Morning Open Thread: Did You Start This War As a Trade Fair of Evil?

“War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”
– Ambrose Bierce,
American author, journalist, and poet,
known for The Devil’s Dictionary and
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”

“Although the world is full of suffering,
it is also full of the overcoming of it.”
– Helen Keller,
American author and activist, who
lost her sight and hearing as an infant

“You never know how strong you are until
being strong is the only choice you have.”
– Bob Marley,
Jamaican musician, songwriter,
reggae pioneer and Rastafarian

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13 poets born in June –
muses of wars within and
without; of politics, oppression,
a mouse’s dilemma, and
bittersweet remembrance

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June 21
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1925 – Stanley Moss born in the Woodhaven neighborhood of Queens NY; American poet, writer, publisher, and art dealer. His father was a high school principal. When he was eight years old, a tour of Southern Europe and the Middle East awakened his interest in European painting and Levantine culture. In 1949, he was hired as an editorial assistant at New Directions Publishing. His poetry collections include: The Wrong Angel: The Skull of Adam; The Intelligence of Clouds; It’s About Time; Almost Complete Poems, which won the 2016 National Jewish Book Award; and Abandoned Poems. Stanley Moss died at age 99 in July 2024.

An Argument

by Stanley Moss

When you said that you wanted to be useful
as the days of the week, I said, “God bless you.”
Then you said you would not trade our Mondays,
useful for two thousand years,
for the Seven Wonders of the ancient world.
I said, “Endless are the wonders
to which I can only say ‘ah,’ that our ‘Ah’
who art in heaven can easily become the
‘ah, ah’ that comforts a baby.” Then you said,
“Go make a living on metaphors for ‘ah,’”
that I, a lunatic, secretly want to be
the Lighthouse of Alexandria,
a fifty-story-high collaboration
of art and science, a mirror of light
that might be seen five or ten days out to sea,
Poseidon standing on my shoulders,
the Library of Alexandria at my back,
all the wonders of Greek Africa.
I said, “Today is Monday. I want little more
than to be a hand-mirror my wife carries
in her purse with a hankie
to stop my hemorrhaging humility.”

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1949 – John Agard born in Georgetown, British Guiana (now Guyana); prolific Guyanese poet, playwright, and children’s writer. In 1977, he moved to Ironbridge, Shropshire, Great Britain. Agard was poet-in-residence at the National Maritime Museum in 2008. In 2012, he was selected for the Queen’s Gold Medal for Poetry. John Agard
was awarded BookTrust’s inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award in 2021. Among his many poetry collections are Shoot Me with Flowers; Limbo Dancer in Dark Glasses; From the Devil’s Pulpit; and Travel Light Travel Dark.

Coffee in Heaven

by John Agard

You’ll be greeted
by a nice cup of coffee
when you get to heaven
and strains of angelic harmony.

But wouldn’t you be devastated
if they only serve decaffeinated
while from the percolators of hell

your soul was assaulted
by Satan’s fresh espresso smell?

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June 22
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1966 – Barbara Nickel born in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada; Canadian poet and editor. She was raised in Rosthern, Saskatchewan, and graduated from Goshen College and the University of British Columbia with an M.F.A., and was the poetry editor of Prism International. Nickel moved to St. John’s, Newfoundland and Labrador, then back in British Columbia. She was on a panel at the 2005 Association of Writers & Writing Programs conference. Awards for her work include the 1995 Malahat Review Long Poem Prize; and the 1998 Pat Lowther Award for her collection The Gladys Elegies.

Saskatoon to Edmonton, December, Train

by Barbara Nickel

The town we used to visit is almost buried
in the dark. Pick out the rink and boarded
station, exhaust haloing an idling car.
Pick out the train’s bell flattening the more
we move away—now we’re the scene we saw
last winter from the road although
a year ahead and how far west who knows.
Midnight in the dome car: time enough
it seems, until the morning we arrive
then barely stop until another year
has passed. November is a train of cars
down the road spewing gravel and clearing
for once that night, town, its frosty ghosts; the one
we used to visit there is gone.

