#BlackHistoryMonth Walking Down Park by Nikki Giovanni #iNeedFeminismBecause

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Walking Down Park

BY NIKKI GIOVANNI

walking down park
amsterdam
or columbus do you ever stop
to think what it looked like
before it was an avenue
did you ever stop to think
what you walked
before you rode
subways to the stock
exchange (we can’t be on
the stock exchange
we are the stock
exchanged)
.
did you ever maybe wonder
what grass was like before
they rolled it
into a ball and called
it central park
where syphilitic dogs
and their two-legged tubercular
masters fertilize
the corners and side-walks
ever want to know what would happen
if your life could be fertilized
by a love thought
from a loved one
who loves you
 .
ever look south
on a clear day and not see
time’s squares but see
tall Birch trees with sycamores
touching hands
and see gazelles running playfully
after the lions
ever hear the antelope bark
from the third floor apartment
 .
ever, did you ever, sit down
and wonder about what freedom’s freedom
would bring
it’s so easy to be free
you start by loving yourself
then those who look like you
all else will come
naturally
 .
ever wonder why
so much asphalt was laid
in so little space
probably so we would forget
the Iroquois, Algonquin
and Mohicans who could caress
the earth
 .
ever think what Harlem would be
like if our herbs and roots and elephant ears
grew sending
a cacophony of sound to us
the parrot parroting black is beautiful black is beautiful
owls sending out whooooo’s making love …
and me and you just sitting in the sun trying
to find a way to get a banana tree from one of the monkeys
koala bears in the trees laughing at our listlessness
 .
ever think its possible
for us to be
happy
 .
.

Nikki Giovanni, “Walking Down Park” from The Selected Poems of Nikki Giovanni. Copyright © 1996 by Nikki Giovanni. Used with the permission of HarperCollins Publishers.

Source: The Collected Poems of Nikki Giovanni (2003)

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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

The Gods Wrote #blacklivesmatter South Africa

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THE GODS WROTE
We are breath of drop of rain
Grain of sea sand in the wind
We are root of baobab
Flesh of this soil
Blood of Congo brush elegant
As breast of dark cloud
Or milk flowing through the groaning yearsWe also know
Centuries with the taste
Of white shit down to the spine…The choice is ours
So is the life
The music of our laughter reborn
Tyityimba or boogaloo passion
Of the sun-eyed gods of our blood
Laughs in the nighttime, in the daytime too
And across America vicious cities
Clatter to the ground. Was it notAll written by the gods!
Turn the things! I said
Let them things roll
To the rhythm of our movement
Don’t you know this is a love supreme!
John Coltrane  John Coltrane tell the ancestors
We listened we heard your message
Tell them you gave us tracks to move

Trane and now we know
The choice is ours
So is the mind and the matches too
The choice is ours

So is the beginning
‘We were not made eternally to weep’
The choice is ours
So is the need and the want too
The choice is ours
So is the vision of the day

 

© 2002, Keorapetse Kgositsile
From: If I Could Sing
Publisher: Kwela Publishers, South Africa
ISBN: 0-7957-0126-8
.
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

“The trees were attitudes in black” #Snow Advent by Auslander #ChristmasEve #Wintersolstice #WinterWonderland

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Photos by Theresaurus.

Snow advent

The clouds were all brushed up and back
The wrong way by the wind;
The trees were attitudes in black;
The brooks were disciplined.

Then soft as spider on a shelf,
Or satin mouse at birth,
Or as a pigeon lends itself
Reluctantly to earth —

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No louder than a silken sound
Of the web’s silver wheel,
Spraying the darkness all around
With spokes of silken steel —

As soft and softer than all these
Parted the sky at noon;
And the air stood up league-deep in bees,
The white bees of the moon.

 

-Joseph Auslander in All the Silver Pennies

Velvet shoes by E. Wylie #christmasweek #winter #solstice

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Photo by Theresaurus.

No snow yet…But that silence after the first snow. The sounds suddenly different! The thick quiet blanket and little paw prints! I’m actually looking forward. That is a first for this Aruban exile.

Velvet Shoes

 

Let us walk in the white snow

In a soundless space;

With footsteps quiet and slow,

At a tranquil pace,

Under veils of white lace.

 

I shall go shod in silk,

And you in wool,

White as white cow’s milk,

More beautiful

Than the breast of a gull.

 

We shall walk through the still town

In a windless peace;

We shall step upon white down,

Upon silver fleece,

Upon softer than these.

 

We shall walk in velvet shoes:

Wherever we go

Silence will fall like dews

On white silence below.

We shall walk in the snow.

 

Elinor Wylie

#snow #haiku #wintersolstice Issa, Greig, Hashin!!!

