San Francisco moon, October 18, 2024
I often get tangled up in the lure of words. Mainly by using too many, sometimes by choosing wrongly or too fast to realize what the important question is that I should have asked.
I've learned that writing poetry is tougher than writing a novel or even this blog. Boiling it down to few words is harder than waxing verbose. It's like playing a simple piano composition at a languorous tempo. I love it when I hear a gorgeous piece and the score opens up to say "andante cantabile" at the top.
I used to yearn to jump quickly to grade five or grade nine compositions in order to consider myself "accomplished" in my piano studies. It took me a long time to realize that technical demands, mechanical control, and musicality, all challenge a new pianist to a far greater extent in a slow piece with fewer notes and simpler chords than in a frenzied and virtuosic Lisztian piece. I'll credit piano teacher and classical pianist Robert Estrin with teaching me that. It was the most valuable lesson of all derived from nine months studying with him.
Small things count, at least as much as simple things. Like last night when we lucky ones in San Francisco happened outside sometime after ten pm on a crystal clear night with an almost-full October pumpkin moon shining down! That's rare in these fog-filled parts. I'm jealous of those readers who don't suffer the standard deprivation of clear skies, and it's the reason my partner and I hie ourselves off to camp in Death Valley about as often as we possibly can. After our dinner campfire dies down we loll about on our chaise lounges, dissolving into the absolute wonder of seeing more stars in the sky than not.
Lately I'm thinking a lot about what is not needed. Subtraction, not addition, or maybe nothing at all. Could be related to my senior time of life as to when we start, or at least start to think about, paring down. Has to do with simplifying, using fewer words, thinking more deeply and hopefully calmly, and principally about what's important. Bill Clinton recently had something to say about that latter matter, and pithily so just like the master orator he is (at least equal to Obama and slightly above IMHO, because Clinton simplifies things).
Today in the Fall-Winter Journal of the Academy of American Poets I came across a poem by Glenis Redmond called "Negro Women Employ Complaints".* She's First Poet Laureate of her town, Greenville, South Carolina and she loves teaching poetry to young folks. To the left side of her poem is a copy of a news article from The Greenville Times dated October 2, 1918 entitled "Negro Women to be Put To Work". It gobsmacked me, but being raised until almost high school in Texas by Caucasian Virginia-born-and-bred parents, should not have done so.
The news article resulted in the title to the initial rough version of the poem below, which in it's own way seems somehow affiliated with my essay theme.
No matter if it's not, today I'm not giving any reason at all for posting it.
***
Without Giving Any Reason at All*
She slept in the nude last night outside
under the golden sunflower in full bloom
like when she leapt the fence
and felt not one thing
though a few barbs could have pierced her heart
and made her bleed.
She walked on water one day,
an easy choice because
there was no other to be made,
like writing poetry.
She painted rainbows on her canvass
caring not if skies are blue,
they came out green
for this Irish lass alone at last
and first, in dream.
She schemed her way inside the playground
snuck over the walls to play with children
ride the merry-go-round
despite the sign that required
a mother to be there.
No mother she by choice
but mothered some, not all,
and sometimes weeping
but often not,
got on with life by choice
without giving any reason at all.
May I reach the purest heaven**
she asked, the closest to prayer she ever came
then chose justice and not silly hope
that's just a wisp of smoke
clinging to the coals of fire.
What rules do you play by when it’s over?***
Not dread, she replied
as she skydived and yet survived
to sleep outside another flowered night
and nude
without giving any reason at all.
_______
*Inspired by The Greenville News, October 2, 1918, reporting on
“Negro women” who refused to cook and clean for white women,
thus requiring a law to make them do so. Members of the governing Council
complained that some Negro women refused to work "without giving
any reason at all." All men at that time were required to put in five days
of labor each week, white women could stay home. Also inspired by the
Glenis Redmond poem "Negro Women Employ Complaints."
**A line from "The Choir Invisible" by George Eliott.
***Former President Bill Clinton at an October 18, 2024 Democratic rally
boiling down the foundational importance of voting on November 5 for
Kamala Harris for President.
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