what carries culture is the sound old women breathe in winter
found this jotted down on two separate pieces of paper while cleaning out old files, no clue what or who it is from
what carries cu…
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Monthly Archives: February 2014
life-saving tru…
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life-saving truths from Linda Ramsey of Brooklyn Women’s Martial Arts:
1. any choice you make to survive is the right choice
2. It’s better to know it and not need it than to need it and not know it
3. Fight with confidence and conviction and do whatever it takes to survive
4. It’s better to be judged by 12 than carried by 6
passed on to me from a friend who heard this at a National Women’s Martial Arts Federation special training
those who perceive themselves as powerless
from a letter published in Lesbian Connection sometime in the late 1980’s:
I become more and more convinced that those who perceive themselves as powerless are the most treacherous people of all because they do not believe they can inflict harm on others.
“Mid-February” – a poem for Maxine Kumin by Alicia Ostriker
MID-FEBRUARY
for Maxine Kumin
The mare rears, she has almost thrown her rider.
It’s the thaw, it’s the scent of spring,
The animals know it before we do.
While we still shiver and worry ourselves over aging,
In the sickroom, the patient begins to heal.
Inside here, the windows are steaming up
But a path runs through the woods,
Half dirty snow, half mud
With the stones sticking through
And the snapped branches lying across, the ones
That were ready to die
And gave themselves to the wind.
Friend, it’s a day for a walk.
Are we going to walk it?
Alicia Ostriker No Heaven (University of Pittsburgh Press ©2005)
to my old brown earth
there was a time when our ancestors sang together every day
Poems in Conversation
I’ve been devouring Jane Hirshfield’s Nine Gates: Entering the Mind of Poetry. Her chapter on translation is insightful and the poems she’s selected as examples are moving, especially this one:
Lying alone,
my black hair tangled,
uncombed,
I long for the one
who touched it first.
– Izumi Shikibu, translated by Jane Hirshfield and Mariko Aratani
Hirshfield writes, “Japanese critics have long pointed out that Shikibu’s tangled black hair is one of very few references to the details of physical life in all Japanese poetry.” Reading Shikibu’s poem made me think of Jack Gilbert’s poem “Married,” one of many poems in The Great Fires that made me realize I couldn’t live without poetry:
Married
I came back from the funeral and crawled
around the apartment, crying hard,
searching for my wife’s hair.
For two months got them from the drain,
from the vacuum cleaner, under the refrigerator,
and off…
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This Frenzy 