Courage by Anne Sexton

It is in the small things we see it.
The child’s first step,
as awesome as an earthquake.
The first time you rode a bike,
wallowing up the sidewalk.
The first spanking when your heart
went on a journey all alone.
When they called you crybaby
or poor or fatty or crazy
and made you into an alien,
you drank their acid
and concealed it.

Later,
if you faced the death of bombs and bullets
you did not do it with a banner,
you did it with only a hat to
cover your heart.
You did not fondle the weakness inside you
though it was there.
Your courage was a small coal
that you kept swallowing.
If your buddy saved you
and died himself in so doing,
then his courage was not courage,
it was love; love as simple as shaving soap.

Later,
if you have endured a great despair,
then you did it alone,
getting a transfusion from the fire,
picking the scabs off our heart,
then wringing it out like a sock.
Next, my kinsman, you powdered your sorrow,
you gave it a back rub
and then you covered it with a blanket
and after it had slept a while
it woke to the wings of the roses
and was transformed.

Later,
when you face old age and its natural conclusion
your courage will still be shown in the little ways,
each spring will be a sword you’ll sharpen,
those you love will live in a fever of love,
and you’ll bargain with the calendar
and at the last moment
when death opens the back door
you’ll put on your carpet slippers
and stride out.

Momma's mad!

From gather.politics.com - I seldom do this, post a link to another blog - but this blog post made me smile for the first time in 3 days. Like so many American women, I have been aggravated and insulted for years by the vicious, abusive misogynist attitude of men on the right to all women. Chief among them is Rush Limbaugh, the GOP's mouthpiece. But that "hater" has maybe gone too far this time. We can only hope. His vile attacks on a young American woman, a University student, may be his Waterloo. MKT

Rush Limbaugh Advertisers Under Assault from Ticked-Off Tweeters

Rush Limbaugh is used to getting away with stuff. He can say pretty much whatever he wants and his legion of supporters will stand by him. If a GOP lawmaker dares stand against him, within 48 hours, that lawmaker will be on his knees begging him, on the phone, for his forgiveness.

But this time... he may have made that one step beyond.

This time... he made Momma mad. And if Momma ain't happy, ain't nobody happy.

See, this time? Rush went and called this nice little college girl a "slut" because she wants a friend of hers to have employer paid health coverage for birth control she needs to prevent cancer. The porcine one has been rolling about in his own linguistic filth this time. For three days in a row, he has called this woman, this nice little law student, a slut and a prostitute who wants too much sex and that's why she wants the taxpayers to pay for her birth control so she can have all the sex she wants with no consequences.

Except, as Rush would have learned if he had attended his 8th grade health classes, birth control pills don't work that way. Once per day does the trick. It's not like the Viagra Rush got caught with, sneaking back from the Dominican Republic with a suitcase full of little blue pills with someone else's name on the label.

The quadrinuptial, quivering mound of goo has never been mistaken for Mr. Goodbar by the ladies. It didn't matter since most of his listeners are men.

But this time? Momma heard about what he said about the nice little law student.

Momma called her friends, and they all got on the Twitter and tweeted to Rush's advertisers and said if they kept advertising on this pig's radio show, then they won't see dime #1 from Momma ever again. And so far, two mattress companies and one auto parts store have said, "Yes, Momma. We won't advertise on that bad man's show ever again."

And Momma saw and Momma said it was good, and Momma got on her Facebook with all her other Momma pals, and now they're hitting all the advertisers that advertise on Rush's show. Now Momma is going to do what all the Republicans who kowtowed to Rush and all the liberals who wished Rush would have lost more than just his hearing due to his drug abuse, and all the people who enjoy reasoned political discourse could not do.

Momma's going to shut Rush down!