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June 23
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1888 – Anna Akhmatova born as Anna Andreyevna Gorenko near Odessa, Ukraine, but grew up in Tsarskoye Selo (now Pushkin) near St. Petersburg. One of the most acclaimed and significant Russian poets of the 20th century, she remained in the USSR even after her work was condemned and censored by Stalinist authorities. She wrote in secret about the horrors of living under Stalin. Requiem, her interconnected set of poems about Stalin’s Great Purge, is considered her masterwork. Her first husband was executed by the Soviet secret police, and her son spent many years in the Gulag. Requiem was written and rewritten between 1935 and 1961, and published in Germany in 1963. Akhmatova was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1965 and 1966. She died of heart failure at age 76 in March 1966. Requiem was not published in the USSR until 1987 – 21 years after her death. In 1993, it was revealed that the authorities had bugged her flat in 1939 and kept her under constant surveillance, keeping detailed files on her from this time, accruing some 900 pages of “denunciations, reports of phone taps, quotations from writings, confessions of those close to her.” Akhmatova had resorted to writing out her poems for trusted visitors on a scrap of paper to be read silently in a moment, then burnt in her stove.

The Muse

by Anna Akhmatova

When in the night I await her coming,
My life seems stopped. I ask myself: What
Are tributes, freedom, or youth compared
To this treasured friend holding a flute?
Look, she’s coming! She throws off her veil
And watches me, steady and long. I say:
“Was it you who dictated to Dante the pages
Of Hell?” And she answers: “I am the one.”

– translated by Stanley Burnshaw

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1889 – Miki Rofū pen name of Miki Masao born in Tatsuno, Hyōgo, Japan; Japanese symbolist poet, children’s book author, songwriter, essayist, and a frequent contributor to the poetry magazine Mirai (Future) and the children’s magazine Shinjushima (Pearl Island). His parents divorced when he was five, and he grew up with his grandfather. At age 17, he published his first collection of haiku and tankas. At 20, he attracted attention for his free verse collection Haien (Abandoned Garden). He worked in Kamiso, Hokkaido (1916-1924) in a Trappist monastery as a teacher, and became a Catholic. Rofū was hit by a taxi at age 75 in December 1964, and died of head injuries
His poetry collections include: Sabishiki akebono (Lonely Dawn); Ryōshin (Parents); and Kami to hito (Gods and Men).

After the kiss

by Miki Rofū

‘Are you asleep?’
‘No,’ you say.

Flowers in May
Flowering at noon.

In the lakeside grass
Under the sun,
‘I could close my eyes
And die here,’ you say.

“After the Kiss” by Miki Rofū from The Penguin Book of Japanese Verse, translated by Geoffrey Bownas and Anthony Thwaite – Penguin Classics, 2009 revised edition

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June 24
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1916 – John Ciardi born in Boston, Massachusetts; American poet, translator, etymologist, editor, and columnist. He was the director of the Middlebury Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference in the 1960s, poetry editor for Saturday Review, and recorded commentaries on word histories for National Public Radio. His many poetry collections include Homeward to America; Live Another Day; The Reason for the Pelican (one of several books of verse for children); Echoes: Poems Left Behind; and Stations
of the Air. He died of a heart attack at age 69 in March 1986.

I Wouldn’t

by John Ciardi

There’s a mouse house
In the hall wall
With a small door
By the hall floor
Where the fat cat
Sits all day,
Sits that way
All day
Every day
Just to say
“Come out and play”
To the nice mice
In the mouse house
In the hall wall
With the small door
By the hall floor.
And do they
Come out and play
When the fat cat
Asks them to?

Well, would you?

“I Wouldn’t” from The Collected Poems of John Ciardi, published posthumously in 1997 – University of Arkansas Press

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1933 – Richard Shelton born in Boise, Idaho; American poet, writer, and Regents Professor of English at the University of Arizona, He was raised in poverty, but found solace in reading. He attended Harding College in Arkansas before transferring to Abilene Christian College in Texas, where he earned a BA in English. Shelton next joined the U.S. Army and was stationed at Fort Huachuca in Yuma, Arizona, but was discharged from service in 1958. He went on to study for a PhD in English at the University of Arizona in Tucson, but never completed his dissertation, and ended in studies with a master’s degree. His first poetry collection, The Tattooed Desert, won the International Poetry Forum’s U.S. Award. His eight other books of poetry include: Richard Shelton died at age 89 in November 2022.

Politics Last Summer

by Richard Shelton

The pederasts were pederasting,
The sycophants were sycophanting
and Washington was awash in the slime of politics

when suddenly the three wise monkeys
burst into the committee room
beating on drums and demanding

an end to the teaching of Darwinism or any
theory that related them, even distantly,
to such a debauched creature as man.

Meanwhile, the homeless were trying
to form a union so each of them
could have a pot and a window.

Can you imagine the gall? A pot and a window!

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1969 – Susan Nalugwa Kiguli born in Luweero, Uganda; Ugandan poet, literary scholar, and anthologist. She earned a Master of Science in literary linguistics for teaching English and literature from the University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, then a PhD in English from the University of Leeds. She is an associate professor of literature at Makerere University. Her books include: The African Saga ; Eye of the Storm: A Photographic Journey Across Uganda; and A thousand voices rising: An anthology of contemporary African poetry.

To War Mongers Everywhere

by Susan Naluwa Kigali

Tell us
Did you start a war
So our women
Could be sold to public shame?
Our girls everyday
Stripped bare of humanity
And treated to voyeuristic sadistic
Machinations of deranged soldiers?

Tell us
Did you start this war
As a trade fair of evil
Displaying the different faces
Of Lucifer to a terrified populace?
Our children naked holding guns
To their chests.

Tell us now
Did you design this war
As a catalogue of atrocities
To enshrine in the libraries of our history?

Did you engineer this war
To blaze us in the flames of your feuds
Or was it so you could issue official statements?

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June 25
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1898 – Kay Sage born in Albany, New York, into a wealthy timber industry family industry; American Surrealist artist and poet. After her parents divorced, she and her mother lived in Rapallo, Italy, and traveled. Kay became fluent in French and Italian. She studied painting in the U.S. and Rome, but developed her own distinctive style. After a failed marriage, she moved to Paris, was exposed to works by early Surrealists. She fell in love with artist Yves Tanguy, who was separated, but not yet divorced, from his first wife. Just before Germany invaded Poland in 1939, she returned to the U.S., and helped other Surrealist painters, including Tanguy, to immigrate to the U.S., arranging exhibitions of their work. She moved to Woodbury, Connecticut. Tanguy died in 1955. Sage’s cataracts made painting difficult, and surgery was only marginally successful. She began writing poetry, mostly in French. Sage committed suicide in January 1963 at age 64.

In the Mirror

by Kay Sage

Do not look
at yourself
always
in the same
mirror.

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1955 – Patricia Smith born in Chicago, Illinois; American poet, Black spoken-word performer, playwright, author. She has been on the faculties of the Stonecoast MFA Program in Creative Writing and the Low-Residency MFA Program in Creative Writing at Sierra Nevada University. Currently, Smith is a professor at the Lewis Center for the Arts at Princeton University, a core faculty member in the MFA program at Sierra Nevada University, and a resident in the Vermont College of Fine Arts Post-Graduate Residency Program. She is a four-time individual National Poetry Slam champion. Her poetry collections include Life According to Motown; Close to Death; Incendiary Art; and Should Been Jimi Savannah, which won the Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize, the Rebekah Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry, and the Phillis Wheatley Book Award in Poetry.

Life According to Motown, 1991

by Patricia Smith

She’s got a favorite word—anemone. She got a gap-tooth mam and a dead daddy and she got westside ways. She sees there’s gonna be 50 poets in a blues club for five hours one winter afternoon, and since that winter afternoon is in Chicago, there’s no reason not to drink middlin’ liquor and get warm and laugh at poets with all their stupid flowers growing through concrete. But they poet good like backhand slap and Gwen Brooks is there and not even a little bit of warm comes from drinkin’. She follows Michael Warr to the Green Mill, where Marc Smith growls and guides, and that stage is hers for merely a million Sundays. She don’t know line break. She don’t know iamb. She don’t know envoi. She knows stage and slam and people’s faces when she poems and then Luis says You got a manuscript? Because Tía Chucha and she says yes,
but she doesn’t have a manuscript, but she makes what she thinks a manuscript is and then it’s a book.

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June 26
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1915 – Charlotte Zolotow born in Norfolk, Virginia; prolific American children’s author, poet, editor, and children’s book publisher. Zolotov authored over 70 books for young readers, including the classic When the Wind Stops, and the groundbreaking William’s Doll. She died at age 98 in November 2013. Her poetry collections include: All That Sunlight; River Winding; Snippits; and Seasons. The Chalotte Zolotow Award is an annual award for the best picture book text in the U.S.

So Will I

by Charlotte Zolotow

My grandfather remembers long ago
the white Queen Anne’s lace that grew wild.
He remembers the buttercups and goldenrod
from when he was a child.

He remembers long ago
the white snow falling falling.
He remembers the bluebird and thrush
at twilight
calling calling.

He remembers long ago
the new moon in the summer sky.
He remembers the wind in the trees
and its long, rising sigh.
And so will I
so will I.

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June 27
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1872 – Paul Laurence Dunbar born in Dayton Ohio, to parents who were slaves before the Civil War; author and poet, one of the first African-American poets who gained national attention and acclaim. Orville Wright and the owner of United Brethren Publishing helped get his first poetry collection Oak and Ivy published in 1893, and two other Dayton Residents, lawyer Charles Thatcher and psychiatrist Henry Tobey, teamed to publish his second book, Majors and Minors. Thatcher and Tobey also helped him get an agent, and book public readings. Lyrics of Lowly Life sold well enough for Dunbar to go to England, where he found a British publisher for this book. In 1897, he became a clerk at the Library of Congress. He wrote Folks From Dixie, a short story collection, while working there. But he began to have lung problems which led to tuberculosis, and he resigned in 1898. He continued to write, but died of tuberculosis at age 33 in February 1906. His poetry collections include Lyrics of Sunshine and Shadow and Lyrics of the Hearthside.

We Wear the Mask

by Paul Lawrence Dunbar

We wear the mask that grins and lies,
It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,–
This debt we pay to human guile;
With torn and bleeding hearts we smile,
And mouth with myriad subtleties.
Why should the world be overwise,
In counting all our tears and sighs?
Nay, let them only see us, while
We wear the mask.

We smile, but, O great Christ, our cries
To thee from tortured souls arise.
We sing, but oh the clay is vile
Beneath our feet, and long the mile;
But let the world dream otherwise,
We wear the mask!

“We Wear the Mask” from The Complete Poems of Paul Laurence Dunbar (1913 edition)

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1936 – Lucille Clifton born in Depew in northern New York state; prolific American author, poet and educator, Poet Laureate of Maryland (1979-1985); her work celebrates her African-American heritage and chronicles her experiences as a woman. She won the 1984 Coretta Scott King Award for Everett Anderson’s Good-bye; the 2000 National Book Award for Poetry for Blessing the Boats; the 2007 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement; and the 2010 Frost Medal for lifetime achievement. She died of cancer at age 73 in February 2010. Her poetry collections include Two-Headed Woman; Next; Quilting; Blessing the Boats; Mercy; Voices; and How to Carry Water.

homage to my hips

by Lucille Clifton

these hips are big hips
they need space to
move around in.
they don’t fit into little
petty places. these hips
are free hips.
they don’t like to be held back.
these hips have never been enslaved,
they go where they want to go
they do what they want to do.
these hips are mighty hips.
these hips are magic hips.
i have known them
to put a spell on a man and
spin him like a top!

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G’Morning/Afternoon/Evening MOTlies!

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Morning Open Thread: Did You Start This War As a Trade Fair of Evil?

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