Morning Open Thread: In My Invincible Summer

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“… what had we tried to do? Defiantly tell the truth.
For what purpose? To keep some truth alive in a
world full of lies. And what was the good of that?
I don’t know. But I was glad I had taken part
in that act of defiant truth-telling.”
– Floyd Dell, in 1917
editor of The Masses, banned for
opposing U.S. entry into WWI

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“… In the midst of chaos, I found there was,
within me, an invincible calm …
In the midst of winter, I found there was,
within me, an invincible summer …”
― Albert Camus,
awarded the 1957 Nobel
Prize in Literature

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Welcome to Morning Open Thread, a daily post
with a MOTley crew of hosts who choose the topic
for the day’s posting. We support our community,
invite and share ideas, and encourage thoughtful,
respectful dialogue in an open forum. That’s a
feature, not a bug. Other than that, site rulz rule.

Catlookingoutapartmentwindow-widegraycoffeemug.jfif

So grab your cuppa, and join in.

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13 Poets born this week,
writing of war, hatred,
loss, exile, isolation –
and the stubborn grit
to fight back against
all the odds

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June 30
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1911 – Czeslaw Milosz born in Šeteniai, Kovno Governorate, Russian Empire (now part of Lithuania); prolific Polish poet, author, translator, and diplomat; awarded 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature. His father was a Polish civil engineer, and his mother was from a distinguished Polish-Lithuanian family. He survived the German occupation of Warsaw during WWII, and helped save some Jews from the Warsaw Ghetto. A cultural attaché for the Polish government during the postwar period, he defected to France after communist authorities threatened him, then came to the U.S., becoming a professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and a naturalized U.S. citizen. His work was banned in Poland for three decades, but his poetry and nonfiction book, The Captive Mind, made him a leading émigré artist and intellectual in the West. After the 1989 fall of communism in Poland, he divided time between the U.S. and Kraków. He died at age 93 in August 2004 in Kraków. His poetry collections include Trzy zimy (Three Winters); Na brzegu rzeki (Facing the River); and Druga przestrzen (The Second Space).

A Song on the End of the World

by Czeslaw Milosz

^.
On the day the world ends
A bee circles a clover,
A fisherman mends a glimmering net.
Happy porpoises jump in the sea,
By the rainspout young sparrows are playing
And the snake is gold-skinned as it should always be.
^.
On the day the world ends
Women walk through the fields under their umbrellas,
A drunkard grows sleepy at the edge of a lawn,
Vegetable peddlers shout in the street
And a yellow-sailed boat comes nearer the island,
The voice of a violin lasts in the air
And leads into a starry night.
^.
And those who expected lightning and thunder
Are disappointed.
And those who expected signs and archangels’ trumps
Do not believe it is happening now.
As long as the sun and the moon are above,
As long as the bumblebee visits a rose,
As long as rosy infants are born
No one believes it is happening now.
^.
Only a white-haired old man, who would be a prophet
Yet is not a prophet, for he’s much too busy,
Repeats while he binds his tomatoes:
There will be no other end of the world,
There will be no other end of the world.

– Warsaw, 1944

translated by Anthony Milosz

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1920 – Eleanor Ross Taylor born in Norwood, North Carolina; American author, poet. She graduated from the Woman’s College of the University of North Carolina in 1940, then worked as a high school English teacher. She then went to Vanderbilt University for master’s work, but married novelist Peter Taylor in 1943, and did little writing until the late 1950s. Her first poetry collection, A Wilderness of Ladies, was published in 1960. Her second book, Welcome Eumenides, appeared in 1972. A third book drew little attention, but her fourth, Days Going, Days Coming Back, and her next two books Late Leisure and Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, were chosen by poet and editor Dave Smith for inclusion in poetry series which he edited, and brought attention to her work. Several awards were then given to her: the 1998 Shelley Memorial Award by the Poetry Society of America; the 2000 Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry; the 2010 William Carlos Williams Award; and the 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize. Eleanor Ross Taylor died at age 91 in December 2011.