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Photo by: unknown. Searched over 30 websites, no source.
.
The snow is melting
and the village is flooded
with children.
Issa

 

Looking at the clouds
blue in the ice-wind
space flows.

Thomas Grieg

No sky
no earth- even so
snowflakes fall.

Hashin

E.J. Scovell Geese on the Park Water #CanadaReads

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Photographer unknown.

The Geese on the Park Water

1
The Canada geese
Pose in the light and dark of ripples,
And in and out of narrow shadows
Pose, compose, improvising
Their endless eloquent line.

 

The Swan’s Feet

Who is this whose feet
Close on the water,
Like muscled leaves darker than ivy
Blown back and curved by unwearying wind?
They, that thrust back the water,
Softly crumple now and close, stream in his wake.

These dank weeds are also
Part and plumage of the magnolia-flowering swan.
He puts forth these too—
Leaves of ridged and bitter ivy
Sooted in towns, coal-bright with rain.
He is not moved by winds in air
Like the vain boats on the lake.

Lest you think him too a flower of parchment,
Scentless magnolia,
See his living feet under the water fanning.
In the leaves’ self blows the efficient wind
That opens and bends closed those leaves.

 

Edith Joy Scovell, called Joy, was born in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, in 1907 and she went up to Somerset College, the women’s college founded at Oxford University in 1879.

Scovell accompanied her husband, the distinguished Oxford ecologist and naturalist Charles Elton, to Central and South America and the West Indies as a recorder and field researcher.

#Wintersolstice Brittle World by Lew Sarett #snow

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Photo by Matt Anderson

Brittle World

Brittel the snow on the gables,
The sleet-hung pines, the night
Sprinkled with stars that quiver
Over the waste of white.

Fragile the earth in the moonlight,
The glassy sheet of lake;
If I tapped it with a hammer,
The brittle world would break.

Lew Sarett in All the Silver Pennies, ed. Blanche Jenning Thompson

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Photo by Daseger. “Witch House” or the Jonathan Corwin House in Salem.

Poetry foundation: “Poet, lecturer, and teacher Lew Sarett was born Lew Saretsky in Chicago to parents who immigrated from Poland and Lithuania.

He was educated at University of Michigan-Ann Arbor, Beloit College, Harvard Law School, and the University of Illinois Law School.

Sarett became interested in nature and American Indian culture and lore at an early age, and these interests are clearly reflected in his life and in his poetry.

[…] lived among the Chippewa Indians of the Lake Superior region, and was adopted by them and given the name Lone Caribou.”

Read more here at the Poetry Foundation!

Four Little Foxes
by Lew Sarett

Speak gently, Spring, and make no sudden sound
for in my windy valley yesterday I found
New born foxes squirming on the ground
Speak gently.

Walk softly, March, forbear the bitter blow,
Her feet within a trap, her blood upon the snow,
The four little foxes saw their mother go
Walk softly.

Go lightly, Spring, oh give them no alarm;
When I covered them with boughs to shelter them from harm
The thin blue foxes suckled at my arm
Go Lightly.

Step softly, March, with your rampant hurricane
Nuzzling one another and whimp’ring with pain,
The new little foxes are shiv’ring in the rain
Step softly.

E.J. Scovell The Days Fail #Baby #WinterSolstice #BlackLivesMatter

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From The First Year

VII

The days fail: night broods over afternoon:
And at my child’s first drink beyond the night
Her skin is silver in the early light.
Sweet the grey morning and the raiders gone.

VIII

the baby in her blue night-jacket, propped on hands
With head raised, coming out to day, has half-way sloughed
The bed-clothes, as a sea-lion, as a mermaid
Half sloughs the sea, rooted in sea, basking on strands.

Like a gentle coastal creature she looks round
At one who comes and goes the far side of her bars;
Firm in her place and lapped by blankets; here like tides
Familiar rise and fall our care for her, our sounds.

E.J. Scovell

Buy the Faber Book of 20th Century Women’s Poetry, ed. Fleur Adcock, from an indie bookseller here.

 

Mary’s Song by Sylvia Plath #Wintersolstice #Shoah #Holocaust

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image-4737610Mary’s Song

The Sunday lamb cracks in its fat.
The fat
Sacrifices its opacity. . . .A window, holy gold.
The fire makes it precious,
The same fireMelting the tallow heretics,
Ousting the Jews.
Their thick palls floatOver the cicatrix of Poland, burnt-out
Germany.
They do not die.Grey birds obsess my heart,
Mouth-ash, ash of eye.
They settle.  On the high

Precipice
That emptied one man into space
The ovens glowed like heavens, incandescent.

It is a heart,
This holocaust I walk in,
O golden child the world will kill and eat.

