And Words Are All I Have

Brubeck, Timberlake, Overdressed sheep.

A poem by Tricia McCallum. March 31, 2020. A woman crouching in the light from a window.

because everyone needs to heal, especially mamas...

praise poets and their pens

how they make me laugh in one stanza,

then break my heart the next

praise how poets hold onto our first loves,

and scent of mama, now gone

praise how we nurture our child self,

gently wrap her around stanzas,

baby girl is resilient

praise our spunk and our sadness,

let our writing heal

at home, at work, in cafés, even in the ICU

praise how we hold our memories up to light,

gentle and cupped in palm of hands

praise our rough and sexy poems,

sometimes that’s all we need

fire in the sheets

praise bebop and jazz

how my foot taps when i

speak your poems out loud

praise power of music and mama

who played Nancy Wilson all night long,

crying behind a closed door.

praise how i wrote a new poem this week,

while my sick child laid on my lap,

because everyone needs to heal, especially mamas.

JP Howard

***

Funniest tweet this week from @leftarmisme

My 11 year old just yelled at their dad saying: YOU HAVE NO RESPECT FOR MY LACK OF MOTIVATION.

***

Why I love children; one reason.

I love their whimsy, how they abandon themselves to fun with no fear of judgment at all and are able to take delight in even the seemingly insignificant.

In Tongue a few years ago, way up in the northernmost reaches of Scotland, I popped in to a local shop. While browsing I spotted a wee lassie with her father, dressed up in her kilt and her tartan tam.

She was curious about me - and shyly watched me as I wandered the aisles.

Finally she came and stood alongside me. I pointed to a small furry sheep on the shelf in front of me, dressed impeccably in in a full tuxedo.

I turned to her and asked: "Now what would a sheep be doing dressed in a tux?"

She thought about it for a moment and then announced with conviction:

"Maybe he's goin' tae a weddin'."

After a Brubeck Concert

something more than eight million couples

coupled to have me here at last, at last.

Had not each fondling, fighting, or fumbling pair

conjoined at the exquisitely right time,

thirty-four million times, I would be an unborn,

one of the quiet ones who are less than air.

But I will be also, when six hundred years have passed,

one of seventeen million who made love

aiming without aiming to at one

barely imaginable, who may then be doing

something no one I know has ever done

or thought of doing, on some distant world

we did not know about when we were here.

Or maybe sitting in a room like this,

eating a cheese sandwich and drinking beer,

a small lamp not quite taking the room from the dark,

with someone sitting nearby, humming something

while two dogs, one far away, answer bark for bark.

-- by Miller Williams

Zenyk Palahniuk, a Ukrainian artist. spent around 200 hours on this incredibly beautiful piece with over 13,000 nails and 24km of thread.

Take a look here to witness the entire painstaking process.

The image is of a bearded Justin Timberlake. Reward yourself by watching until the reveal.

A true piece of writing is a dangerous thing. It can change your life.

Tobias Wolff

I loved my waitressing days, especially the short order lingo that flew around kitchen restaurants back then.

Put out the lights and cry: Liver and onions.

On wheels: Takeout order.

Sidearms: Salt and pepper.

Gurch: Grilled cheese.

Lumber: A toothpick.

Adam & Eve on a raft and wreck ‘em: Two scrambled eggs on toast

Black and white: Chocolate soda with vanilla ice cream

Bridge party: Four of anything.

All sorrows can be borne if we put them in a story or tell a story about them.

-- Isak Dinesen (Out of Africa)

Reconnaissance

We are left adrift it seems. Dr Laura is too busy plugging window blinds to be taken seriously. And these days Dr. Phil appears a mere dead eyed huckster for his wife’s line of miraculous subterranean botanicals. Archbishops are led away in handcuffs while princes in island mansions prey upon the under-aged. In search of wisdom we seek …

Michael O'Donnell didn't return home from the Vietnam War, but his poetry did. Alum Daniel Weiss was so taken by O'Donnell's work that he spent the last decade-plus learning about its author.

This is from an essay by Bret McCabe, himself a vet, published Spring of 2020.

Helicopter pilot Michael O'Donnell could hover near the ground for only a short time before returning to the sky. On the afternoon of March 24, 1970, O'Donnell had guided his Huey below the dense foliage of Cambodia's mountainous northeast region to retrieve an eight-man reconnaissance patrol that had been inserted to gain information on the size and movements of enemy forces but encountered gunfire early on. Three days into a planned five-day patrol, they needed to be evacuated.

O'Donnell, a 24-year-old from suburban Milwaukee, was part of the helicopter rescue mission involving two unarmed transports and four gunships that were dispatched from an airbase in Vietnam's central highlands. After lingering at 1,500 feet, waiting for the recon team to reach the extraction point, one transport had to return to base to refuel. The transport was on its way back when the recon team radioed that it couldn't hold out much longer. O'Donnell dropped his helicopter into a windy canyon and through a small opening in the canopy, lowered his craft to just above the ground. The recon patrol emerged from the jungle with enemy fire trailing after them. It took about four agonizingly long minutes for all eight men to board, a little longer than the average pop song.

After ascending about 200 feet, O'Donnell radioed to air command, "I've got all eight, I'm coming out," right before his helicopter burst into flames, likely struck by a ground-based rocket. The pilot, his three-man crew, and the recon patrol were officially declared missing in action in 1970. O'Donnell wouldn't be declared dead until February 7, 1978. His remains were discovered in 1995 but not officially identified until February 15, 2001. And on August 16, 2001, he was interred at Arlington National Cemetery, which was created as a final resting place for soldiers on land seized from a plantation owner after the Civil War. O'Donnell left behind his wife, his parents, a sister, his best friend and music partner, and a collection of 19 poems, some of which he included in his letters to friends, discovered in his footlocker after his death.

One of those 19 retrieved pieces, printed below, O'Donnell had mailed to his friend Marcus Sullivan in 1970. Sullivan served as a combat engineer in Vietnam from 1967 to 1968, and they wrote each other throughout their training and tours. O'Donnell's daily missions transporting the dead and wounded back from the front lines were taking their toll.

If you are able,
save them a place
inside of you
and save one backward glance
when you are leaving
for the places they can
no longer go.

Be not ashamed to say
you loved them,
though you may
or may not have always.
Take what they have left
and what they have taught you
with their dying
and keep it with your own. And in that time

when men decide and feel safe to call the war insane,
take one moment to embrace those gentle heroes
you left behind.