Kitchen Fable

by Eleanor Ross Taylor
^.
The fork lived with the knife
and found it hard — for years
took nicks and scratches,
not to mention cuts.
^.
She who took tedium by the ears:
nonforthcoming pickles,
defiant stretched-out lettuce,
sauce-gooed particles.
^.
He who came down whack.
His conversation, even, edged.
^.
Lying beside him in the drawer
she formed a crazy patina.
The seasons stacked —
melons, succeeded by cured pork.
^.
He dulled; he was a dull knife,
while she was, after all, a fork.
^.

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1939 – José Emilio Pacheco born in Mexico City; Mexican screenwriter, poet, novelist, short story writer, critic, translator, and essayist. He was educated at the National Autonomous University of Mexico, where he edited (1957-1958) the literary supplement of the review Estaciones, he then worked as a magazine editor, and later taught literature. His first book, La sangre de Medusa (The Blood of Medusa), a short story collection, was published in 1958. In 2009, he was honored with the Cervantes Prize, the highest accolade in Spanish Letters. His many poetry collections include: Los elementos de la noche (The Elements of the Night); El reposo del fuego (The Resting Place of Fire); Desde entonces: poemas, 1975–1978 (Since Then: Poems 1975–1978); and Siglo pasado, desenlace: poemas 1999–2000 (Century of the Past, Denouement: Poems 1999–2000).

The Lives of Poets

by José Emilio Pacheco
^.
In poetry there’s no happy ending.
Poets end up
living their madness.
And they’re quartered like cattle
(it happened to Darío).
Or they’re stoned or wind up
flinging themselves to the sea or with cyanide
salts in their mouths.
Or dead from alcoholism, drug addiction, poverty.
Or worse: canonical poets,
bitter inhabitants of a tomb
entitled Complete Works.
^.

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July 1
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1897 – E. Wyndham Tennant born, English war poet, killed at the Battle of the Somme in September 1916. His book of poems, Worple Flit and Other Poems was published in 1916 prior to his death, and did not include “The Mad Soldier” which was written June 13, 1916, shortly before the Battle of the Somme began. Edward Wyndham Tennant: A Memoir by His Mother, written by Pamela Glenconner, was published in 1919.

The Mad Soldier

by E. Wyndham Tennant

I dropp’d here three weeks ago, yes ~ I know,
And it’s bitter cold at night, since the fight ~
I could tell you if I chose ~ no one knows
Excep’ me and four or five, what ain’t alive
I can see them all asleep, three men deep,
And they’re nowhere near a fire ~ but our wire
Has ’em fast as fast can be. Can’t you see
When the flare goes up? Ssh! Boys; what’s that noise?
Do you know what these rats eat? Body-meat!
After you’ve been down a week, ‘an your cheek
Gets as pale as life, and night seems as white
As the day, only the rats and their brats
Seem more hungry when the day’s gone away ~
An’ they look as big as bulls, an’ they pulls
Till you almost sort o’ shout ~ but the drought
What you hadn’t felt before makes you sore.
And at times you even think of a drink…
There’s a leg acrost my thighs ~ if my eyes
Weren’t too sore, I’d like to see who it be,
Wonder if I’d know the bloke if I woke? ~
Woke? By damn, I’m not asleep ~ there’s a heap
Of us wond’ring why the hell we’re not well…
Leastways I am ~ since I came it’s the same
With the others ~ they don’t know what I do,
Or they wouldn’t gape and grin. ~ It’s a sin
To say that Hell is hot ~ ’cause it’s not:
Mind you, I know very well we’re in hell.
~ In a twisted hump we lie ~ heaping high
Yes! an’ higher every day. ~ Oh, I say,
This chap’s heavy on my thighs ~ damn his eyes.

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1953 – Harryette Mullen was born in Florence, Alabama, but grew up in Fort Worth, Texas; African American writer, poet, and professor of English at UCLA. She won the Jackson Poetry Prize for her 2013 book Urban Tumbleweed: Notes from a Tanka Diary. Her other poetry collections include: Tree Tall Woman; Sleeping with the Dictionary; Muse and Drudge; Recyclopedia; and Open Leaves.

