“The writer should never be ashamed of staring. There is nothing that does not require his attention.“
-Flannery O’Connor
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Independence Reenvisioned
“America” by Claude McKay, 1921
Although she feeds me bread of bitterness,
And sinks into my throat her tiger’s tooth,
Stealing my breath of life, I will confess
I love this cultured hell that tests my youth.
Her vigor flows like tides into my blood,
Giving me strength erect against her hate,
Her bigness sweeps my being like a flood.
Yet, as a rebel fronts a king in state,
I stand within her walls with not a shred
Of terror, malice, not a word of jeer.
Darkly I gaze into the days ahead,
And see her might and granite wonders there,
Beneath the touch of Time’s unerring hand,
Like priceless treasures sinking in the sand.
Claude McKay was born in Jamaica in 1889.
Joy
Know that joy is rarer, more beautiful and more difficult than sadness. Once you make this all important discovery, you must embrace joy as a moral obligation.
Andre Guid
Catalyst
As if disintegrating the stone of our being to sand
we pour ourselves empty to be remade beyond
the merciless sins we rise above.
The beauty of your breast now cleaved away,
my lungs always stomping their sun-flare dance against harm,
yet we reshape ourselves for one another as balm
till we can bear our stories’ terrible weight
till we are transformed as if sound—
water on granite, wind through pine,
an osprey’s haunting cry—
you and I as salt and sea and sky.
Thank you to the editors of The Tishman Review for first publishing this poem.
Poetry…
is just the shadow of the dog…
The dog is elsewhere, and constantly
on the move.
11/9/16
I’ve been saying Fuck fear! to everyone today, especially myself. The surrealistic results of last night’s election were shocking and fostered images of increased violence, economic disparity, disenfranchisement, senseless cruelty and suffering in our country and beyond our imaginary borders…yet while out with our dog, I marveled at the stars sparkling as they have and will for eons.
So many compassionate people with social and historical understanding are scared, yet fear is how slave owners and terrorists, bullies and rapists, gangs and militias have gained and maintained entirely too much privilege for too long. Fear paralyzes. Fear wraps us in numbing behavior, PTSD and isolation. I’ve spent too much of my life focused on moving out of fear to embrace it now because our young nation is struggling with issues of entitlement and humanism; the ideals of capitalism and democracy; the definitions of freedom and propaganda. Fear locks the brain in a simplified fight or flight state rather than perceiving others through the complex lens of empathy and layered perspectives.
Fear, like anxiety, is a mighty imaginative force. If I let it root I’ll be paralyzed in ways I’ll be too blinded to even see, so fuck fear. We rise above bad circumstances and heal through love and connection so let’s make our way to 2020 as intact as we can as a nation, as connected as we can with our entire world and with as much deep listening, caring and intelligence as we can offer one another.
May all be happy, safe, healthy and at peace.
