Asakiyume mita

Here are three photos for you. Two I've shared elsewhere on the interwebs, so some of you will have seen them before, but the first one is making its world premiere right here, right now!

Dancing a cumbia with a candle.

Last month we went to see Yeison Landero and his band play cumbia in Amherst. (Here's what his music is like--he throws his head back and goes into a beatific trance as he plays.) It was marvelous.



When we were last in Colombia, we had one very brief session of learning to dance ;-) The teacher showed us several different styles of cumbia dancing, including one where one partner (traditionally, the guy) takes off his hat and holds it high, then low, as the two partners twirl round. That night in Amherst, the venue was full of people dancing their hearts out, including this one girl wielding a candle like a hat. How great to be dancing with fire!**

Ice Eye

Sometimes the frozen beaver pond glares up at you with a critical eye! (The eye is created by people opening a hole in the ice for ice fishing. It refreezes, and then it's opened again, and so on.)



Popcorn Blossoms



From swollen buds, just about to unfurl, to a double-petaled flower in all its glory, popcorn blossoms are rightly celebrated for their beauty. As the classical poet wrote

Seeing them explode
ought to be the end of it.
These popcorn blossoms!
--Nothing can keep their buttery goodness
from lingering on my fingers.

(apologies to the poet Sosei and the translator larryhammer for my abuse of Kokinshū poem no. 47. You can read more of Larry's for-real translations in Ice Melts in the Wind: The Seasonal Poems of the Kokinshu.)


**Actually we think it was an electric candle. But let's imagine!

rachelmanija's great review of Goddess of Yesterday (by Caroline Cooney) made me want to read it too--I did, and I enjoyed it very much. It really truly felt like the story was being told to me by a young girl from Trojan War times. I liked Anaxanadra very much, liked how observant she was, how she learned quickly and worked for her own survival, and that she took a liking to--and then felt loyalty and concern for--the various people she met.

What had absolutely pushed me from "Hmmm, cool book; maybe one day I'll read it" to "I want to read this NOW" was the example Rachel gave of Anaxanadra's wonderment on first encountering a glass container, and I was rewarded with more encounters like that (first time encountering enough of something that you need to use the word "one thousand," first time encountering horses, etc). Even just her ordinary observations had a feel of ancient Greece to them that I loved, as when she describes the sound of water slapping the side of a boat like dogs drinking, or this, describing dolphins:

Dolphins swam alongside. Now and then they would leap out of the water and spin themselves like yarn.

And then radiantfracture posted a poem the other day, "Pahkwêsikan," by the poet Samantha Nock, that made me want to read the rest of the collection, the author's debut collection. It has a gorgeous cover:

( but the image is a little large, so under the cut it goes )

And now I have a copy!

Speaking of images, check out these great dusky swifts (Cypseloides senex), posted by Aves do Brasil, a bot that posts photos of birds of Brazil. Facebook says that the original photo was taken by Frodoaldo Budke.

( great dusky swifts )

With those intense, deep-set eyes, and clinging to the rock face like that, they seem like a pair of heroes: loyal siblings or friends, or intense lovers, out to redress a wrong. I want to write a story with them as the heroes ... maybe in human form--but that intensity!

I first came upon this poem in 2007; I love it. I shared it back at the time, but that was 16 years ago, so I'm sharing it again--this time with illustrations. (Some of them are click-through-able to the original person's photo on Flickr... others are just shamelessly ripped from stock photos and what-have-you.)

"A Love Letter" was originally published in a collection called Break the Mirror.

( A Love Letter, by Nanao Sakaki )

There's a woman from Timor-Leste I follow on Facebook, Esteviana Amaral, who shares beautiful, sometimes funny, sometimes touching reflections on daily life. Kirsty Sword Gusmão put me onto her with this video (in which you can hear Tetun spoken beautifully). Since then, I've been enjoying--and sometimes translating--her work. Here is one from last Thursday. (Her original post)


(The photo is the one Esteviana shared with the post)

Her words:

Iha momentu balu ita presiza tuur no haree de'it natureza halo nia servisu, udan monu ba rai, kalohan nakukun no loro-matan sa'e.

Momentu sira ne'e bele repete maibé kada minutu ne'ebé liu ho nia istória rasik. Husik natureza hala'o nia knaar no buka tuir ó-nia ksolok rasik.

My translation:

In some moments we need to sit and just watch nature doing her work, rain falling to the ground, dark clouds, and the sun rising.

These moments will repeat, but each minute passes with its own story. This self-same nature carries out her duties and seeks after your joy herself.

Kirsty liked my translation and shared it on her Facebook page!

A Twitter friend tweeted a post that said "Explaining a funeral to a 5 year old. He wants to know if the priest will 'do spells.'" She said in reply, "I would hope so!"

So I wrote this:

With this spell I do create
A chalice made of feathers
To hold your grief so softly
And uplift and honor it

and with *this* spell I do create
A lantern for the light
Of memories of the deceased
Carry it home with you
And may its shining comfort you


In other news, it's still snowing, and now the wind is whirling the snow around and carving sharp edges in it and hollowing out other parts, so I'm doing what I've always wanted to do: I've put some objects in the snow--a piece of wood and a plastic sign, plus a pile of shoveled snow, and I'm going to see how the wind makes the snow flow around them. Stay tuned for pictures, eventually.

My friend CE, who blogs over here, shared this breathtaking poem on Twitter:


Lê Vĩnh Tài | A FIELD OF INHUMANITY – BÀI TRƯỜNG CA VỀ CÁNH ĐỒNG BẤT NHÂN

It is very long and very intense, but as you read through it, you will see and hear how words and phrases and ideas, come up again and again in new contexts, like they do in a sestina, turned over and reinterpreted. Pain, rage, acquiescence, regret, bitterness, beauty, horror--clear eyes, clouded heart.

Here are a handful of the parts that jumped out at me:

When one has been bitten by a dog
Should one bite back
Especially when
It’s a little mad?

Yes. Then again probably no

...

Why do intellectuals refuse to sleep?
Even after they’ve taken in full
The thirty pieces of silver

...

Oh well, let your mind drift back into darkness
There, you can forget

...

While your wife and kids
Those who were fast enough
Escape to write down their life
Down where?

...

One half of the truth is not the truth
But half of the agony is half of the pain
And the poet’s blown up face
Gets blown up along with his beard
Except the poem couldn’t be blown up
Since it may possibly be, a choking hazard

...

I am also a poet
Not some kind of cathedral

I saw dreadlock, deadlock, and deadname in quick succession and started thinking about not hair or tangled traffic or trans rights, but about a dreadful lock, a lock that dies--is executed even. A dead lock. And I thought, how do you kill a lock?

Answer:

The key was turned
The bolt slid into place a final time
Then liquid copper was poured into the hole
--the whole plate melted, a metal smear—

Then prayers, candles, incense
No more will people pass through here

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osprey_archer posted a very fun, very short Valentine's extra for her novel Honeytrap, readily understandable even if you haven't read the novel. All you need to know is it's set in the 1950s, and the characters are a Soviet agent and an American agent who are working together (for reasons). It's a discussion of the capitalist nature of Valentine's Day as celebrated in the America. (Read it here!) And then, coincidentally, a friend linked me to this TikTok video where a woman talks about how capitalist Valentine's Day is, and then provides links to her free anticapitalist you-can-use-them-for-Valentine's-or-any-day cards. I liked "Workers are Billionaire Creators" best.

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I love this art, located in London, by Colombian street artist Stinkfish:



Detail:



(Source: Hooked: Street Art from London and beyond)

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I'm doing some pro bono work for a friend of one of my kids, who's written about the Titanic. I reached a passage where it talks about the SS Californian, which was very close but didn't render assistance, and he describes how it seemed to the Californian that this ship--they didn't know what ship it was--that they had noticed was moving away from them, getting smaller, when really what was happening was it was sinking. It made me think of that famous poem by Stevie Smith, "Not Waving but Drowning.

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Well that would be a bad note to end on! So some light humor. Someone used Google translate to translate a packet of Chinese rice crackers and got this:


(Twitter source)

One of my kids retweeted it with "tag yourself"

So go ahead: Who are you?

The ninja girl made a poem by cutting up Trump's stimulus-check letter and rearranging the words and sentences. The result is excellent:

My former tutor, current pen pal, said it was okay to link to his poems!

So here they are: "Medusas," "Sirenas," and "La Mentira," by Geovanni Trujillo/Mictlán.

I really like them--there are great lines and images in all of them--I really like in "Sirenas," for instance, the very first line: "A veces le cuento al viento sobre ti"---sometimes I tell the wind about you.

I like the idea of the wind as a confidant.

We'd looked at "quiet" poetry earlier--the sort you read to yourself in books--and so I brought in some recordings of poetry being performed for my students to react to and think about.

I played them Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner's "Tell Them," and felt a warm glow as they reacted visibly to her lines about Styrofoam cups and dusty rubber slippers, and my favorite line, about the children flinging like rubber bands across the street. And then when I asked them which lines stuck with them, they had so many others they loved too--the curling letters, "toasted dark brown as the carved ribs of a tree stump," "the breath of God," "papaya golden sunsets" ... and "the ocean level with the land" and "we see what is in our own back yard."

They heard what her poem said.

I played them Elizabeth Acevedo performing "Night Before First Day of School, the opening poem to her novel-in-poems, The Poet X (which I'm reading--except I lent it out to one of the students), and they loved "I feel too small for all that is inside me."

I played them Laurie Anderson's "From the Air," and several students fell in love with it. What's it about, I asked, and some talked about a plane and a crash, but several said, "It's about more than that. It's about living your life--'there is no pilot': you're the pilot. But you're not alone."

I played them Billy Collins reading "Monday," and they got his teasing affection for poetry and poets.

--I should have asked them if they noticed the boys angling across the street... in context, an echo of Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner's poem.

And then we turned to some Tupac Shakur raps. The students range in age from 22 to 55, mainly White, but everyone knew those raps. They recited right along with them, and by the end of "Dear Mama," several were in tears--I think maybe not just for the love in it, but because that love came in spite of the fact that Tupac's mom was an addict. In that piece he's acknowledging all she's gone through and asserting that he loves her as she is. **Many** of my students really want that to be possible for them, with their kids.

I felt like I had wandered into a room so much bigger than I had imagined.

"He's not dead," one student said stoutly. Yeah. Sometimes your presence and your creation is so meaningful that even death can't decommission you.