Poem #1-March- Lynette
(This poem is on a different topic than climate, but it is what I've got. It was accepted to a poetry journal pending revision. I need a LOT of help in revising this. It has sat for ages, and I feel daunted. I'm not seeing the forest for the trees. I look forward to your feedback.) Virginia Woolf on Kavenaugh On the Saturday Kavenaugh was steam rolled onto the US Supreme Court despite the testimony of women he had sexually assaulted while he gleefully laughed in his narcissistic sadism, I was studying Virginia Woolf’s suicide. I was surrounded, covened together with 13 mostly grey-haired women. Women’s Studies professors. English professors. We were all guided by who should have been honored as Poet Laureate while she was still in full health, lesbian writer, teacher, poet Judith Barrington. 3 hours of wise woman group mind communing, pondering Virginia Woolf’s suicide note and her dying request t...
W.S. Merwin
ReplyDeletefrom the Essential W.S. Merwin
edited by Michael Wiegers
Copper Canyon Press 2017
For a Coming Extinction
Gray whale
Now that we are sending you to The End
That great god
Tell him
That we who follow you invented forgiveness
And forgive nothing
I write as though you could understand
And I could say it
One must always pretend something
Among the dying
When you have left the seas nodding on their stalks
Empty of you
Tell him that we were made
On another day
The bewilderment will diminish like an echo
Winding along your inner mountains
Unheard by us
And find its way out
Leaving behind it the future
Dead
And ours
When you will not see again
The whale calves trying the light
Consider what you will find in the black garden
And its court
The sea cows the Great Auks the gorillas
The irreplaceable hosts ranged countless
And foreordaining as stars
Our sacrifices
Join your word to theirs
Tell him
That it is we who are important
A LETTER FROM F. SCOTT FITZGERALD, QUARANTINED IN 1920 IN THE SOUTH OF FRANCE DURING THE SPANISH INFLUENZA OUTBREAK.
ReplyDeleteDearest Rosemary,
It was a limpid dreary day, hung as in a basket from a single dull star. I thank you for your letter. Outside, I perceive what may be a collection of fallen leaves tussling against a trash can. It rings like jazz to my ears. The streets are that empty. It seems as though the bulk of the city has retreated to their quarters, rightfully so. At this time, it seems very poignant to avoid all public spaces. Even the bars, as I told Hemingway, but to that he punched me in the stomach, to which I asked if he had washed his hands. He hadn’t. He is much the denier, that one. Why, he considers the virus to be just influenza. I’m curious of his sources.
The officials have alerted us to ensure we have a month’s worth of necessities. Zelda and I have stocked up on red wine, whiskey, rum, vermouth, absinthe, white wine, sherry, gin, and lord, if we need it, brandy. Please pray for us.
You should see the square, oh, it is terrible. I weep for the damned eventualities this future brings. The long afternoons rolling forward slowly on the ever-slick bottomless highball. Z. says it’s no excuse to drink, but I just can’t seem to steady my hand. In the distance, from my brooding perch, the shoreline is cloaked in a dull haze where I can discern an unremitting penance that has been heading this way for a long, long while. And yet, amongst the cracked cloud line of an evening’s cast, I focus on a single strain of light, calling me forth to believe in a better morrow.
Faithfully yours,
F. Scott Fitzgerald