writings from a workshop #2

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(the writing prompt was an acorn)

She is walking today — short stumbling steps — her chipped cane prodding the gravel choked weeds along the length of driveway.

We are walking today because she can, because it’s a mild early-fall morning, because the pains of her age are not so bad, because I am here to help her if she stumbles.

We walk along the property line, a slow unsteady march through light and shadow. The unkempt ground is littered with the leavings of the season — withered crabgrass and dandelion stalks, weathered leaves, and an early harvest of acorns.

I hold her free arm while she beats the ground with her cane, grunting angry words that I can’t understand.

A sharp white stone catches her attention, and she prods it with her toe, strikes it with her cane, sends it out of her limited sight.

She stops before a scattering of acorns, a barrier to her shuffling gait. Grunting, again, she swings the tip of her cane, stabbing at the offending shells, missing more than she hits, the cane tip knocking aside small stones and sending too few acorns rolling into the underbrush.

She is shaking now, from fear or frustration or just plain tiredness. I can’t tell.

I lead her back inside to her chair by the kitchen table, where a doughnut and coffee will take her mind off the recalcitrant acorns.

She will forget her battle with the acorns in the driveway.

But I can’t.

(the prompt was a memory of a piece a jewelry)

How sweet it is to be sixteen. At least it’s supposed to be. I know that I am not nearly as sweet as my parents want the world to think I am.

So they give ma a heart. A 24 carat solid gold heart, heavy with considerations.

A prominent diamond chip marks the day of my birth on the calendar etched into the center of the heart’s face, and lines like rays of the sun streak from the edges of the month of March to the edges of the shiny heart.

I am sweet sixteen, and my wrist is shackled with a heavy heart on a heavy gold charm bracelet. Look, Look, the clanking metal announces: Look how much my parents love me.

writngs from a workshop

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Having strayed so far from my poetic roots, I am taking a brief writing workshop based on the Amherst Writers and Artists Method. Blogging has given me plenty of practice with the first person essay; but it’s poetry where my heart is. I need some help getting my brain to follow.

The writing “prompt” for the exercise was the word “breathe.”

She does not swim –
afraid to breathe against
the weight of water, afraid
of those breathless wet depths.

But she goes to a sweat lodge
where steamy smoke rises —
thick breath steadily blinding
a clear winter sky.

She lets herself be led into the wet
dark already slick with steam
and sweat, cool water hissing,
smoking stones.

Thoughtless with dread
she stumbles out into the cold,
blinded by water and smoke
and a clutch of fear that sends
breath into memory:

— a child’s cry for breath stunted by fever
lungs rattling beneath a tent of steam
thick as smoke, heavy as a depth of sea.

Well, its a start.

knitting as a subversive activity

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Over in the UK, there’s a “network dedicated to knitting & crochet work made for visual arts projects” and they have a website called “Subversive Yarn,” which I have joined.

As my first yarn art project, I am submitting an entry into a “Yarn Art” project, Yarn Forward 2009 , which is on display at Manchester Craft and Design Centre.

The instructions are as follows:

Knit or crochet your knitted strip to measure 7cm wide x 40 cm long. Any colour, yarn and technique is accepted, the brighter and wackier, the better.

stripI’ve done one strip so far, make of random crochet stitches using a multicolored cotton yarn. My plan is to play around and design and do several more and then send them off to the exhibition.

Well, all right, not very subversive or terribly artistically creative, but, after all, it’s my first venture.

After this, at my daughter’s request, I’m going to knit up a “hug me” sweater for our front yard maple tree. (I’m stealing the idea from here.)

Except for working on a sweater for my daughter (which I started a year ago), I think I’ll leave off from the mundane crafty stuff and focus on how to be more subversive. Especially, since I just finished this very mundane granny square vest. squares I always wanted to try a granny square something, and I already had the yarn.

Finally, I finally got my “Crafty Side of Kalilily” page launched. So take a look of some of my other mundane (and, eventually, not so mundane) creations.

I’ll be updating it regularly. The link is on my home page.

show the right the door

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There is no common table at which to sit with the Right. There is no compromise with the Right. To them, a show of compromise by their opponents isn’t seen as an invitation to further discussion and common progress. It isn’t seen as civility.

To them, it’s simply a sign of weakness, the baring of one’s naked throat to their waiting teeth.

The above from the end of a post here.

Their votes didn’t put this administration into office, and they will do all they can to sabotage the agenda that did put this administration into office.

President Obama and the progressive Democrats need to show the Right/eous the door — politely but firmly.

oh boy, oh boy!!

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Maureen Dowd’s column in Saturday’s NY Times calls a spade a spade (no, this is not a racial slur).

She writes:

I’ve been loath to admit that the shrieking lunacy of the summer — the frantic efforts to paint our first black president as the Other, a foreigner, socialist, fascist, Marxist, racist, Commie, Nazi; a cad who would snuff old people; a snake who would indoctrinate kids — had much to do with race.

[snip]

Now he’s at the center of a period of racial turbulence sparked by his ascension. Even if he and the coterie of white male advisers around him don’t choose to openly acknowledge it, this president is the ultimate civil rights figure — a black man whose legitimacy is constantly challenged by a loco fringe.

For two centuries, the South has feared a takeover by blacks or the feds. In Obama, they have both.