Weathering Hate

by Harryette Mullen
^.
The way, exposed to weather, a body is worn.
Velvet threads begin to
wither, rapid ripened beyond the burst bloom.
Vibrant strands, cut short,
fray, unweaving faded fabric. Sun-struck,
rain-warped, storm-blasted,
rough-sanded in whipping wind that whittles rock.
^.
Small, torturous fractures opened in stone where
water freezes in the
pores with grains of salt. Cracks in the surface
pried apart by unrelenting
pressure. With incessant freezing and thawing,
shock and fatigue speed
rugged stress to ultimate breakdown.
Intemperate weather, abrading edges,
gradually disintegrates resolute minerals.
^.
A boulder, even a mountain, will wear down. So
will bodies, bent and
broken under toilsome burdens, caving
beneath unbearable weight, in
adverse climate, exposed to harsh elements,
caustic rains.

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July 2
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1923 – Wisława Szymborska, Polish poet, essayist, editor, and translator, born in Prowent (now Kórnik), Poland. She won the 1996 Nobel Prize in Literature, the 1995 Herder Prize, and the 1991 Goethe Prize; called the woman “the Mozart of poetry … who mixed elegance of language with something of the fury of Beethoven.” She died at age 88 in February 2012.

Cat in an Empty Apartment

by Wisława Szymborska
^.
Die — you can’t do that to a cat.
Since what can a cat do
in an empty apartment?
Climb the walls?
Rub up against the furniture?
Nothing seems different here
but nothing is the same.
Nothing’s been moved
but there’s more space.
And at nighttime no lamps are lit.
^.
Footsteps on the staircase,
but they’re new ones.
The hand that puts fish on the saucer
has changed, too.
^.
Something doesn’t start
at its usual time.
Something doesn’t happen
as it should.
Someone was always, always here,
then suddenly disappeared
and stubbornly stays disappeared.
^.
Every closet’s been examined.
Every shelf has been explored.
Excavations under the carpet turned up nothing.
A commandment was even broken:
papers scattered everywhere.
What remains to be done.
^.
Just sleep and wait.
Just wait till he turns up,
just let him show his face.
Will he ever get a lesson
on what not to do to a cat.
Sidle toward him
as if unwilling
and ever so slow
on visibly offended paws,
and no leaps or squeals at least to start.
^.

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1968 – Esther G. Belin was born in Gallup, New Mexico, but grew up in Los Angeles, CA; Diné (Navajo) poet, writer, multimedia artist and filmmaker, anthologist, writing instructor, and addiction counselor. Her parents had been relocated to Riverside, California, where they went to a boarding school, as part of a failed 1950s-1960s Federal Indian relocation attempt to assimilate Native Americans into mainstream American culture. Though Belin attended public schools in Los Angeles, she spent her summers on the Navajo homeland in New Mexico and Arizona. She studied at the University of California, Berkeley, then earned an MFA from the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe. Her first book of poetry, From the Belly of My Beauty, won the 2000 American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation. Her second book, Of Cartography: Poems, came out in 2017. She was one of the editors of The Diné Reader: An Anthology of Navajo Literature, published in 2021.

I hope to God you will not ask

by Esther G. Belin

I hope to God you will not ask me to go anywhere except my own country. If we go back, we will follow whatever orders you give us. We do not want to go right or left, but straight back to our own land.
—Barboncito

^.
I hope to God you will not ask
Me or my People to send
Postcard greetings: lamented wind
Of perfect sunrisings, golden
Yes, we may share the same sun setting
But the in-between hours are hollow
The People fill the void with prayers for help
Calling upon the Holy Ones
Those petitions penetrate and loosen
The binds you tried to tighten
Around our heart, a tension
Blocking the wind, like a shell
Fluttering inside, fluttering inside
^.

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July 3
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1860 – Charlotte Perkins Gilman born in Hartford Connecticut; American feminist leader, author, poet, editor, sociologist, economist, and science fiction writer. Her father abandoned the family while she was still an infant, and they often had to stay wilt relatives. Charlotte was in and out of seven different schools, often missing days and weeks, and she left when she was 15. An avid reader, she spent much time at public libraries. She did learn painting at the Rhode Island School of Design, then supported herself painting cards, and tutoring. She is best known for her subtly terrifying short-story “The Yellow Wallpaper,” written after she suffered from post-partum depression during her first marriage, compounded by the complete forced isolation treatment which made her condition even worse. Her non-fiction works, such as Women and Economics, and The Home: Its Work and Influence, contributed much to feminist thought. From 1909-1916, Gilman single-handedly wrote and edited The Forerunner, a monthly magazine where many of her ideas first appeared. She produced 86 issues, each 28 pages long, for nearly 1,500 subscribers, from 1909 through 1916. She was diagnosed with breast cancer in 1932. A believer in euthanasia, she committed suicide with an overdose of chloroform at age 75 in August 1935.

