When there is no dissent, there is no change

Howard Zinn lives on:

“Yes, dissent and protest are divisive, but in a good way, because they represent accurately the real divisions in society. Those divisions exist – the rich, the poor – whether there is dissent or not, but when there is no dissent, there is no change. The dissent has the possibility not of ending the division in society, but of changing the reality of the division. Changing the balance of power on behalf of the poor and the oppressed.”

Beauty is your African birthright

From photographer Steve Bloom’s images of  Nairobi:

‘it depicts a world that is changing fast. Hand-painted hoardings are rapidly being obliterated by advertisements for mobile phone networks and other expanding brands. While that is good news for some of the people we meet here, it adds an extra poignancy to this celebration of the resourcefulness and resilience of their lives ‘

The ship that became an island

From the ever-surprising Boing Boing:

‘This camouflaged Dutch ship successfully disguised itself as a small tropical island and avoided the Japanese Navy after the Battle of the Java Sea.’

So I sit here and imagine  a city disguised as an estuary, a shopping cart as a richly decayed rolling log, a warship become a trail of foam, a woman turning into a fox….

Lammas in Africa

Up north it is raining and Aquila ka Hecate looks out on a curtain of late summer rain. Down here the towering mountains of the Cape are wrapped in a heat haze, the granite and sandstone softened to tones of violet and dun. The pinot noir grapes ripen in the vineyards, the nectarines, plums and clingstone peaches have been harvested, the orchards are bright with reddening apples. All intended for export.

Vivid pink nerines are flowering ahead of March. Berries of coppery orange and scarlet thickening on the invasive cotoneaster, the plectranthus (our Mediterranean sage)  has begun to throw up spires of lilac and mauve. Because we are a winter rainfall fynbos region, this is the hottest and windiest month of the year and  there will be watch towers with farmers looking out for veld fires all through this  season. And yet, the wheel turns — autumn is stretching lazily and soon there will be morning mist and the smell of wood smoke. Leaves on the liquidamber and pin oaks changing colour, the indigenous trees coming into flower or berry. And the much loved  foreign birds — the swifts, starlings, swallows – will begin their long journey north to cross the  cold stormy Atlantic into a European spring.

The wheel turning, the year cooling and soon we too will have blessed rains falling, our mountain peaks grey with mist.

Poem for Imbolc: Philip Gross

Image found here; h/t to Bouphonia. Taken from Gross’ award-winning collection The Water Table:

What the Mountain Saw 

They arrive by night, travel-stunned, and see nothing.
They sleep wrapped in pine-tang and the rush of waters.
The father is first awake. He clacks the shutters back
and a mountain squats square in the window, looking in. 
 
It never leaves them, though it changes hour by hour,
twisting a scarf of cloud, or turning a hard profile
to the morning sun, or dissembling a sugar-pink haze.
However far they walk – and they walk, walk every day – 
 
it’s above them, a bit of beyond. Some snow hangs on
in shreds. This is a famous north face, and a killer.
Each day the father scans it with his old binoculars
for any hint of tracks, and never finds them. 
  
So the holiday proceeds, in a series of snapshots.
Here, in mid-stride, he crests a rise, wife and child
at his boot-heels, tranced by their thud and the heat
and the insect hum. But the snow-face is no nearer. 
 
Here, through veils of spruce, he breaks into a glade
possessed by pallid green-veined hellebores.
Or here, he brings the family, breathless, to its knees
before one icicle-white wild crocus. Here is the lake
  
he finds them, like a souvenir, round and still
enough to hold the mountain, till a fish jumps.
In between, there are the hours he drives them on
for health. Stop too long, the sweat begins to chill. 
 
‘Breathe deep!‘ he cries, and strikes out higher
up a wide white stony stream-bed, tumbled and scoured
by the spring-melt, strewn with tree-trunks, torn
and bleached, and a few tiny tough mauve flowers 
 
he can’t name. He grips the child’s hand as she teeters
on a plank beneath a waterfall. Its ice-breath touches them.
Their hair goes white with spray. Afterwards he will say
‘This was our furthest point,’ and sigh. As they drag home  
 
footsore, the mountain shows itself again behind them,
in its pure dream of itself, untouched … Just as now
it looks in through the breakfast-room window when the child,
as if the strings that controlled her had fouled 
 
and were jerked tight, has one of her turns. An egg
tips from its silver cup, a glass pirouettes to the edge
but has not yet smashed, the other guests have not
yet turned to stare, the father reaches for her but 
 
is frozen. He will never reach her. Any moment now
the yolk will burst on crisply laundered linen. Soon
there will be splinters and tears. Behind it all he sees
the mountain at the window. If one could stand there 
 
looking down, he thinks, this would all be very small.

Poetry as the wheel turns: Hyacinth

From Louise Gluck:

Hyacinth

by Louise Glück

         1

Is that an attitude for a flower, to stand

like a club at the walk; poor slain boy,

is that a way to show

gratitude to the gods? White

with colored hearts, the tall flowers

sway around you, all the other boys,

in the cold spring, as the violets open.