Dowd’s piece gives a little history of the South’s failed efforts to fight on the wrong side of national moral issues since the Civil War.

Obama, as an educated, eloquent, and erudite mixed race black man is the redneck’s nightmare come true.

For the rest of us, he’s our last great hope for rescuing our country from the lying maws of the stupid, selfish, and snide.

Is this how the moral Germans felt?

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While Hitler was spewing his hateful lies and masterminding the most horrific manipulations of all times, the good and powerless German people who understood and feared what he was trying to do must have felt the way that some of us do these days. Nothing we say or write or do seems to deter the crooks and liars who are so fiercely opposing the kind of Universal Health Care system that would save lives and ultimately save money as well. The right-wing conservatives are railroading to its certain death the ability of this country to keep its citizens healthy.

How viciously ironic that the Right/eous portray President Obama as a Hitler figure, when it is they, his opponents, who are copying Hitler’s tactics of spreading distortions and disinformation, manipulating and inventing language that totally misrepresents the truth and stirs up the most primal fears of those who adhere to the right-wing’s philosophy and values

This from an article in The Nation: Reverse Reverse Nazism and the War on Universal Healthcare

The spinmeisters of the right have done quite a job with what used to be straightforward English etymology. Thanks to Rush Limbaugh and Fox News, “integration” was inverted to mean “takeover” and “colorblindness” is code for abandoning the advances of the civil rights movement, which itself is synonymous with an “industry” of exclusion. It’s no surprise, then, that whenever a piece of progressive legislation comes to the table, the same manipulations come into play from right-wing pundits who shamelessly profess their desire to see the Obama presidency fail. Thus it is that America’s Affordable Health Choices Act of 2009 is being turned upside down as the neat equivalent of Germany’s Bankrupting Forced Death Act of 1939.

Like the Nazis, the Right/eous are playing to the fears of people are afraid that change will somehow mean that they will get less because someone else will get more. They are the same people who were afraid of integration and feminism, and they follow the leaders who validate their fears and keep them riled up and misinformed.

From the article cited above (read the entire piece here):

But if you listen as though deciphering pig Latin and realize that this demographic is speaking from a well-managed, near-hypnotic looking-glass world where every word from the mouth of a Democrat (or a liberal, or a Latina, or a Canadian) is a lie, a betrayal… then it all makes sense. Their world truly has been turned inside out, by the election, by the economy, by the precarious conditions that threaten us all. But for those whose sense of identity has been premised on a raced, masculinist, conservative Christian hierarchy of American power, the world must seem even more emotionally terrifying than any actual facts would indicate.

I am afraid. They are afraid. If the Health Care legislation doesn’t pass, I think ALL of our fears will be realized. They will get less of what they already have. I will be OK because I have health benefits from a government job, but my adult son and the millions (yes, I said MILLIONS) like him will still go without.

This is the time for strong moral leadership to step up and take some risks and vehemently press for a Universal Health Care System that, when enacted, will alleviate all of our fears.

I am inclined to ask here, “What Would Jesus Do?” Certainly not support the profiteers of the for-profit health care industry.

C’mon President Obama. Rise to the position of leadership that we put you on and press for the changes we so desperately need.

digitized for posterity: me

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I was tooling around the website of the campus of which I am an alumna because I will be going with a college friend to his 50th reunion next month. As I was looking through the list of events for the reunion weekend, I noticed that the college library was having an event for former staff of the college’s newspaper to celebrate the fact that the old paper copies of the publication have been digitized.

Wow, I think. I must be in those digits somewhere, having been the Feature Editor and having authored several different columns over my coed years.

So I go into the data base and poke around the issues from time period that I was on the paper’s staff.

It’s a whole lot embarrassing to read what I wrote as a college junior that pretty much always appeared on page 3. I pretentiously called my column “The Prism.”

Oh my.

OMG.

Groan.

Another groan.

Well, at least this isn’t so bad.

We didn’t have a journalism program back then, and I cringe at what today’s journalism students would think if they had some reason to read what I wrote when I was young and full of myself and still trying out my voice.

The writers’ workshop I joined starts in a couple of weeks.

Funny, but back then I probably didn’t think I needed to take one.

a time to disbelieve

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This quote from Talking Points Memo.

Rightwing fearmongers and demagogues
thrive only to the extent the mainstream media
believes they’re thriving.

It’s all a matter of persistent marketing, isn’t it? Say something loud enough and often enough and pretty soon it will be believed.

The leaders of the Right/eous (both political and religious) know and use this strategy well. And, in many cases these days, various Right/eous factions have banded together to strategically defeat a health care plan for America that will both save lives and money.

While there is evidence from other countries regarding how well a single payer national health plan can and does work there is no evidence showing that it won’t work here in America. There is only the persistent and consistent marketing message from Right/eous telling us to believe that it won’t work and that any health care reform has to come about very slowly.

What is this, “faith-based politics”?

The TPM piece cited above ends with this:

Sometimes reform has to occur in a big way, everything or nothing, if it’s to happen at all. That’s the way it is with health care reform at this stage. Every moving piece is related to every other one. That’s also why a public option is necessary.

So forget the authoritative sources. Mobilize and organize. We can get comprehensive, meaningful health care reform if we push hard enough. And we must.