Monthly Archives: January 2015

“How the World Began!”: the Story of Crow. Indigenous creation story as told by Angela Sidney! #NativeLivesMatter

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The Story of Crow.

(This poem starts with a daughter so precious that her parents did not want to lose her, ao they protected her and even though many men wanted her hand in marriage, they said she was too good for them. They all waited, I imagine, for the right man. She is referred to as ‘that girl.’)

Crow wanted to be born— he wants to make the world!

So he made himself into a pine needle.
A slave always brings water to that girl and one time he gets water
.   with a pine needle in it.
She turns it down— make him get freshwater.
Again he brings it. Again a pine needle is there.
Four times he brings water and each time it’s there.
Finally she just give up— She spit that pine needle out and drink the
.   water.
But it blew into her mouth and she swallowed it.
Soon the girl is pregnant.

Her mother and daddy are mad.
Her mother asks, “Who’s that father?”

“No, I never knew a man,” she told her mother.

That baby starts to grow fast.
That girl’s father had the sun, moon, stars, daylight hanging in his
.   house.
He’s the only one that has them.
The world was all dark, all the time.
The child begged for them to play with.

Finally, the father gives his grandchild the sun to play with.
He rolls it around, plays with it, laughs, has lots of fun.
Then he rolls it to the door and out it goes!
“Oh!” he cries. He just pretends.
He cries because that sun is lost.

“Give me the moon to play with.”

They say no at first— like now, if a baby asks for the sun or moon you
.   say,
“That’s your grandfather’s fire.”

Finally, they gave it to him.

One by one they gave him the sun, moon, stars, daylight—
He loses them all.

“Where does she get the child from? He loses everything!”
That’s what her father says.

Then Crow disappears.
He has to things with him in the box.
He walks around— comes to a river.
Lots of animals there— fox, wolf, wolverine, mink, rabbit.
Everybody’s fishing…
That time animals all talk like people talk now—
The world is dark.

“Give me fish,” Crow says.
No one pay any attention.
“Give me fish or I’ll bring daylight!”
They laugh at him.

He’s holding a box… starts to open it and lets one ray out.
Then they pay attention!
He opens that books a bit more—they are scared!
Finally he opens that daylight box and threw it out.
Those animals scatter!
They hide in the bush and turn into animals like now.
Then the sun, moon, stars, and daylight come out.

“Go to the skies,” Crow says.
“Now no man owns it— it will be for everybody.”

He’s right, what he says that Crow.

After Crow made the world, he saw that sea lion owned the only island
. in the world.
The rest was water— he’s the only one with land.
The whole place was ocean!
Crawl rests on a piece of log— he’s tired.
He sees see lion with that little island just for himself.
He wants some land to so he stole that sea lion’s kid.

“Give me back that kid!” said sea lion.

“Give me beach, some sand,” says Crow.

So sea lion gave him sand.
Crow threw that sand around the world.
“Be World,” he told it. And it became the world.

After that, he walks around, flies around all alone.
He’s tired— he’s lonely— he needs people.
He took poplar tree bark. You know how it’s thick?
He carved it and then he breathed into i.

“Live!” he said, and he made a person.
He made Crow and Wolf to too.
At first they can’t talk to each other—
Crow man and woman are shy with each other— look away.
Wolf the same way too.

“This is no good,” he said. So we change that.
He made Crow man sit with Wolf woman.
And he made Wolf Man sit with Crow woman.
So Crow must marry Wolf and Wolf must marry Crow.

That’s how the world began.
.
.

“You tell what you know.
The way I tell stories is what I know.”

Angela Sidney.

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As told by Angela Sidney in “Life Lived Like a Story: Life Stories of Three Yukon Native Elders.” By Julie Cruikshank, p. 42.

Library in Toronto: http://www.torontopubliclibrary.ca/detail.jsp?Entt=RDM521988&R=521988

Order online:
– NEW: http://www.ubcpress.ca/search/title_book.asp?BookID=444 or at http://www.indiebound.org
– USED: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&tn=Life+Lived+Like+a+Story

‪#‎IndigenousLivesMatter‬ ‪#‎WinterSolstice‬ ‪#‎WinterSolsticebonfire‬ ‪#‎AmINext‬

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Start of story:
“One time there was a girl whose daddy is a very high man.
They kept her in her bedroom all the time—
Men try to marry her all the time, but they say no, she’s too good.”

