.
Like the angry storm, they drown me.
Like the desert sands, they suffocate me.
They see me, a little person
of little consequence … a girl
Just a trinket, a toy, a receptacle,
something to sell, buy, trade or
marry-off prematurely,
without my say.
But hear me, I am the answer.
I am the calm after the storm.
I am the antidote to
stone hearts and desiccated souls.
I am the future and the past.
I am the hope, the dream, the reality.
I am real.
I am human.
I am the answer.
“Women are half the society. You cannot have a revolution without women. You cannot have democracy without women. You cannot have equality without women. You can’t have anything without women” Nawal El Saadawi (b. 1931), Egyption feminist writer and physician
The Tahirih Justice Center stands alone as the only national, multi-city organization providing a broad range of direct legal services, policy advocacy, and training and education to protect immigrant women and girls fleeing violence. Come out and support some of New York’s most powerful artists as they perform to raise money for a worth cause. $10 suggested donation all going to the center. Thanks to Terri Muuss for sharing this with us. Lifting the Veil Facebook Page is HERE.
August 7 at 5 p.m. – 8 p.m. EDT at BrickHouse Bewery & Restaurant 67 W. Main Street, Patchogue, New York 11772.
There is no place for child marriage in a world where empowered girls lead the way into a better future for everyone everywhere!
English Poet Myra Schneider at her 80th Birthday celebration and the launch of her 12th collection
for Anne Cluysenaar
A honey sun, the cease of gnawing wind
so we seize the day, unleash ourselves
in the country park, gaze at flowers inscribed To Dad
lying on a bench. They summon a huge bee
to their pink and yellow freesia bells. Dreamily,
I too enter the nectar-laden chambers and feed.
Turning away, we follow the droghte of March track
to the water garden where snowdrops are fading,
daffodils are on the brink of opening
and expectation’s in bloom on naked trees.
Welters of lily stalks in the darks of a pond
are tangles of umbilical cords. Beyond the garden,
beyond the singing of birds is a lake which glitters
as if it’s a source of light. We sit down
on a wicker seat and there you are breathing
in the budding warmth, freed from the last
of October now and that distressed message
you sent before your life was snatched.
You’re stooping over a small plant, stroking
its leaves, tracking the hover-rise of a damsel-fly,
smiling as you follow all the riverlets.
– Myra Schneider
The First of Spring is taken from Myra’s twelfth poetry collection, Persephone in Finsbury Park, which was published last month by Second Light Publications. It is available from poet Anne Stewart’s p f poetry site. The site is set up with PayPal, so it works well if you are making a purchase from outside of England. I haven’t read the collection yet, but Myra never disappoints.
Over there
all that happened
(and didn’t happen)
folded
packed in mental mothballs
stories fading with licked creases
some reduced and softer versions
wonder why I preserve breaths
forced through my lungs in those days
stringed around the eye of a hurricane
circling, demonic, nameless
shaking me shameless for a day
on nights when a collective sigh stings
and I can’t tell
which tale will toll for me
and which nocturnal howl
will lift the dust
through endless times
relive slivers
on a pink tip of my tongue
afraid to bite a dreamt memory
that it might hemorrhage
bleed the night
I want a dripping whiff of that afternoon coffee
instinctively bitter, solemnity and hot
ten minutes when lonely hearts
willed an arching cease fire
and time hovered among us
long enough for my mother
to build castles in my cup
over there
the man flying his doves
on the roof across two streets
remains a blur
but the doves stirring the air
in perfect shades of unison
(I had named them after heroes long forgot)
sometimes still raise dust in my room
of their feathers’ aches and plight
I believed then
I could break away
would break away
I did one day
the doves were left to die
over there
at dusk my father played the mandolin
and my mother’s voice filled all the gaps
between our breaths –
the dam that held surpluses of war
long enough for us to shed in dreams
why do I long for hell
on nights
when I can’t sieve my sigh from the wind’s eye
and I wonder if I ever broke away
from a circle named dead doves
perhaps
scent of jasmine
still smells like home
back home in the rain
Excerpt from the 2015 collection, Rumor, reviewed and published along with an interview of Silva Merjanian HERE. Beirut is published today with the permission of the poet and is under copyright.
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Jamie Dedes' THE POET BY DAY Webzine 