You never know what we'll churn up in cleaning a stall
Just a heads-up for anyone who might want to show up in Amesbury, Massachusetts, tonight. I’m the featured reader at this month’s Prime Time Poets gathering. The open mic starts at 6:30 in the Market Square Bakehouse, 5 Market Square, just a few blocks from John Greenleaf Whittier’s home. And, yes, I’ll be paying homage to Whittier in his more topical, acerbic vein.
Once again, Bryan P.T. Riley has put together a lively slate of reader for the coming months. Here we go!
America – and the world – needs a Congress that can solve problems.
Not make them. And not pretend they don’t exist.
The public needs to take back the House and Senate and stop marching to the tune of the One Percent. Or the lunatic fringe. Or the National Rifle Association. What kind of Congress runs scared in the shadow realm as this one does? Denial is not an option when it comes to the real issues before us. (All of us.)
One man can’t do the job alone. No matter how valiantly he’s done in the face of such ill will and obfuscation.
Selecting the examples of historic architectural styles that are running in the Red Barn’s Strolling Dover series on Wednesdays, I have to admit one thing.
Often, more impressive houses can be found in some of the neighboring cities and towns, meaning those a bit closer to the ocean.
Unlike more prosperous settlements around nearby Atlantic harbors – Portsmouth, New Hampshire; York, Maine; and Newburyport, Massachusetts, all spring to mind – Dover was essentially a blue-collar mill town. Or, as the ditty went,
Portsmouth by the sea;
Dover, by the smell
referring to the tanneries needed to keep the mills supplied with leather belts that conveyed power from the falling water to the looms and related machinery above.
Rich merchants and sea captains didn’t retire here, and even though we were a seaport, we were a dozen or so miles from the open ocean downstream. As a result, our housing was more modest, less refined than some of the magnificent specimens found clustered overlooking the prime wharves and customs houses of our tonier neighbors.
That doesn’t take away from my pleasure of strolling through Dover or of sharing details observed along the way. Just want to put it all in perspective.
Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the “war to end wars.” This was the “war to make the world safe for democracy.” No one told them that dollars and cents were the real reason. No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on which they were going to cross might be torpedoed by submarines built with United State patents. They were just told it was to be a “glorious adventure.”
Maj. Gen. Smedley Darlington Butler, USMC
— from War Is a Racket
How many of those scoffing at climate change also think Darwin was all wrong?
Even while planting hybrid seeds or taking medicines developed through application of an understanding of evolution?
For that matter, speaking honestly, they’d probably still have the world flat rather than global.
It’s not all that they’d flatten.
The Olympic Peninsula is an extraordinary extreme in continental United States. It juts out in the far upper left-hand corner, surrounded on three sides by ocean and inlets and featuring a jagged mountain range in its center. Much of it is lush and tangled, and there is relatively little human habitation.
It could be a land of the gods, as its very name suggests. Or as the Native Americans, with their stories still intact, will relate. Forget Zeus and Hera, then – this is a panoply arising from American roots and its westward focus.
Come along into the rainforest and then camp just in from the beach. As I did, collecting these poems.
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When I see this …
… I think of this.
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The news coming out of Kansas is truly disturbing. Things were bad enough when historian Thomas Frank asked, What’s the Matter With Kansas? (Subtitled, “How conservatives won the heart of America.”) But now it’s looking out and out suicidal.
It’s what happens when ultra-right-wingers take over the governorship and legislature and begin dismantling the government. Make that, all signs of civilization. How bad can it get? When the legislature cuts down the judiciary?
This is tyranny running toward dictatorship. And the bold economic “plan” is piling up record debts for the state – and others who just might come to the rescue will wind up with the “tax-increase” label. Well, it’s looking hopeless unless the corporations in the state force a change in direction, as business leaders are urging. (At least they know the value of investing for a future.)
My suggestion? Go ahead, if you want, be truly conservative. Give it back to the Indians. And move to your own reservation.
As I said at the time …
Did I ever mention that if you examine the headstones in many cemeteries in Montgomery County, Ohio, where I’m from, the names are identical to those in a typical Lancaster County, Pennsylvania, graveyard? Turns out half of my dad’s ancestry is Pennsylvania Dutch who continued in western Ohio from the early 1800s.
World War I, of course, obliterated any awareness of that German connection. But we weren’t alone. Not just the first wave, who arrived before the Revolutionary War in their desire for religious freedom, either. The more urban wave of the mid-1800s, with all of its high culture, also vanished from public awareness.
These are histories that need to be restored. They helped build America, urban and rural, and they were a sizable part of the population.
If you garden, unless you have a pickup truck or access to one, you’ll have to decide what to do with the limbs and branches you trim. Bagging them for the dump’s a pain. One thing you don’t see in the colorful gardening books, of course, just may be essential. I’m speaking of the brush pile. Especially if you can’t get a burn permit due to neighborhood density.
The wood breaks down over time, however slowly, but the pile does provide refuge for small critters as well as kindling for our wood-fired stove through winter.
It’s all part of working our plot, with an emphasis on composting and natural balance.
In an urban setting like ours, rejuvenating the soil itself can be a revelation. Items keep coming to the surface from somewhere underground – stones, glass, costume jewelry, bits of metal or plastic objects. Nothing prepared me for the spaceman, though – the one holding a pair of pliers. No, he topped the toy horse and the Neanderthal with a club, for certain.
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Jnana's Red Barn 