The Old Woman under the World, told by Angela Sidney. #LifeLivedLikeaStory #nativelivesmatter

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The Old Woman under the World.

There are two old ladies down below who look after the world.
One is supposed to be sleeping;
The other one holds up the earth with a pole.
When she shakes it, that’s when there’s supposed to be an earthquake.
That old lady there with the pole is supposed to be Death.
She always argues– She’s the one who always says, “let people sleep for good when they go to sleep.
Let them die.”

That Death Woman wants to kill people before their time.

But Sleep Woman says,
“No!
Can’t you see how my boss put a good pillow for me to sleep on?
And you want me to let her go to sleep for good?
No. No—I won’t do that.
Those old ladies—
One is Sleep Woman, the other is Death Woman.

Billboards in the rain, Dvorah Fogel #YiddishPoetry …Today the rain dissolved the vermilion letters

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http://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/fogel-dvoyre

“Together with her husband and son, Fogel was killed in the Lwów ghetto in 1942.
…
Fogel’s remarkable experimental poetry, all written in the 1930s, was, in the spirit of early twentieth-century art, radically avant-garde and attuned to all the modernist minimalisms.

She attempted to fuse modern art and poetry in a new style that she termed “white words,” striving, as she put it, to create a new lyric poetry of the urban condition: a poetry of cool stasis and of geometric ornamentation with a rhythm of repetition that can replace melodiousness and dynamism, in which monotone becomes theme.

In her creative prose she employed repetitive detached impressions (“montages”) to achieve the same goals.

Contemporaneous and later critics considered her style too intellectual, studied and obscure, and lacking in traditional Jewish and feminine thematics.

Yet Fogel herself regarded her project not as a deliberate experiment, but rather as “a necessity, achieved and paid for with life’s experience.”

Billboards in the rain.

Today the rain coats gray houses
with another coat
of gray,

you, far away.

Everyone away,
there’s no one to be with.

I lean
against a wall of billboards
pasted with posters of lemon and orange.

Today the rain dissolved
the vermilion letters
announcing the film
of the red ballerina.

Red lines, caressing,
and other hands heavily moving
across hot yellow figures.

In a row of ten gray houses
a red and yellow wall of boards,
the only sign of life.

And one can lean against it
as against the human body
now far off,
out of reach.

Dvorah/Dvoyre Fogel

From: a Treasury of Yiddish Poetry edited by Irving Howe and Liezer Greenberg.
USED and NEW: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=13535919967

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Black man: I’m a black man; I’m black; I am— A black man; black— I’m a black man; I’m a black man; I’m a man; black— I am— #OscarsSoWhite, Michael S. Harper, jazz poetry.

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Brother John

Black man:
I’m a black man;
I’m black; I am—
A black man; black—
I’m a black man;
I’m a black man;
I’m a man; black—
I am—

Bird, buttermilk bird—
smack, booze and bitches
I am Bird
baddest night dreamer
on sax in the ornithology-world
I can fly–higher, high, higher
I’m a black man;
I am; I’m a black man—

Miles, blue haze,
Miles high, another bird,
more Miles, mute,
Mute Miles, clean,
bug-eyed, unspeakable,
Miles, sweet Mute,
sweat Miles, black Miles;
I’m a black man;
I’m black; I am;
I’m a black man—

Trane, Coltrane; John coltrane;
it’s tranetime; chase the Trane;
it’s a slow dance;
it’s the Trane
in Alabama; acknowledgment,
a love supreme,
it’s black Trane; black;
I’m a black man; I’m black—
I am, I’m a black man—

Brother John, Brother John
plays no instrument;
he’s a black man; black;
he’s a black man; he is
Brother John; Brother John—

I’m a black man; I am;
black; I am; I’m a black
man; I am; I am;
I’m a black man;
I’m a black man;
I am; I’m a black man;
I am:

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Read more about this poem and jazz poetry here.

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From The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry.
NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry
NEW at independent bookstores: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780195125634

Poetry books by Michael S. Harper:
NEW and USED: Dear John, dear Coltrane and Images of Kin: Abebookds.com

brothers, who will hold her, who will find her beautiful if you do not? Lucille Clifton. #OscarsSoWhite

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song at midnight

brothers,
this big woman
carries much sweetness
in the folds of her flesh.
her hair
is white with wonderful.
she is
rounder than the moon
and far more faithful.
brothers,
who will hold her,
who will find her beautiful
if you do not?

won’t you celebrate with me
what i have shaped into
a kind of life? i had no model.
born in babylon
both nonwhite and woman
what did i see to be except myself?
i made it up
here on the bridge between
starshine and clay,
my own hand holding tight
my other hand; come celebrate
with me that everyday
something has tried to kill me
and has failed.