 

Sylvia Plath
 Photo by Henri van der Beek 
 Buy the Faber Book of 20th Century Women’s Poetry, ed. Fleur Adcock, from an indie bookseller here.

 

 

 

 

#wintersolstice Sheep in Fog by Sylvia Plath #iNeedFeminismBecause

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Sheep In Fog

The hills step off into whiteness.
People or stars
Regard me sadly, I disappoint them.

The train leaves a line of breath.
O slow
Horse the colour of rust,

Hooves, dolorous bells –
All morning the
Morning has been blackening,

A flower left out.
My bones hold a stillness, the far
Fields melt my heart.

They threaten
To let me through to a heaven
Starless and fatherless, a dark water.

sylvia Plath

image

photos by:

Buy the Faber Book of 20th Century Women’s Poetry, ed. Fleur Adcock, from an indie bookseller here.

Old #Transit poem by famous Canadian poet Margaret Avinson

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Transit

Blowing hard at the bus stop: southbound, NW corner.
Barometer falling.
Stars falling, but in that
blue sky who marks it, they fall all over out there.

Wind’s off the Barren Straits.
But the sun is blowing too.
Rearing high out of the nest snakeheads flap in it till the
tear ducts crackle.

The whole geste unrolls; black cars,
poles, black-and-white headlines,
dentist’s floss, wire mesh,
heads spinning, and
a thorn needle for every solitary tune even though there’s no
automatic arm. And it’s
all plugged in
and everything is coming.
But the bus isn’t coming.

Noon keeps swallowing.

The Gas Fire by Stevie Smith #wintersolstice #TransIsBeautiful #iNeedFeminismBecause

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Near Williamstown, MASS, credit: Peter Rintels.

The gas fire
Seemed quite a friend
Such a funny little humming noise it made
And it had a name, too, carved on it you know,
‘The Persian’. The Persian!
Ha ha ha; ha ha.

Now Agnes, pull yourself together.
You and your friends.

Stevie Smith

Florence Margaret Smith, known as Stevie Smith (20 September 1902 – 7 March 1971) was an English poet and novelist.

“When suffering from the depression to which she was subject all her life she was so consoled by the thought of death as a release that, as she put it, she did not have to commit suicide.

She wrote in several poems that death was “the only god who must come when he is called”. Smith suffered throughout her life from an acute nervousness, described as a mix of shyness and intense sensitivity…

Sylvia Plath became a fan of her poetry and sent Smith a letter in 1962, describing herself as “a desperate Smith-addict.” Plath expressed interest in meeting in person but committed suicide soon after sending the letter…

Smith was celibate for most of her life, although she rejected the idea that she was lonely as a result, alleging that she had a number of intimate relationships with friends and family that kept her fulfilled.

About Not Waving But Drowning: Jannice Thaddeus suggests that the speaker of the poem, like other figures in Smith’s works, changes from male to female as part of a theme of androgyny that exists in many of the poems found in Selected Poems.”

Buy the Faber Book of 20th Century Women’s Poetry, ed. Fleur Adcock, from an indie bookseller here.

Daisies by Genevieve Sambrook

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Daisies

Wednesday I kissed every inch
of your pulsing neck
and I held your waist
so close to my heart
our breathing matched
you asked me why
I haven’t written
a poem in a while
You joked that I was
lacking inspiration
but darling
the heaviest words are so quiet
when something feels right
you just breathe

and so do I

I heard last week on the radio
that for burn victims the only way
to save a limb is to cut it
until it bleeds
so you know where the living starts
every spring my mother has
me slice apart her flowers
she says they grow back
healthier if you remove what has died
darling I’ve been cutting to
the living part for
as long as I can remember
I would like to think I am
growing back
.

from: We Will Be Shelter, poems for survival. Ed. Andrea Gibson. A write bloody book.

#ForgottenFire Suzy La Follette #iNeedFeminismBecause

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Nothing is gentle for me here. The fire’s
heat is brief, occasional. it’s their eyes
that burn the back of my neck. I was hired
through the same requirements and I’ll rise
through the ranks with the same tests. Yet, somehow
I’ll have more. With every alarm I prove
my strength, prove my skill prove my worth. My brow
furrowed, clothes soaked with sweat. But all my moves
are soon forgotten, disappear like steam
rising from my head, with helmets removed.
Surely, when they tell stories they don’t mean
to forget me, but they do. In their truth
it must’ve been one of the guys, that pulled
that body from the car. Now who’s the fool?

Suzy La Follette

Career firefighter, poet, singer Arti Twit and the Alibis. From Austin, Texas.

http://www.girlsrockaustin.org
http://www.annrichardsschool.org

From: We Will Be Shelter, edited by Andrea Gibson.

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