The Socialist and the Suffragist

by Charlotte Perkins Gilman
^.
Said the Socialist to the Suffragist:
“My cause is greater than yours!
You only work for a Special Class,
We work for the gain of the General Mass,
Which every good ensures!”
^.
Said the Suffragist to the Socialist:
“You underrate my Cause!
While women remain a Subject Class,
You never can move the General Mass,
With your Economic Laws!”
^.
Said the Socialist to the Suffragist:
“You misinterpret facts!
There is no room for doubt or schism
In Economic Determinism–
It governs all our acts!”
^.
Said the Suffragist to the Socialist:
“You men will always find
That this old world will never move
More swiftly in its ancient groove
While women stay behind!”
^.
“A lifted world lifts women up,”
The Socialist explained.
“You cannot lift the world at all
While half of it is kept so small,”
The Suffragist maintained.
^.
The world awoke, and tartly spoke:
“Your work is all the same:
Work together or work apart,
Work, each of you, with all your heart–
Just get into the game!”
^.

“The Socialist and the Suffragist” from Suffrage Songs and Verses, by Charlotte Perkins Gilman – The Charlton Company, 1911 edition

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1948 – Wadih Sa’adeh, Lebanese Australian poet and journalist born in a village in northern Lebanon as Wadih Amine Stephan; in 1973 he wrote out copies by hand of his first poetry book, Laysa Lil Massa’ Ikhwah (Evening Has No Brothers), and sold it in the streets of Beirut. He spent time in Australia and France before working as a journalist in Lebanon. Laysa Lil Massa’ Ikhwah was printed in 1981 by Almouassah Aljamiah, which brought Sa’adeh attention in the Arab-speaking world. In 1988, he emigrated to Australia, where he became a writer and editor with the Lebanese newspaper Annahar in Sydney. Among his other poetry collections are Bisabas Ghaymah ’Alal-Arjah (Because of a Cloud, Most Likely), Nass Al-Ghiyab (Text of Absence), Ghubar (Dust), and Man Akhatha an-Nazra Allati Taraktuha Amama l Bab? (Who Took The Gaze I Left Behind The Door?).

A Leaf

by Wadih Sa’adeh
^.
They silently carried him
and left him there, in the square
in the field of crosses and tombstones
in the spacious square next to his sleeping
comrades.
He said, ‘I’ll be back
the key is under the flower pots’
One of its leaves
was still in his hand.
^.

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July 4
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1973 – Adrienne Lewis born in the Midwest; American poet; co-Editor of the Paradidomi Review, a forum for Michigan creative writers. Her works have previously appeared in Fusion, Cardinal Sins, Controlled Burn, and the White Pine Review. A graduate of Saginaw Valley State University’s Interdisciplinary Honors program, Lewis lives in Saginaw, Michigan, with her husband and son and works as a professional grant writer. She received the 2003 Raymond Tyner Prize for Poetry. Coming Clean was her first collection of poetry, followed by Compared to This in 2005.

Repose

by Adrienne Lewis

For those on earth can much advance us here.
— Dante
^.
Catholics have it all wrong: Purgatory
is not in the afterlife. It is the aisle in a grocery store
where your husband ignores you, the bed covers
you lie beneath alone. Never knowing if he will ask you
to leave this place. It is not the dead
in need of prayers; the living are the punished.
Trapped in a car with someone
they can’t ask to stop, a person who never speaks
sitting across the table from them.
It is easy to see why they linger
near others of their kind. Seeking release
they want to be whole again and remember
what it was like to reside in the world unfettered,
without thirty pieces of silver lining
their pockets.
^.