See, the advertisers know what's coming. After El Rushbo reels out enough sturdy rope to hang himself with, this nice little law student is going to get a pack of sharp lawyers who will go have a meeting with the lawyers at Clear Channel, which owns Premiere Radio which syndicates El Rushbo's show on the radio stations that Clear Channel owns upon which Rush Limbaugh owns the AM airwaves from noon to 3 pm Eastern. And these lawyers are going to demand that Rush be summoned before them so the young lady's lawyers can extract as much money as they can from between his flabby, drug-addled hams. And once they've emptied out Rush's hams, they're going to want to have a look at the books of the Clear Channel radio stations and see how much money they have. Then they're going to have a look at the books of Premiere Radio. And then they're going to have a look at the books of Clear Channel Corporation and its radio and TV stations, and its shopping malls and its outdoor advertising and God knows whatever else Clear Channel owns and the lawyers will giggle and high-five each other as the Clear Channel lawyers moisten their dark blue pants and rend their Italian-made suits and Rush is banished from their presence.

Rush's 4th wife will not be happy about this, for sure. Not at all. She won't like having to go back to live in the trailer park that Rush was born in when the lawyers take every scrap of property he owns. No doubt she'll want a quick settlement while Rush still has a couple bucks to pay in alimony.

Then the former head of the Republican party will find himself among the people he mocks every day, his dittoheads who don't have two nickels to rub together.

Please, Rush, when the grand denoument comes, don't do anything stupid. Well, at least not anything rash. You can still get a gig recording voice tracks at a radio station somewhere. It pays by the page, and it isn't much. But it's something.

http://politics.gather.com/

Afternoons in February by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

The day is ending,
The night is descending;
The marsh is frozen,
The river dead.

Through clouds like ashes
The red sun flashes
On village windows
That glimmer red.

The snow recommences;
The buried fences
Mark no longer
The road o'er the plain;

While through the meadows,
Like fearful shadows,
Slowly passes
A funeral train.

The bell is pealing,
And every feeling
Within me responds
To the dismal knell;

Shadows are trailing,
My heart is bewailing
And tolling within
Like a funeral bell.

A collection of my grandpuppy Oliver's best sleeping positions!

Mr. Oliver Takes a Nap by Grandma with love!
                          Maureen Kavaney Tillman | Make Your Own Book

A Winter Night by Sara Teasdale

My window-pane is starred with frost, The world is bitter cold to-night, The moon is cruel, and the wind Is like a two-edged sword to smite. God pity all the homeless ones, The beggars pacing to and fro, God pity all the poor to-night Who walk the lamp-lit streets of snow. My room is like a bit of June, Warm and close-curtained fold on fold, But somewhere, like a homeless child, My heart is crying in the cold.

Sara Teasdale 1884 - 1933

Sara Teasdale, the poet, has recently become a favorite of mine; and having just read, Sara Teasdale, Woman and Poet by William Drake, I understand why that is. I relate to a number of personal traits in her life - a kinship I suppose. Sara Teasdale began writing poetry on the cusp of  a new century that was to introduce a whole new genre of modern poetry in free verse. As a young writer, Sara "cut her teeth" on the popular stories, genteel characters and higher ideals of the Arthurian romances as it was a major thematic trend in late Victorian literature. Her interest centered on the tragic love stories such as Tristan and Isolde that were portrayed by many of the greatest writers of their time. As it was, poetry was in a transition from the formal and artificial style of the Victorians to the concept of free and natural or "anti-literary" in verbiage, style and content of the new genre of free verse. But Sara had found her own place as a female writer, able to retain the conventions and traditions of the previous period while honing her skill with the free and natural verse and uncluttered verbiage of modern poetry. Tradition, convention and restraint were accepted as necessary to human life as Sara saw it. She believed they enabled one to understand the difference between good and evil, right and wrong, and truth and lies. Still Sara struggled for the mastery yet subtlety to accept  the formal restraint and convention in poetry while managing for the artifice to appear sincere and artlessly timeless.

Sara Trevor Teasdale was born August 8, 1884 in St. Louis Missouri. She was born to mature parents who had 3 older children ages 14 to 20. Sara grew up in a sheltered atmosphere, considered fragile and ill often, she became used to having a nurse near her at all times as she grew. She never performed any normal household chores. Sara was home schooled until age 9 and had no contact with peers until that time when she was enrolled in a school one block from her house. In her isolation, she learned to amuse herself with writing stories and poetry, having her first poem published at age 13. She graduated from Hosmer Hall in 1903.

