Protector

There's a long line of hands carryin' your name, mm
Liftin' you up, so you will be raised
~Beyoncé

Congratulations to Beyoncé on winning Album of the Year at the Grammys last night:

Batter our cymbals

When a man starts out to build a world, He starts first with himself.
~Langston Hughes

Midnight Golfer by E. J. Martin

Happy Poetry Friday! It's almost Black History Month, but any time is a good time to celebrate Black excellence. Today we have Langston Hughes and Airea D. Matthews.

To You
by Langston Hughes

To sit and dream, to sit and read,
To sit and learn about the world
Outside our world of here and now—
Our problem world—
To dream of vast horizons of the soul
Through dreams made whole,
Unfettered, free—help me!
All you who are dreamers too,
Help me to make
Our world anew.
I reach out my dreams to you.

*******************

excerpt of Eviction
by Airea D. Matthews
for Wislawa

If one sister is silenced into salt

without body that remembers,

then I will batter my cymbals

bearing witness for us both

with what body still remains.

*******************

excerpt of ‘Black Ecstatic Ode’
by Airea D. Matthews

Praise to that which endures
To old doors, layers of paint
To years of storm beating solid oak
Praise to the gable roof that is a ceiling
coffered ceiling that is also a floor
Praise to open wombs and caskets
To any mother who must decide either
Praise to what shoulders weight
To brackets and load-bearing walls
beams and spindly skeletons
sacred geometry and tangents
To levees and pregnant summers
the bullet-ridden body
To coilspring and wheel

Praise, soon, to the crown and seed lowering
To both the thorny and fertile soil
Praise to the ground unfastening
To every earthworm bristle
and every seraph’s six wings
Interlocked in songdance of welcome

To the body relenting only to dust
the spirit ascending straightway to stars
Praise to all who rejoice in becoming
To all who rejoice in return

*******************

Bookseed Studio has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Jan!

The Brave zine has been updated! We added two poems that came in late.

Sipping Grief by Betsy Kahn ("There is actually a firehose of grief at my disposal, but everybody knows you can’t drink from a firehose. So when these images float up, I just take a little sip of grief, and mourn the loss")

Poetry Temple with Sage Cohen. February 8 from 3-4:30

Kim Tschang-Yeul

It was in Paris, in fact, that [Kim Tschang-Yeul] first embarked on his monumental water drop painting titled Événement de la Nuit (1972), where a single oversized water drop hangs, its shadow projected against the dark ground; within the droplet, a reflection of the window of the artist’s studio. Ever since, for fifty years, he continued to present works featuring water droplets that would transform into his trademark.
~Adam Hencz

For Art Thursday, Kim Tschang-Yeul. More from Artland's Adam Hencz: "The water drop motif straddles the space between the real and the abstract...water’s nature of being transparent while simultaneously having substance has been interpreted as a metaphor of emptiness or peace.

The meticulous practice of producing works, the painting process, and the creative act itself served as a self-healing journey for a generation of Korean artists [the Dansaekhwa movement] that grew up in the midst of the chaos of the Korean war...Creating patterns with the act of repetition is central to the practice of these artists. "

Kim Tschang-Yeul

Kim Tschang-Yeul

Huddled Masses

I lift my lamp beside the golden door
Remember what I stand here for
~Shaina Taub

Shaina Taub:

The Round-Up

The remarkable thing about Shakespeare is that he is really very good – in spite of all the people who say he is very good.
~Robert Graves

Happy Poetry Friday! Welcome! It's lovely to have you here.

Sending thanks to participants in Jone's New Year's Postcard Swap. I have enjoyed receiving your warmth and creativity on these cold days.

It's been a transformative week. What are you and I being transformed into? My hope is that we will become more clear-eyed, generous, imaginative, curious, and brave.

I thought about "stiffening the sinews" the other day, so I had to share Shakespeare's Henry V, Act III, Scene I [Once more unto the breach, dear friends]:

Once more unto the breach, dear friends, once more;
Or close the wall up with our English dead!
In peace there's nothing so becomes a man,
As modest stillness and humility;
But when the blast of war blows in our ears,
Then imitate the action of the tiger:
Stiffen the sinews, conjure up the blood,
Disguise fair nature with hard-favoured rage:
Then lend the eye a terrible aspect;
Let it pry through the portage of the head,
Like the brass cannon; let the brow o'erwhelm it
As fearfully as doth a galled rock
O'erhang and jutty his confounded base,
Swill'd with the wild and wasteful ocean.
Now set the teeth and stretch the nostril wide;
Hold hard the breath and bend up every spirit
To his full height.



Thank you to everyone who contributed to my collection of brave poems (and to Elena, who formatted it)! You can read it online here and you can print it here. (Choose "print on both sides" and "short edge." Heidi also says that the print command is in the "little 3-dot dropdown," which is different than printing your own doc from your own Adobe account. If you have trouble printing from Adobe, let me know.)

I had thought I would pick my favorite poem to give the $50 Bookshop gift card to, but when it came down to it, I couldn't decide. Congrats to Irene, who was chosen by the random choice generator. Happy book shopping!

Isn't the image below cool? It's on a Wikipedia tshirt and says (in small letters) Free Knowledge For Everyone! I'm a huge fan of free knowledge in general and Wikipedia in specific, so I bought one of these tees for a family member. It was a hit with my kids and their SOs.

If you'd like to learn about how to keep info/anything on the Web safely archived, check out this DIY Web Archiving zine by Quinn Dombrowski, Tessa Walsh, Anna Kijas, Ilya Kremer, and Amanda Wyatt Visconti.

Time to add your link!

Spirals

Growth is a spiral process, doubling back on itself, reassessing and regrouping.
~Julia Margaret Cameron

I try to draw an animal every day. Yesterday I picked a snail illustration to use as a mentor drawing but ran out of time before I got around to it. Thinking about what to post for Art Thursday, a snail's spiral shell popped into my head.

When I looked up "spiral shells" on Wikipedia, my curiosity was piqued by "spirals in animals" generally. What other spirals do animals have? There are millipedes, ammonites, other sea animal shells, dog tails, chameleon tails...

Woo, chameleons are impressive-looking! (I'm including the Black-headed dwarf babies at the end even though you can't really see their spirals very well because, aah, so cute!)

Blue-legged Chameleon (Calumma crypticum), Ranomafana National Park, Madagascar
Frank Vassen

Eastern Cape Dwarf Chameleon (Bradypodion ventrale)
Marius Burger

Amber Mountain chameleon (Calumma amber) male Montagne d’Ambre, Madagascar
Charles J. Sharp

Female Chamaeleo africanus digging a nest
Benny Trapp

Cryptic Chameleon (Calumma crypticum)
Julien Renoult

Indian chameleon From Kanakpura, Karnataka
Girish Gowda

Black-headed Dwarf Chameleon (Bradypodion melanocephalum)
suncana

I saw my people

Nobody living can ever stop me,
As I go walking that freedom highway;
Nobody living can ever make me turn back
This land was made for you and me.
~Woody Guthrie

photo by Ted Eytan

Am I sad that an arsonist is being put in charge of the fire department? You bet. Am I going to keep walking that freedom highway? Absolutely.

For Music Monday, This Land is Your Land: