Tag: Poet

Lightly Child, Lightly.

Live & Learn19 Comments

Still, ritual is journey, atonement is real.
As you lay dying, I asked,
What is your biggest regret?
Every kindness withheld, you said.
Every flicker of pleasure denied, you said.
Look, you said, sunlight.

— Chris Abani, from “Ritual Is Journey” in “Sanctificum” (Copper Canyon Press; April 1, 2010)

Notes:

  1. Post Title & Inspiration: Aldous Huxley: “It’s dark because you are trying too hard. Lightly child, lightly. Learn to do everything lightly. Yes, feel lightly even though you’re feeling deeply. Just lightly let things happen and lightly cope with them.
  2. Poem Source from orpheuslament
  3. Chris Abani bio and portrait via Poetry Foundation

Sunday, Sparrows, Sawsan (do unto others as….)

Live & Learn70 Comments

I knew when I took the shot this morning it would be a triggering moment for Sawsan who swoons over Sparrows.

Then I posted the shot on Instagram. In seconds, a text message comes flying in: “POST the Sparrow, PLEASE.”

Then message alerts won’t stop: Ping Ping Ping Ping Ping PING. PING. She lights up my inbox after I ask her to share a few thoughts on why I should post the picture.

I was a bit taken back — she said ‘PLEASE‘ vs. the customary JUST-DO-IT. Finally, a wee bit of control over Her on Something. I feel such joy over this…

Sawsan said it all started here with my post: Riding Metro North. With “My” Little Bird.’

Then she shares a passage from Thoreau in ‘Walden‘: “I once had a sparrow alight upon my shoulder for a moment, while I was hoeing in a village garden, and I felt that I was more distinguished by that circumstance that I should have been by any epaulet I could have worn.”

I had to look up “epaulet.”

I re-read the passage, and thought about the summer afternoon when the kids and I went to Cove Island Park. I had Birdie (our Sun Conure) on my shoulder — and, the kids were a least one hundred yards behind me, belly crawling in the grass, nope, don’t know him, never saw him before in our life.

But we digress.

Continue reading “Sunday, Sparrows, Sawsan (do unto others as….)” →

“Hello Charlotte,” I said to the awaiting terminal.

Live & Learn23 Comments

“Hello Charlotte,” I said to the awaiting terminal. I sat down at the machine and pulled up yesterday’s work. It was not good. Let me be transparent: it was abysmal. It was empty, bottomless, abysmal, from the same root as “abyss.” Good poetry is at least, at most, (at last), genuine. It is a bridge across that abyss. Imaginary gardens with real toads in them—we can try, we can hope. But set aside even that. Set aside “good poetry.” Settle for poetry that is made of real thoughts, actual weather—poetry that does not shatter at the first touch of a miniature hammer. The preceding day’s work was a collection of glass cathedrals. I reread it with alarm. Turns of phrase I had mistaken for beautiful, which I now found unintelligible. Charlotte had simply surprised me: I would propose a line, a portion of a line, and what the system spat back upended my expectations. I had been seduced by this surprise. I had mistaken a fit of algorithmic exuberance for the truth. […]

The system’s panache with lists, the way it could take a few words and extrapolate, no longer had its mesmeric effect on me. Yesterday, Charlotte’s creations had seemed handsome—or better yet, new—casting the world in a strange light. Now I saw their incoherence. Instead of understanding the meaning of words, the software presumably relied on frequency: the likelihood of any one word appearing next to any other.[…]

Nor did it mean anything at all, not really—it was all empty coincidence, a gray grey, a talent that seems … Here, then, was the problem. Not merely the emptiness of these emissions, but the boundlessness of human beings’ capacity to interpret, to make meaning from. I could draw substance from any line I read, no matter how hollow its intention. I was so easily deceived, as all of us are.

— Sean Michaels, Do You Remember Being Born: A Novel (Astra House, September 5, 2023)

Notes:

  1. DK: Highly Recommended
  2. NY Times Book Review by Lincoln Michel, September 4, 2023: ” Will A.I. Change Art? A New Novel Uses A.I. to Explore Just That. Sean Michaels’s “Do You Remember Being Born?,” about a poet who is asked to collaborate with an A.I., explores the dangers and opportunities of incorporating technology into art.
  3. Image & Book Review by Quill & Quire

No religion except…

Live & Learn20 Comments

…No religion except whatever Mary Oliver had going on.

Notes:

  • Quote: Monkcore.
  • T-Shirt: Online Ceramics
  • Inspired by: “Oh, good scholar, I say to myself, how can you help but grow wise with such teachings as these— the untrimmable light of the world, the ocean’s shine, the prayers that are made out of grass?” —  Mary Oliver, from “Mindful” in “Why I Wake Early” (via Alive on All Channels)

My brother was birthed a soft whistle

Live & Learn31 Comments

Although Twin is older by almost an hour—
of course the birth got complicated when it was my turn—
he doesn’t act older. He is years softer than I will ever be.

When we were little, I would come home
with bleeding knuckles and Mami would gasp
and shake me: “¡Muchacha, siempre peleando!
Why can’t you be a lady? Or like your brother?
He never fights. This is not God’s way.”

And Twin’s eyes would meet mine
across the room. I never told her
he didn’t fight because my hands
became fists for him. My hands learned
how to bleed when other kids
tried to make him into a wound.

My brother was birthed a soft whistle:
quiet, barely stirring the air, a gentle sound.
But I was born all the hurricane he needed
to lift—and drop—those that hurt him to the ground.

~ Elizabeth Acevedo, “More about Twin” in The Poet X (HarperTeen, March 6, 2018)

The Poet X, highly recommended.

 

Notes:

  • Elizabeth Acevedo is a Dominican-American poet and author.  Her critically-acclaimed debut novel and NY Times Bestseller, The Poet X, won the 2018 National Book Award for Young People’s Literature.
  • Portrait of Elizabeth Acevedo via wbur.com