Orange-colored day

You’re a part of the season, no more and no less
~Liana Flores

For Music Monday, a song Ariana introduced me to during my visit. Liana Flores:

We can make a house called tomorrow

It's sobering to realize that there's a huge chunk of the U.S. voting population that doesn't think of sexual assault as something horrendous enough to disqualify a presidential candidate.
~Ana Kasparian

by Jogesh Chandra Seal

Happy Poetry Friday! How great is it to have poetry friends who will take up a meaningful challenge with you? Here's a post from 2020 full of poems about hand-marked paper ballots.

Ouch: Voting Machine by Maggie Smith

Lastly, I'm returning to Alberto Rios, who knows what to say:

A House Called Tomorrow
by Alberto Ríos

You are not fifteen, or twelve, or seventeen—
You are a hundred wild centuries

And fifteen, bringing with you
In every breath and in every step

Everyone who has come before you,
All the yous that you have been,

The mothers of your mother,
The fathers of your father.

If someone in your family tree was trouble,
A hundred were not:

The bad do not win—not finally,
No matter how loud they are...

read the rest here

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I'm visiting Ariana and Matthew this week but hope to make the rounds anyway, maybe a little late.

Radio, Rhythm & Rhyme has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Matt!

Vooooote

[Project 2025] is a meticulous outline of how they will crumple the system simultaneously through minute changes.
~Cecilia Esterline

For Art Thursday, voting! I voted early:

It was super easy, but would I have gone to great lengths to vote? You bet I would! Am I terrifed at the thought of someone with no regard for civil rights, ethics, or democracy taking the White House?

endless screaming

Like everyone, I am pulling myself together and carrying on. Conserve your strength, preserve your sanity, take action when you can. The Norman Rockwell Museum's Unity Project "calls upon all Americans to uphold democracy by voting":

VOTE
by Lisk Feng

Vote – Register – Find – Learn – Explore – Make Sure – Research – Look – Check
by Timothy Goodman

The Future is in Your Hands – VOTE
by Edel Rodruiguez

Noodle Soup

Jazz music is an intensified feeling of nonchalance.
~Francoise Sagan

For Music Monday, Four80East:

Radiant

The meadows are yellow with buttercups, and the birds fly out of the gold.
~George Augustus Moore

photo by William Warby

Happy Poetry Friday! Today's poem is by Wendy Stern, whose poetry has an archive at the Buddhist Poetry Review.

Vision
by Wendy Stern

If all you see is cityness,
Heavy cement, paving stones,
Concretised un-breathing,
Can you still notice out of the far corner of your eye
That solo flying buttercup,
Rooted in the crusty soil,
There between the cracks,
Amid the greyness, the bleakness,
All radiant yellowness?

Life,
No matter what,
Survival,
No matter where.

All radiant yellowness.

Wendy was a Buddhist and poet who lived in Bristol, in the west of England. For many years she was completely bedridden, and her poetry therefore came from an unusual perspective. Writing poetry was Wendy’s passion and her only form of creativity and self-expression. Her work was produced without the capacity to look at text, to write or to use a laptop. Dictating the poems and then editing them aurally took an immense amount of energy and concentration. Wendy passed away on April 8, 2015. -Buddhist Poetry Review

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Jama's Alphabet Soup has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Jama!

Fionn and Áillen

[Áillen] would burn Tara [the seat of the High King of Ireland] to the ground every year at Samhain [Oct 31/Nov 1] with his fiery breath after lulling all the inhabitants to sleep with his music. This only ended with the arrival of Fionn mac Cumhaill, who inhaled the poison from his spear to keep himself awake and slew Áillen.
~The Boyhood Deeds of Fionn

Now that's a hero, right? Inhaled his own poison to stay awake! For Art Thursday, Fionn mac Cumhaill fighting "The Burner" Áillen. According to Irish History.com:

Fionn Mac Cumhaill, born as Demne, was the son of Cumhaill, the leader of the Fianna, and Muirne, the daughter of the druid Tadg mac Nuadat. Fearing for the child’s safety due to Cumhaill’s death in battle and the enmity of his enemies, Muirne entrusted her son to be raised in secrecy by the druidess Bodhmall and the warrior Liath Luachra.

The name Fionn, meaning “fair” or “bright,” was given to Demne after he killed a dangerous supernatural creature known as Aillen mac Midgna, who had terrorized the people of Tara for years. With his newfound fame, Demne adopted the name Fionn Mac Cumhaill, honoring his father and signifying his bright future as a great hero.

Both of these images seem to be from the same book, but they are quite different. I thought the second one was Áillen because it seemed like there was fire coming out of the creature's mouth but maybe not? What do you think?

Fionn fighting Áillen
illustration by Beatrice Elvery in Violet Russell's Heroes of the Dawn (1914)

illustration to a collection of tales from Irish mythology
Beatrice Elvery, 1914

Orla Gartland

La-la-la, la-la-la, la-la-la-la-la-la
I, I wouldn't trust me either
~Orla Gartland, Backseat Driver

For Music Monday, Irish singer, songwriter, and musician Orla Gartland with "Late to the Party" and "Backseat Driver":

We will be spirals and domes

“And if anyone knows anything about anything,” said Bear to himself, “it’s Owl who knows something about something.”
~Winnie the Pooh

Happy Poetry Friday! Glad you're here. It's National Poetry Day in the U.K. (on Oct 3rd) so huzzah for that!

One morning this week when I walked outside with my dogs, we startled an owl. It flew away but not too far, so I got a good look at it. How thrilled was I? Exceedingly! I told my neighbor, who said he'd seen that owl a couple of times before and he shared this picture:

by Nathan B.

He took this photo out his window! I have been looking for our owl ever since. When I was searching for an owl poem, I found this gorgeous one about starlings. It could make a good mentor poem! What if humans could move like a pod of whales or a caravan of camels? (You can find animal group names here.)

Murmuration
Emily Schulten

If we move with the fluidity of starlings,
like a puddle of clippings in the air that shape-
shifts but never falls hard to the ground,

if we sense enough of each other to know
in which direction to fly away from being
preyed upon, but never from one another,

in swirls and with the unshakable faith
that wherever we turn we will be synchronal,
miming in a language only our bodies

comprehend the intention of our design...

read the rest here

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Please leave your link below!

Welcome to October!

Autumn carries more gold in its pocket than all the other seasons.
~Jim Bishop

For Art Thursday, an assortment of Octobers:

October's "bright blue weather," Work Projects Administration Poster Collection 1940
Attributed to Albert M. Bender

Octobre
Eugène Grasset

Late October
John Atkinson Grimshaw

The Carolyn Wells year book of old favorites and new fancies for 1909

Slow, Slow (Run Run)

I got to free my mind
I got to chase my Soul
I got to face myself
I got to find my glow
~A Y Ọ

For Music Monday, A Y Ọ with Slow, Slow (Run Run):

You count sheep — and stop at one

It is a common experience that a problem difficult at night is resolved in the morning after the committee of sleep has worked on it.
~John Steinbeck

Poet’s Insomnia
by Julian Matthews

It is late and you are awake, stricken by Poet’s Insomnia
You count sheep — and stop at one
You wonder how this lone sheep got here
The scene is a green, verdant field,
framed by white picket fences, rolling hills, shining sun

Scratch that—
Why is this field so green and verdant?
Make it windswept, dirty-olive long-grass, patches of burnt umber
Make the fence mottled, termite-infested, rotting like a grounded pirate’s ship
For that matter, why do hills always have to roll?
Make them weathered, fossil-studded, miocene
Forget the sun...

read the rest here

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Live Your Poem has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Irene!

A bird a day

If it looks like a duck, and quacks like a duck, we have at least to consider the possibility that we have a small aquatic bird of the family anatidae on our hands.
~Douglas Adams

Hi folks! For Art Thursday, I wanted to share an art habit I've been doing for about six weeks. It's a habit with no actual goals except enjoying myself. It's low stakes-- I am using a notebook and colored pencils I already had. The brown paper is sometimes frustrating (yellow doesn't show up well) and I don't have a black pencil so I wing it (haha) when I'm drawing black birds. I just wanted to share my practice in case it encourages you to play around with something you get the urge to do. Maybe I'll draw bugs next.

Oktavists

The term oktavist is most precisely used to refer to basses that sing down to contra B flat and lower in a choral setting.
-Oktavism.com

Sliding in late again for Music Monday, with a majestic bit of singing from the PaTRAM Institute Male Choir. "We have no other help" by Boris Ledkovsky:

Arms out like wings

Có chí làm quan, có gan làm giàu.
Vietnamese proverb, Fortune favors the brave.

Sokół antique motorcycle

Happy Poetry Friday! People are sooo interesting, aren't they? I just love hearing stories, everybody's stories. One of my father's cousins was a motorcycle racer, until he lost a foot doing it. Here's a poem by Hoa Nguyen, who says her mother "left home at 15 and joined a circus and became a motorcycle stunt-woman in Vietnam in the early 1960s. She did these amazing things contrary to what her position as a poor woman, born in 1942 in the Mekong Delta, should have been.” (I feel like this poem -- and last week's -- would be good mentor poems to encourage high school students to write about their ancestors...or perhaps historical figures.)


My Idea of the Circus Is My Idea of the Circus Otherwise Known As: My Mother Was a Celebrated Stunt Motorcyclist, Vietnam, 1958 to 1962
by Hoa Nguyen

Very loud    a mad frenzy     The wooden
barrel she rode would have roared

(I first wrote “road”)
Left home to join the circus: 15 years old

You enter at the bottom and wind upwards
in spirals    the bike climbing the sides

You enter the barrel on a Peugeot
with automatic tied down handles

I mean the kind that you can peg
so you can ride hands-free

arms out like wings on either side...


read the rest here

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TeacherDance has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Linda!

The beauty of the air

I want to paint the air in which the bridge, the house, the boat are located. The beauty of the air where they are, and that's nothing short of impossible.
~Claude Monet

For Art Thursday, Impressionist paintings by Sisley, Corinth, and Pissarro. This quote from Wikipedia kills me:

When Pissarro returned to his home in France after the war [1872], he discovered that of the 1,500 paintings he had done over 20 years, which he was forced to leave behind when he moved to London, only 40 remained. The rest had been damaged or destroyed by the soldiers, who often used them as floor mats outside in the mud to keep their boots clean.

I feel like Pissarro could teach a thing or two about resilience after dealing with that.

The Hay Cart, Montfoucault, 1879
Camille Pissarro

Lady at the Goldfish Basin (1911)
Lovis Corinth

The Terrace at Saint-Germain, Spring, 1875
Alfred Sisley

Rock and roll vocalizations

Our mystical throat singing, special elemental vocals, enchanting sounds of vargan (jaw harp), khomys, morinhur, leather drums will take you to the wild, northern thickets of the Siberian taiga.
~Otyken

For Music Monday, Otyken:

Lanterns in my words

Out of the fire comes firmness, through stress we pass to strength.
~Charles F. Binns

photo by Musahfm

Happy Poetry Friday! Today's poem mixes music, pottery, poetry, defiance, and positivity. It's a lot, but it holds holds holds.

Praise Dave
by Glenis Redmond

Enslaved potter-poet
Edgefield, SC

First time I see a jar rise up,
I be midwifed into life.

Understood how these pots and I be kin
––dismissed to what’s under foot.

I learned to turn and turn––
people the world with pots.

I pour my need into the knead
until forty thousand around me crowd,

but everything I love, I lose
so I want what I mold to hold.

Even my empty pots
be full. One say:

I wonder where is all my relation
Friendship to all and every nation.

There are lanterns in my words––
every story got another story.

Some call me Dave the slave, if that’s all they got,
I say leave the rhymes to me.

When people look at me, a slave be...


read the rest here

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My Juicy Little Universe has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Heidi!

A vital public good

A vibrant, rich, growing corpus of public-domain books is a vital public good - similar to parks, the infrastructure of basic services, and other hallmarks of any advanced society.
~Tom Peters

For Art Thursday, images from the Public Domain Review:

The Circulating Library
George Spratt, ca. 1830

Owl with Two Owlets Sitting on Branch
Henri De Groux, 1895

Study of a Hand with Needle
Henricus Wilhelmus Couwenberg, ca. 1830

The Mansion of the Plates
Katsushika Hokusai, ca. 1830

The Night-Blowing Cereus
Robert John Thornton, 1807

Big Ocean

Right now, the concepts of disability and non-disability are separated, but ultimately, we want to see a world where those boundaries are erased.
~Park Hyun-jin of Big Ocean

For belated Music Monday, Big Ocean, a Korean pop band who is HoH (Hard-of-hearing)/Deaf. I heard about them on my Instagram feed, which thanks to my interest in the Paralympics, is now full of cool people with disabilities. I love that a deaf Kpop band exists.

From an article in The Korea Times by Pyo Kyung-min:

“The three of us have different levels of hearing ability,” Kim says. “During recording, we often struggle to stay on beat because we can’t hear the rhythm of the track clearly. It’s hard to fix this on our own, so we rely on the staff’s hand signals to help us stay in sync.”

“Tuning our voices is also challenging,” Park adds. “We use an app that helps us match our pitch and then we memorise the amount of muscle effort needed to produce each note. It’s not easy to remember the muscle tension required to hit the right notes, so we focus a lot of our training on that.”

...For choreography rehearsals, they use a smartwatch-style metronome that provides pulse feedback through vibration, along with a visual metronome on a monitor that helps maintain rhythm with light cues.

Don't lie awake

Few delights can equal the presence of one whom we trust utterly.
~George MacDonald

This has been Heather Maloney week on the blog. I shared a Maloney performance for Music Monday and I'm sharing her again (a different song) for Poetry Friday... these lyrics are so poetic! Check them out:

Hey, hey baby, I'm your picnic blanket
Give me your crumbs, give me your drips, give me your bugs
Hey, hey baby, I'm your mud-room floor
Give me your street-dust, give me your beach-sand, give me your rain
Hey, hey baby, I'm your nightstand drawer
Give me your secrets, give me your longings, give me a chance
To hold these things

I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna sell it to the papers. No, and
I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna spin em' into stories. And
I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna use it as ammunition, no
I just wanna hold...



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Buffy Silverman has the Poetry Friday round-up today. Thanks, Buffy!

Koishikawa tea house

Tea is the magic key to the vault where my brain is kept.
~Frances Hardinge

I've been thinking about tea because Elena is having a tea party tomorrow.

Tea house at Koishikawa. The morning after a snowfall
Katsushika Hokusai

P.S. I just finished A Face Like Glass by Frances Hardinge (who is quoted above). So good! Would love to read more by her.

We are golden

Can I walk beside you
I have come here to lose the smog
And I feel to be a cog in something turning
~Joni Mitchell

Hi y'all! I forgot to post something for Music Monday! Here are Darlingside and Heather Maloney playing "Woodstock" by Joni Mitchell:



As long as we're golden...Curtis Aaron, Velorisa, Jscott 'The Glove' Martin, Ben Goodman, and Louis Nelson playing "Golden" by Jill Scott:

Stronger than an airplane wing

Maybe what we can do when we feel overwhelmed is to start small. Start with what we have loved as kids and see where that leads us.
~Aimee Nezhukumatathil

Happy Poetry Friday! I am thinking about a well-loved bird today...and especially about voting.

One Vote
by Aimee Nezhukumatathil

After reading a letter from his mother, Harry T. Burn cast the deciding vote to ratify the 19th amendment of the U.S. Constitution

My parents are from countries
where mangoes grow wild and bold
and eagles cry the sky in arcs and dips.
America loved this bird too and made

it clutch olives and arrows. Some think
if an eaglet falls, the mother will swoop
down to catch it. It won’t. The eagle must fly...

read the rest here

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Chicken Spaghetti has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Susan!

Vynohrad

You cannot eat a cluster of grapes at once, but it is very easy if you eat them one by one.
Jacques Roumain

My parents are having a bumper crop of grapes this year so I brought some back yesterday and hope to make jelly today. I don't really know what I'm doing but am hopeful!

For Art Thursday, grapes:

Bufford's fruit cards, no. 779-5 [grapes]
Bufford

Druer i et Drivhus (Grapes in a Greenhouse), 1903 oil on canvas
Anna Syberg

Bunch of Grapes Quilt in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
photo by Daderot

Porträt einer jungen Frau in einer Weinlaube, 1851
Franz Xaver Winterhalter

Archaeological revival necklace, circa 1880
Castellani
Metropolitan Museum of Art

Crouse Brothers' descriptive catalogue, 1879

A delicate look in her eye

The song was co-written by Costello with Paul McCartney, and was co-produced with T-Bone Burnett and Kevin Killen, and features Paul McCartney on his iconic Höfner bass.
~Wikipedia

I bought some flowers the other day, Veronica flowers in particular, and Elvis Costello's Veronica kept going through my head when I looked at them. For Music Monday, Costello's song inspired by his grandmother:

The next Games

This medal is mainly for Yunidis Castillo. Yesterday she suffered a serious injury and I know that it is a bad moment for her now. It has happened to me before so I know how she feels.
We are all humans, we spend almost all our career together so when a teammate suffers, I suffer too.
~Omara Durand, Paralympic gold medallist

Happy Poetry Friday! I am excited that the Paralympics are starting soon (August 28-September 8) . The sports are: Para Archery, Para Athletics, Para Badminton, Blind football, Boccia, Para Canoe, Para Cycling, Para Equestrian, Goalball, Para Judo, Para Powerlifting, Para Rowing, Shooting Para Sport, Sitting Volleyball, Para Swimming, Para Table Tennis, Para Taekwondo, Para Triathlon, Wheelchair Basketball, Wheelchair Fencing, Wheelchair Rugby, and Wheelchair Tennis.

photo by Bob Nichols (USDA)

Guide Dog
by Ona Gritz

He's a celebrity on trains,
an unexpected guest at restaurants
where he lies still as the table legs
that frame his sprawled form.
There's a jaunt to his walk
as he guides you past sign posts,
weaves through rush hour streets
so that no one so much as brushes
your sleeve. That's your best friend...

read the rest here

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Previous Paralympic posts

A collection of picture books featuring disabled athletes on Instagram (The KidLit Mama)

Imagine the Possibilities has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Rose!

Peaches

One does a whole painting for one peach and people think just the opposite - that particular peach is but a detail.
~Pablo Picasso

Did you know that nectarines are actually a type of peach? I didn't realize that until recently. This week, a friend brought me a basket of peaches and they were like candy. Soo good. For Art Thursday, peaches:

Still life with peaches and silver platter
William Mason Brown

Die junge Pfirsichverkäuferin, 1888
Giovanni Sottocornola

Jin Tingbiao's painting of Yaochi to celebrate longevity

Pêches
Claude Monet

Still life with peaches, grapes and nuts on a table
Emilie Preyer

Here in my car

On November 7, Nine Inch Nails was formally inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame, Class of 2020, by punk icon Iggy Pop.
~Wikipedia

For Music Monday, Nine Inch Nails with Gary Numan:

Happy typo

The more I do poetry, the less it’s about what the poem is and more about who the poem serves.
~Elizabeth Woody

I read Ariel Lawhon's The Frozen River this week and closed the book thinking that Lawhon must be a wonderful person.

The feeling reminded me of that age-old quandary: how does an artist's personality/behavior affect how you feel about their work? Recently, a lot of people were disappointed by Alice Munro.

In this case, I'm sure Lawhon is great, haven't heard anything otherwise. I feel like I know so many ethical, big-hearted writers whose beautiful internal lives are reflected in their writing. I am still wrapping my head around the gap for some people between their writing and their lives. It's bewildering.

On to today's poetry!

Blessed by Mistake by Kim Stafford

Kim Stafford on Revising the elements of a poem
Kim Stafford's poems and prompts

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Not a poem, but:

Linescapes Drawing (Sonja and Gasper)

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Salt City Verse has the Poetry Friday round-up. Thanks, Janice!