January 29, 2013
January 27, 2013
January 25, 2013
Poetry Friday--"Inauguration Day 2013"
I can't tell you how delightful it was to be at home on Inauguration Day. Normally I'm at work and only get to see soundbites later in the day. It was fun to watch, from start to finish, the all-American hoopla that goes into inaugurating a president. It also restored a little of the faith and pride that I had lost over the manic past year of electioneering.
Inauguration Day 2013Tabatha Yeatts is hosting this week's Poetry Friday Round-Up. See you there!
Ardent speeches, prayers,
and poems are peppered with
references to diversity
and immigrants, Seneca
Falls, Selma, and Stonewall.
Meanwhile, TV cameras point
toward the mall scanning
the crowd of hundreds
of thousands swathed in
wool, cotton, and fleece.
Male, female, black, white,
and every shade of human,
young, old, gay, straight,
native born, recently arrived.
They are all there. All here.
Smiling, crying, silent,
or cheering--huddled masses
yearning to be seen and
to see what is truth--
We, the people. We. The People
have arrived at the party
while the invitation is still
being stuffed in an envelope.
© Diane Mayr, all rights reserved.
Photo by Brian Gratwicke.
January 22, 2013
January 20, 2013
January 18, 2013
Poetry Friday--Photographs
Sharon Olds has written some truly heartbreaking poems. This is one of them:
The photograph below was taken October 10, 1921. The Library of Congress caption reads, "Two small coffins being carried on stretchers to cemetery in the Volga famine district of Bolshevist Russia."
Photograph of the GirlThere are many photographs of the famine in Russia that took place in 1921. I wouldn't recommend looking at them. Children suffered greatly. Many did not survive.
The girl sits on the hard ground,
the dry pan of Russia, in the drought
of 1921, stunned,
eyes closed, mouth open,
raw hot wind blowing
sand in her face. Hunger and puberty are
taking her together. She leans on a sack,
layers of clothes fluttering in the heat,
the new radius of her arm curved.
She cannot be not beautiful, but she is
starving. Each day she grows thinner, and her bones
grow longer, porous. The caption says
she is going to starve to death that winter
with millions of others. Deep in her body
the ovaries let out her first eggs,
golden as drops of grain.
From The Dead and the Living.
The photograph below was taken October 10, 1921. The Library of Congress caption reads, "Two small coffins being carried on stretchers to cemetery in the Volga famine district of Bolshevist Russia."
ProcessSorry for the downer today...I hope the Round-Up at Violet Nesdoly/poems will have more cheerful poetry to share with you!
Let me forget the child
whose body I brought into
the world and whose soul
I carry out so clumsily.
"Just walk," he says.
I look down, and watch
my step. I look down
and pray not to stumble.
I lift my foot...
"Just walk," he says.
Lord, let me lay my child
in the belly of Earth--
only She will not go
to sleep hungry tonight.
"Just walk," he says.
So I do.
© Diane Mayr, all rights reserved.
January 15, 2013
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