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July 5
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1923 – Mitsuye Yamada born as Mitsuye Yasutake in Fukuoka, Japan; Japanese-American activist, feminist, fiction author, poet, essayist, editor and professor of English. Her father worked as an interpreter for the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Service, and the family lived in Seattle. Immediately after Pearl Harbor, her father was wrongfully arrested by the FBI for espionage, so her family was interned at Mindoka War Relocation Center in Idaho. She was only allowed to attend the University of Cincinnati after she renounced loyalty to the Emperor of Japan. Her first book, Camp Notes and Other Poems, was written during the war, but not published until 1976. She became a naturalized U.S. citizen in 1955, five years after her marriage to Yoshikasu Yamada, who was born in Hawaii, and had served as a medic and a translator in the U.S. Army during WWII. Her other works include Lighthouse, her essay “Invisibility is an Unnatural Disaster,” and Full Circle: New and Selected Poems.

Evacuation

by Mitsuye Yamada
^.
As we boarded the bus
bags on both sides
(I had never packed
two bags before
on a vacation
lasting forever)
the Seattle Times
photographer said
Smile!
so obediently I smiled
and the caption the next day
read:
^.
Note smiling faces
a lesson to Tokyo.

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July 6
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1765 – Catherine Maria Fanshawe born Shabden in Chipstead, Surrey, England; English writer, poet, and etcher. Her father was a squire who held a post in the household of King George III. After his death in 1816, she and her two sisters were his heirs. They divided their time between a house in London, the family home in Surrey, but also spent several winters in Italy because of ill health. Some of Catherine’s poems were printed in literary publications in 1820s, and then a collection of poems was published posthumously after her death at age 68 in April 1834.

When Last We Parted

by Catherine Maria Fanshawe
^.
When last we parted, thou wert young and fair,
How beautiful let fond remembrance say!
Alas! since then old time has stolen away
Full thirty years, leaving my temples bare.—
So has it perished like a thing of air,
The dream of love and youth!— now both are grey
Yet still remembering that delightful day,
Though time with his cold touch has blanched my hair,
Though I have suffered many years of pain
Since then, though I did never think to live
To hear that voice or see those eyes again,
I can a sad but cordial greeting give,
And for thy welfare breathe as warm a prayer—
As when I loved thee young and fair.
^.

“When Last We Parted” from The Literary Remains of Catherine Mary Fanshawe; with Notes by the Late Reverend William Harness, originally published in 1876

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1955 – William Wall born in Cork City, Munster, but raised in the Irish coastal village of Whitegate; Irish poet, novelist, and short story writer. He graduated from University College Cork, where he studied English and philosophy. He has produced seven novels, three collections of short stories, and five books of poetry. In 1997, he won the Patrick Kavanaugh Poetry Award for his first poetry collection, Mathematics And Other Poems. His other poetry books include: Fahrenheit Says Nothing To Me; Ghost Estate; and The Yellow House. He suffers from Still’s disease, a rare systemic auto inflammatory disease closely related to juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, and uses speech-to-text applications to compose his work.

In my invincible summer

by William Wall
^.
In my invincible summer
I walk the fields
skirting the frozen pools
stepping daintily
like an excited foal
^.
in the broken lines
of a wintery morning
with no grand gesture
the old year is dying
^.
through the ice
the stubble tells
of harvest past
and golden days
^.
and the hill rises
like a breaking wave
a buzzard circling
in the steel grey
^.
three thousand cases
is the estimate
we circle the same place
but we’re far from home yet
^.
— December 29^th 2020

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So grab your cuppa, and join in.

______________________________________

13 Poets born this week,writing of war, hatred,loss, exile, isolation –and the stubborn gritto fight back againstall the odds

_________________________________

June 30_________________________________

A Song on the End of the World

________________________________

Kitchen Fable

________________________________

The Lives of Poets

_________________________________

July 1_________________________________

The Mad Soldier

_______________________________

Weathering Hate

_________________________________

July 2_________________________________

Cat in an Empty Apartment

_______________________________

I hope to God you will not ask

_________________________________

July 3_________________________________

The Socialist and the Suffragist

_______________________________

A Leaf

_________________________________

July 4_________________________________

Repose

_________________________________

July 5_________________________________

Evacuation

_________________________________

July 6_________________________________

When Last We Parted

_______________________________

In my invincible summer

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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

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Related Posts

13 Poets born this week,
writing of war, hatred,
loss, exile, isolation –
and the stubborn grit
to fight back against
all the odds

June 30
_________________________________

July 1
_________________________________

July 2
_________________________________

July 3
_________________________________

July 4
_________________________________

July 5
_________________________________

July 6
_________________________________