         2

There were no flowers in antiquity

but boys’ bodies, pale, perfectly imagined.

So the gods sank to human shape with longing.

In the field, in the willow grove,

Apollo sent the courtiers away.

         3

And from the blood of the wound

a flower sprang, lilylike, more brilliant

than the purples of Tyre.

Then the god wept: his vital grief

flooded the earth.

         4

Beauty dies: that is the source

of creation. Outside the ring of trees

the courtiers could hear

the dove’s call transmit

its uniform, its inborn sorrow—

They stood listening, among the rustling willows.

Was this the god’s lament?

They listened carefully. And for a short time

all sound was sad.

         5

There is no other immortality:

in the cold spring, the purple violets open.

And yet, the heart is black,

there is its violence frankly exposed.

Or is it not the heart at the center

but some other word?

And now someone is bending over them,

meaning to gather them—

         6

They could not wait

in exile forever.

Through the glittering grove

the courtiers ran

calling the name

of their companion

over the birds’ noise,

over the willows’ aimless sadness.

Well into the night they wept,

their clear tears

altering no earthly color.

Poetry for wild Brigid, remembering

 

Another favourite poet who writes on rivers, wild flowers, weeds. And everyting else that matters. Alice Oswald:

Story of a Man

last time a man was sealed in skin
like an inspoken word sealed in
it was mid-spring, most people arm in arm, most trees whispering
and he could just make out the fluttering light

it was warm, it was days you walk out without a coat
and little rain showers dash across the carpark
and he stood there, like a man on film, going on with his heartwork
at last at last he could think clearly

this is myself, he said,
rubbing round all four sides of my breeze-block patience
this is one or two flying strands of my eyes
this is my heart’s halo’s prismatic subdivisions

there were people bringing chairs to the fire-escapes, peering down.
it was mid-spring
and all day, all he could breathe
was the crow’sfoot tracks of his sighs’ small hollows in the air.

then in the half light, it half thawed,
he half, with a mist-hand, waved
alive in his skin-ruins.
at last at last he could think clearly

Poetry at the full moon in Leo

I see this full moon referred to as a ‘wolf’ moon and I suppose it could be called a jackal or hyena moon out here on the veld, stark white and  dazzling. Enormous as anivory disc hanging overhead, unshadowed and  gleaming.

Time for the Fifth Annual Brigid Poetry Festival, for those celebrating Imbolc in the northern hemisphere as well as those of us  out here in the heatlands where the wheel finally cools and  turns to autumn and mellow fruitfulness. And these days I’m reading the ‘new nature poets’ on water, the sluice gates opening, the fear of drought abated, the physicality and symbolic force of  water: Don Paterson’s Rain, Philip Gross on the River Severn in The Water Table and the Scottish naturalist and  poet Kathleen Jamie:

The Dipper

by Kathleen Jamie

It was winter, near freezing,   

I’d walked through a forest of firs   

when I saw issue out of the waterfall   

a solitary bird.   

It lit on a damp rock,   

and, as water swept stupidly on,   

wrung from its own throat   

supple, undammable song.   

It isn’t mine to give.   

I can’t coax this bird to my hand   

that knows the depth of the river   

yet sings of it on land.

What do women want?

Sheryl WuDunn talking to Guernica on the global emancipation of women and the  key role of education:

Bangladesh educated everybody. They realized education was important, and they cared about health care. Everyone had to have access to health care. Their maternal mortality rate is much lower than similar cultures. Pakistan’s statistics are terrible; Bangladesh is, of course, smaller but a very similar culture. So for everyone that says you can’t change culture, well look, this is a perfect example. [In the] nineteen seventies [Pakistan and Bangladesh] were the same culture. I mean there was a slight difference because Bangladesh has an intellectual tradition and a few other differences. But they were basically the same country. [Bangladesh] decided to educate girls and give access to health care, and it’s night and day. The way they have developed, it’s night and day. There are more girls in high school in Bangladesh than boys. They have one of the most prominent women’s universities that other women in Southeast Asia go to. I mean, it’s just funny; their health statistics on women are much better than in Pakistan, and you’ve got two of the largest micro-lending institutions, Grameen Bank and BRAC, the Nobel Prize winner coming from Bangladesh.

The impeded stream that sings

Bracing myself for loss, living through aftershock. But staying present to the moment, the  spaciousness within. From Wendell Berry:

“There are, it seems, two muses: the Muse of Inspiration, who gives us inarticulate visions and desires, and the Muse of Realization, who returns again and again to say “It is yet more difficult than you thought.” This is the muse of form. It may be then that form serves us best when it works as an obstruction, to baffle us and deflect our intended course. It may be that when we no longer know what to do, we have come to our real work and when we no longer know which way to go, we have begun our real journey. The mind that is not baffled is not employed. The impeded stream is the one that sings.”