Lucille Clifton

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From The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry.
NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry
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Snow White was nude at her wedding, she’s so white… #OscarsSoWhite #ThyliasMoss #poetryisjustawesome

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Lessons from a Mirror

Snow White was nude at her wedding, she’s so white
the gown seemed to disappear when she put it on.

Put me beside her and the proximity is good
for a study of chiaroscuro, not much else.

Her name aggravates me most, as if I need to be told
what’s white and what isn’t.

Judging strictly by appearance there’s a future for me
forever at her heels, a shadow’s constant worship.

Is it fair for me to live that way, unable
to get off the ground?

Turning the tables isn’t fair unless they keep turning.
Then there’s the danger of Russian roulette

and my disadvantage: nothing falls from the sky
to name me.

I am the empty space where the tooth was, that my tongue
rushes to fill because I can’t stand vacancies.

And it’s not enough. The penis just fills another
gap. And it’s not enough.

When you look at me,
know that more than white is missing.

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From The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry.
NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry
NEW at independent bookstores: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780195125634

About the meaning read this post by Tara Betts: ““Lessons from a Mirror” is from Moss’ third collection. Pyramid of Bone was part of the Callaloo Poetry Series, which published early books by Rita Dove, Brenda Marie Osbey, and Elizabeth Alexander.

“Lessons from a Mirror” is a concise gathering of 10 couplets that articulates the contrast between a woman of color and someone who she will never be, Snow White.

[…]

This not only implies a sense of possible servitude but a sense that a shadow, darkness will always be beneath whiteness that

darkness must bow and defer as an underling.

[…]

“And it’s not enough.” To say this, recalls how black people have often had to work much

harder to gain a toehold

similar to counterparts of another race, a toehold that has become increasingly more difficult to gain as shown in recent Pew Research Center study about wealth accumulation and loss in the U.S..

[…]

After revisiting Anne Sexton’s poems in Transformations or Lucille Clifton’s biblical poems many times and looking at recent work like Barbara Jane Reyes’ Diwata, Marjorie Tesser’s The Magic Feather, Aimee Nezhukumatathil’s Miracle Fruit, Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber, and the anthology The Poets’ Grimm, I’m reminded of how necessary

and jarring it is to see

archetypal stories deconstructed, retold, or even replaced with more inclusive stories.”

USED and NEW– books by Tara Betts at abebooks!

Little Girl Talk by Delores S. Williams.

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Little Girl Talk

my grampaw was a smooth black, way back then
before black discovered beautiful he was pretty.
he had pearlywhite teeth and a big moustache.
he useta skinny-out to the edge with a black-wax stick. on Sunday
he would pindown in his darkblue suit, wideblue tie.
white-stiff shirt, and hip-on down to the presbyterian church where he argued
over how to spend white folk’s mission money.

on weekdays: overalls. he worked in a factory.
until some white boss talked down to him. then he’d quit.
to another factory. talk union talk to negroes. get
laid off. on the way home buy me a big box of oran
kause i kalled iron ‘i-roan’.

my grampaw was all the kings i wanted to know. when
i was six. my grampaw was smart. didn’t
go to college. said white folks wouldn’t let’im.
but he worked algebra and trig and read gladstone’s law.
and science books. he used to tell us kids
there wasn’t no heaven.

my grampaw said i was the sugar in his coffee. yes indeed.
i remember my grampaw,

the day the siren screamed into our street ballgame
and stopped at our house, we kids, eight of us, scattered
into an uneven line across the street. we watched two
big, redneck, white men in white uniforms stuff my
pretty grampaw into something called a straitjacket,
crowd him into the back of their looney wagon, jump
into the front themselves and shriek-off into the distance.
my grammaw stood perfectly still. her proud eyes
looked deep and sore and hollow. my mother, unmoving, cried softly.
i, girl-boy-tom-tree-climber of 10, tried
not to feel anything. the tears that didn’t come swelled
to a tight fist in my chest

big, brave, girlboy me
shove the weight of my ten years
onto two flat feet,
strolled to the middle of the street
and yelled as loud as i could,
“throw the ball, shity!”
.          The game was on.

