Greetings, April; greetings, Poetry Month; greetings, visitors! That all sounds much more upbeat than I feel, frankly. I feel a little like I'M the one who stood up and speechified for 25 gravity-amplifying hours on the floor of the Senate trying not to wet my pants--but then I have been fighting off a few annoying health issues for weeks, and I do live rather close to Implosion Central, and raise your hand if you also are struggling to go with the flow of elder care? In any case, it has been WORK lately to remember, DAILY WORK, that
our daily work of witnessing the world through poetry has real power, remains worth doing, is a legitimate response to the terrorism of this "administration."
My friends, I know that you are doing all you can to place your body into the company of the millions of others turning out tomorrow to do the first, most basic response in this moral moment--to upend business as usual, the appearance of normalcy. But here's a lil help just in case.
Click the map to find your protest.
An overlapping group of us from Poetry Friday and Laura Shovan's Fab Poetry Project (yes, fab; also Feb), met up joyfully at the MLK Library in DC on Wednesday night for a talk with Maggie Smith promoting her new book DEAR WRITER. She's the one famous for her poem "Good Bones," which she says now feels like it's not quite hers anymore like her other work, but belongs to the public domain. She read it (and has not memorized it, nor any of her poems--that made me feel better about how I can't seem to memorize my poems). I'm dropping it here, because it does have a remarkable ability to do its job, which is to salvage something from the shithole and make it worth the effort.
Good Bones | Maggie Smith
Life is short, though I keep this from my children.
Life is short, and I’ve shortened mine
in a thousand delicious, ill-advised ways,
a thousand deliciously ill-advised ways
I’ll keep from my children. The world is at least
fifty percent terrible, and that’s a conservative
estimate, though I keep this from my children.
For every bird there is a stone thrown at a bird.
For every loved child, a child broken, bagged,
sunk in a lake. Life is short and the world
is at least half terrible, and for every kind
stranger, there is one who would break you,
though I keep this from my children. I am trying
to sell them the world. Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
So here we are, trying to make this place beautiful, and welcoming and spacious and comforting, with our words. The Inklings are doing so this week with a simple challenge to write a shadorma, thanks to Margaret Simon (whose new book, WERE YOU THERE?, has dropped and which you. do. not. want. to. miss!). The shadorma, according to the shadowy information available on the interwebs, is a 6-line poem of Spanish origin with a syllable count of 3/5/3/3/7/5. There are those who think the shadorma is not a "real" form at all but a thing somebody made up, which is Spanish like chicken tikka masala (invented in Birmingham, England) is Indian.
Whatever its origins, the shadorma is fun to write. Here's an early try from some years ago:
Shawarma Shadorma
Sleep sizzles
aromatically
on the spit
of night. Carve
juicy slices onto white
sheets of pita bed.
And here's today's effort, an InstadraftTM .
more bones for the reluctant buyer
in a pool
pulled bare of ivy
flowering
quince blazes
briefly, camouflaging thorns--
then cools to spiked hedge
Check out what the other Inklings have shadormed below, if life allowed them the opportunity, and thanks to our first PoFri host of the month, Matt at Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme, where rainbows are being appropriately and thoroughly celebrated!
