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

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

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

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

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...



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

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: