Wednesday, June 17, 2020

Sylvia's collage poem: Small Town Texas Protest -- with the photos!

































Small Town Protest with Collage


These come, then, with their signs, too many to choose best from. 

They’re ready, already, after a long wait for a way to protest here on the town square with its fountain, its man on a horse.  There’s no public transit to the cities, not like when the old folk were young, could take off to where things happen, back when cars and gas were cheap if you didn’t want to take the bus.  Lots of jobs.  Cheap rent.  Education.

Are they Generation Z already?  Then we start over?  Or what? They’re it?  Last chance?

Pick any one you want to remember, then.  Let it be the writing on the cardboard wall of your mind.  A hopeful sign from one of these grand children:



HATRED IS A VIRUS TOO 
Black Lives Matter
*
He called Mama
*
No More KKKiller Cops
*
Back Justice
Love Mercy
Walk Humbly
Stay Pissed
*
NOBODY’S ILLEGAL
ON STOLEN LAND
*
JESUS DIDN’T DIE FOR US TO
HATE EACH OTHER
*
RISE UP
*
NO ROOM FOR RACISM
*
STAY BLACK AND REMAIN PROUD

*
My black family and friends
deserve to be as respected as I am.
*
I’m not black
but I see you.
I’m not black
but I hear you.
I’m not black
but |I will
Stand by you.
*
IF THEY OPEN FIRE
STAND BEHIND ME.
**

They stand politely in Sunday summer heat, among them tech-savvy savants who even so made these humbly lettered signs on pieces of cardboard, … nothing purchased, nothing slick --  No Sticks!  They stand modestly through all the malarkey of small town southern plantation culture [ersatz Christian] assembly void of anarchist urbanity, nothing boughten brought along but new black tee-shirts on young black men who pulled this together as best they could, having never done anything like this in their lives, so that something could be said to have been said, here, in their own place --  to come together with blessings of all appropriate, if need be; to appropriate, for once, in need indeed, their own home-town King’s X.


Sylvia Manning
Seguin, Texas
June 16, 2020

after June 7, 2020




This from nearest town, New Braunfels
The young men who pulled it together.

Thursday, June 11, 2020

Some of the poems we read June 10, 2020




Here are some of the poems we heard in response to the take-away challenge to write a sestina or something relating to an old adage.  Adrien managed to do both in the same poem.  


1.  Adrien Helm's sestina with the old adage as title, "The more things change, the more they stay the same."



“plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose”
                                                            Jean Baptiste Alphonse Karr 1849

The more things change the more they stay the same.
Shackled in place forever there to stay,
Since 1619 when trans shipped here they
Were locked away from freedom’s change,
Cut off, deprived, of life’s abundant things.
No wonder they cannot but speak of more.

Our greedy forebears drove for more and more
Seeing the “other,” black or red, the same
Rapacious in their hunger for more things
Land and goods, restless push to stay
Away from stasis, always toward change.
The status quo, “enough,“ unknown to them. (sic)

So enslaved built the towns and homesteads they
Established and grew to prosper more and more.
Presence of abundant rich land meant change;
The continent’s face was never the same,
And indigenous folks could never stay
With whites who plundered and coveted things.

Industrialization soon drove things
With cheap labor away from farms, so they
Prospered a new way, and they didn’t stay
With slavery’s “institution” anymore.
The Southern economy stayed the same
And even unto civil war resisted change.

Civil War, our costliest, did bring change
Blacks were no longer chattel, things.
But reality was lived much the same
Their labor was leased for petty “crimes” and they
Were slaves by another name, and what’s more
In poverty, and ignorance they’d stay.


From this and Jim Crow they fled north to stay,
But racist urban life was little change
As institutions only promised more
And didn’t deliver any of those things
That would assure the fulsome life, that they
As human beings deserved just the same.

People protest to say they are not “things.”
With diverse allies make this adage change:
The more things change the more they stay the same.


                                                              AWH 6/10/2020

2.  Moira Coleen's poem for change



CHANGEABLE
     
Grace is in 
The windy blue of skye
Cloud of Angels wing
Sweeps the earth
In rising retreat becomes 
The crocodile
Lolling for a belly scratch


                             Moira Coleen O’Neill



3.  Lucette's poem about chance, not change


THE CHANCE YOU TAKE

Speeding down
the hills of that town
on her blue Schwinn
no hands
she once believed that
due to her consummate
balance and in no small
part her youth
she was in complete control
of the bike
of the street
of her larger than
life
and couldn’t imagine that
one future day
balance impaired
control ceded
to those stronger
and younger
she would clutch those
handlebars with both hands
choose only the safer
streets and hang on
as if her shrunk
down life was worth
the caution

                                      Lucette Bernard
                                        June 9, 2020

                                      


4.  Another sestina, Sylvia's, but not to an adage



Sestina for a Father and Son

Ángel (AHN hell, really)
pushing his son whose name
is Máximo, his middle child,
still only two years old,
past a Black Lives Matter sign
across the street, then into the shade

over the play car, ready for shade
after all those police cars – really
more than needed, a glaring sign
funds are to the max (to play on a name) --
so many of them in their old
parking lot -- they’ve another now, new – child

of only two even older than it, boy child
born brown, not black, but shade
protects him from being darker, old
hope of Mexican parents, really
not a hope of his own he would name,
Angel, but the times are a sign

or his neighbor wouldn’t have that sign
in yard across from him and his brown child,
brother to Katia and Belén by name,
one older, one a baby, inside now in shade
of their mother Miranda’s love, really
their grand protection, even until they’re old.

But just today, past police cars in the old
parking lot – as if it were a sign
that all is well, and beautiful, really –
Angel’s pushing son Máximo, their child,
past the glare of the day into shade
now, into green space without a name

in his little car, little son whose name
resembles Maximilian’s, that kindly old
French ruler who died in Chapultepec shade
because he couldn’t read the sign –
assuming he was fine, like a child –
that he would be permitted to escape, really.

No, there’s shade for a son whose name
is Máximo, really, not that old
Emperor’s.  A good sign, this passage with his child.


                                                                        Sylvia Manning

                                                                                June 8, 2020


5.  from Kathryn Kyker



Learning to See    



We puzzled over   
that John Denver lyric, profound
philosophy at 13, silent agreement
—not to ask any other —
just wait to see.

When did we know we knew? Being lost in the woods
blinds you to essential truths:
how love can’t cure madness—
how you can’t love a child happy—
how myopic understanding needs a wide lens to find the way out.

That first lesson comes in hard—love is not always enough but you love anyway.

Years later to see a lesson in the fruit we’ve borne, the lives
we’ve grown into, claimed as earned, our places taken—
ground held by ancestors—saving space, enriching the soil, shutting out others,
shepherding our shot—
an orchard of inequity.

Getting the best place in the sun is a race and we cooked the odds.

If we see only our tree
of rights, we miss a
forest of reality.
                                                                              Kathryn Kyker,  June 2020


6.  from Ellen Mass

Taming our Fame

Traveling along my earth path train
Down hills stunted with force and might
Everywhere in green forest, the same

I search for reason but in vain
Only muffled sounds come to heal my pain
There’s a future sing my birds, but only with humans’ name

Disease and sickness falls heavy like rain
We know not from where it came
Nor who to blame

Covid’s passing will leave the world in hard stain
We’ve devalued our species over and over again,
Death of so many -  how lame

There’s hommage to give - bow to remain
Through struggle, try to sustain.
Our honor and inclusion
 to regain
Ellen Mass
6/10/20

Shining Sow’s Ear

Have the grit to change those dying beliefs
To Better than they appear
The essence of goodness - that you hold dear
When agreed, our moral soul is the goal.
We often give slight to a beautiful sow’s ear
as disdained species, goveling and dirty that we fear
But really, her ear is soft and silky, 
If we Dare get near

Try to enhance what is rancid or stale
Try to elevate what is dull and pale
leave my lovely pig alone twitching its curled little tail.