 

Delores S. Williams

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From The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry.

NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry
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America by Henry Dumas. Black Poet. If we must die.

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America

If an eagle be imprisoned
On the back of a coin
And the coin is tossed into the sky,
That coin will spin,
That coin will flutter,
But the eagle will never fly.

Henry Dumas.

From: The Oxford anthology of African-American poetry

NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry
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Leila Chatti, 14, SUNDAY SCHOOL, 3 DAYS LATE. Funny and short. Muslim American brilliance!

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Only recently I discovered Rattle. I think it is a great resource full of energy- never mind their youthful statement that in this century (!!) poetry has become obscure and dusty.

Typically North-American attitude and fresh from high school poetry assignments. Well, I guess they will go find other countries on their own or they won’t.

I am so glad in the Netherlands learning foreign languages is a must. I need to brush up my French and German and I have forgotten most of the ancient Greek and Latin I learned, but I was fortunate to read poetry in high school in all those languages: to feel how impossibly different a german poem is such that you can’t translate without putting your own voice in it. My english teacher said the best english was spoken and written in Ireland. It’s true. Australian english has a shorter feel/sound to it and is languid and you can read from the words, the sentences how different the landscape is.

Anyway, subscribe to Rattle- it is well worth it!  http://www.rattle.com/poetry/print/current/

Leila Chatti

14, SUNDAY SCHOOL, 3 DAYS LATE

I’m not stupid—
I know how it works.

But there was a time when
she was just some virgin nobody, too,

small purse of her womb
and her ordinary eggs
waiting like loose pearls.

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—from Rattle #45, Fall 2014
Tribute to Poets of Faith
http://www.rattle.com/poetry/print/40s/i45/
__________

Leila Chatti: “People are always surprised to find out that I’m Muslim, which is funny because I was raised pretty much as Muslim as you can get—Sunday school, Qur’an classes, Fridays at the masjid.

I don’t wear the hijab and so the common assumption is that I’m not religious.

The truth is, I became a poet largely because of my faith.

As a child, I wasn’t allowed to listen to music, but I could listen to recordings of the Qur’an. If you’ve ever heard it read, you know how gorgeous it is.

It was my first realization that language, particularly beautiful language, can hold power. I wanted to try my hand at crafting language that brought people to their knees, too.”

http://leilachatti.blogspot.ca

Cavalry Way and After Reading Mickey In The Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed.

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Because The Oxford Anthology of African American Poetry is one of the best, most satisfying, fat books of poetry I have, you should go buy it too. Poets get paid and editors get paid and we get more poesie. This leads to joy.

NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry
NEW at independent bookstores: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780195125634

One sad, one happy poem.

Calvary Way

How did you feel, Mary,
Womb heavy with Christ Child,
Tasting the dust of uncertain journey?
Were you afraid?
When, winding the swaddling clothes,
You laid him in the manger,
Were you afraid?
Could you trace nail holes
Under his curling fingers,
Thorn pricks on the forehead?
Could you trace them?

I should bear a warm brown baby,
A new dark world of wonder;
But I fear the nails that pierce the spirit,
The unseen crosses.
How did you feel, Mary,
On the road beyond the star-lit manger,
Up to the hill to crucifixion?
Were you afraid?

May Miller

A graduate of Howard University; did graduate work at Columbia. Teacher of Speech and Dramatics in Baltimore schools.

 

After Reading Mickey In The Night Kitchen for the Third Time Before Bed 
Rita Dove

I’m the milk and the milk’s in me!… I’m Mickey!

My daughter spreads her legs
to find her vagina:
hairless, this mistaken
bit of nomenclature
is what a stranger cannot touch
without her yelling. She demands
to see mine and momentarily
we’re a lopsided star
among the spilled toys,
my prodigious scallops
exposed to her neat cameo.

And yet the same glazed
tunnel, layered sequences.
She is three; that makes this
innocent. We’re pink! 
she shrieks, and bounds off.

Every month she wants
to know where it hurts
and what the wrinkled string means
between my legs. This is good blood
I say, but that’s wrong, too.
How to tell her that it’s what makes us —
black mother, cream child.
That we’re in the pink
and the pink’s in us.

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Thank you Wiki: From 1993 to 1995 she served as Poet Laureate Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress. She is the first African American Poet Laureate. Dove is the second African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (1987). 2011 National Medal of Arts from President Barack Obama.

The documentary film Rita Dove: An American Poet by Argentinean-American filmmaker Eduardo Montes-Bradley premiered at the Paramount Theater (Charlottesville, Virginia) on January 31, 2014.

The annual “Rita Dove Poetry Award” was established by Salem College Center for Women Writers in 2004.

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Tune for a Teenage Niece, Eugene B. Redmond

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Tune for a Teenage Niece

Smile/ rippling river of dance—
Flow, blow green soul-lyre
Ballooning under brown flesh
Song/swirl, startling as claps
Of unexpected waves;
Girlriver dancing its drumdeep past,
Its boogalooborn/e day,
Fluteflown afro freight
Grandmother/mamma/aunt—sun-led—
Yesterwhistling confluence
.                       /childwoman and charmsong:
.                       Brown blues and honey-river, girl!
.                       Girlmother gonna sing her song someday, boy !
.                       Brown blues and honey-river, girl!”
Smile/river dancing, splashing flame-waves
Applaud and burn/mold brownfruit,
Afro-plum,
River symphony, water ritual:
.                       “Brown blues and honey-river, girl!”
Girlriver, spiced as pot liquor, flowing up/under
From queenmother’s heartbeam; from magic and marmelade
Fluteflown to fleshdance and birdgrace:
Flowing to omen, to woman:
.                       “Brown blues and honey-river, girl!”
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Fantastic compilation of black voices: buy the book.

NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry
NEW at independent bookstores: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780195125634

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harriet by Lucille Clifton. (Harriet Tubman)

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harriet
if i be you
let me not forget
to be the pistol
pointed
to be the madwoman
at the rivers edge
warning
be free or die
and isabell
if i be you
let me in my
sojourning
not forget
to ask my brothers
ain’t i a woman too
and
grandmother
if i be you
let me not forget
to work hard
trust the Gods
love my children and
wait.

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Lucille Clifton .
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Isabella Baumfree was the slave name of free woman Sojourner Truth. More thoughts about the poem here.

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Connotations to “wait”: psalms, patience, Walt Witman’s Song of Myself that ends with “wait” and that Clifton refers to elsewhere and white people telling black folks to “go slow” and wait for more civil rights as sung in Mississippi Goddam by Nina Simone.
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“… You will hardly know who I am or what I mean,
But I shall be good health to you nevertheless,
And filter and fibre your blood.

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Failing to fetch me at first keep encouraged,
Missing me one place search another,
I stop somewhere waiting for you.”

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Walt Whitman.

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NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry NEW at independent bookstores: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780195125634

The Black Unicorn, Audre Lorde.

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Migraine morning, so no reading law but reading poetry.

The Black Unicorn

The black unicorn is greedy.
The black unicorn is impatient.
The black unicorn was mistaken
for a shadow or symbol
and taken
through a cold country
where mist painted mockeries
of my fury.
It is not on her lap where the horn rests
but deep in her moonpit
growing.
The black unicorn is restless
the black unicorn is unrelenting
the black unicorn is not
free.

NEW and USED: Abebooks.com The Oxford Anthology of African-American Poetry
NEW at independent bookstores: http://www.indiebound.org/book/9780195125634

The Black Unicorn isn’t supposed to be funny, but she makes me smile. I’m not sure: I think the mist means that a token black person is white washed by white friends or fellow academics, writers maybe, a place where she feels bound also by misogyny and emphasizes her power comes from her vag. That’s what I read into it. The black unicorn is powerful.

Quick notes about the poem.

The Night is beautiful, So the faces of my people. Langston Hughes.

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The film Selma was heart-aching. One of the most beautiful shots was where Dr. King phones Mahalia Jackson and asks to hear the voice of the Lord and she sings to him My Precious Lord. 

Listen to the song hhttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N1ceCpU25vA

My people

 
The night is beautiful,
So the faces of my people.

The stars are beautiful,
So the eyes of my people.

Beautiful, also is the sun.
Beautiful, also, are the souls of my people.

NEW and USED: http://www.abebooks.com/servlet/SearchResults?sts=t&tn=oxford+anthology+of+african-american+poetry
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