Sara was courted by 2 men in 1913. One was the poet Vachel Lindsey who was deeply in love with Sara. She maintained a life-long platonic relationship with him but never accepted his proposals. There was also a third gentleman at that time that Sara herself was deeply in love with but who did not feel the same way about her. He also became a life-long attachment of Sara's. But in 1914, Sara did choose to marry Ernst Filsinger, a businessman who with Sara made their home in New York City.

Sara had become enchanted with the city of New York by the time of her marriage and made it her home for the rest of her life. Her enchantment with the covenant of marriage was not so long lasting though. I think she married out of a sense of duty and purpose but soon probably understood that she really did not want to be anyone's wife. She divorced Ernst in 1929 against her husband's wishes. Throughout their 15 year marriage, Ernst spent months at a time traveling to Europe and South America for business. On rare occasions Sara accompanied him, but mostly she remained at home in New York.  Frequently, Sara would become ill at those times, as she regularly did throughout her lifetime, and needed to take refuge in one of several of her favorite respites or retreat locations around the United States and Europe. It is Sara's need for withdrawal and isolation with her art that I relate to - that and her Victorian insatiable penchant for constantly seeking out beauty in the world around her, in nature and in word or deed and to endeavor to exemplify it in her work. Her favorite themes in her work were love, beauty and death. As a true product of the Victorian period, Sara was never able to experience the passion she expressed through her poetry.

Her illnesses seems to have been rather puzzling and unclear as to diagnosis but showed a pattern throughout her life from childhood on. It seems to have been a combination of exhaustion, nervous anxiety, depression and some degree of total collapse to the point of invalidism. She required a quiet, remote, beautiful place to renew her vigor and spirit, sometimes for months at a time. Some of the retreats included the presence of a nurse to travel with her. Eventually Sara would choose to rejoin her public life and return. It appears that after spending such long and stressfully lonely months apart from her husband, desperately awaiting his return, when he finally did reappear, it wasn't very long before Sara needed to leave again for a rest cure. Or occasionally, if she felt strong enough, she planned her own business trips to Europe when Ernst returned home. Sara spent her 15 years of marriage torn between her sense of duty as a woman and wife, and her one true passion and desire of her life, her poetry. Her poetry demanded all of her time. She realized she had no reserves left for a husband or children.

Gifts

                                            I gave my first love laughter,

                                           I gave my second tears,

                                           I gave my third love silence

                                           Thru all the years.

                                           My first love gave me singing,

                                           My second eyes to see,

                                           But oh, it was my third love

                                           Who gave my soul to me.

                                                               Wisdom

                                       When I have ceased to break my wings

                                       Against the faultiness of things,

                                       And learned that compromises wait

                                       Behind each hardly opened gate,

                                       When I can look Life in the eyes,

                                       Grown calm and very coldly wise,

                                       Life will have given me the truth,

                                       And taken in exchange - my youth. 

In her later years, Sara, weakened by recurrent illnesses and depression was more and more obsessed with death in her work and thoughts. Distressed both in mind and spirit she was no longer able to see the beauty in simple things. A number of her friends and acquaintances had committed suicide in recent years, including her beloved friend and fellow poet, Vachel Lindsey just weeks earlier. On the morning of January 29, 1933 in her New York apartment, Sara prepared a warm bath for herself, took an overdose of sleeping pills and lay down in the warm water, fell asleep, and never again opened her eyes. She was gone at the age of 48. Her last collection of poems which she had produced, Strange Victory, was published posthumously that same year. I am fortunate to own a first edition of that slim 1933 volume that is very precious to me. After postponing the completion of this profile for several months, it is uncanny that I chose today, January 29, to finish it - on the anniversary of her death. Sara Teasdale's brilliant lyric poetry has attained a measure of true immortality in the hearts of poetry lovers everywhere.

                                                           I Am Not Yours

                                          I am not yours, not lost in you,

                                         Not lost, although I long to be

                                         Lost as a candle lit at noon,

                                         Lost as a snowflake in the sea.

                                         You love me, and I find you still

                                         A spirit beautiful and bright

                                         Yet I am I, who long to be

                                         Lost as a light is lost in light.

                                         Oh plunge me deep in love - put out

                                        My senses, leave me deaf and blind,

                                        Swept by the tempest of your love,

                                        A taper in a rushing wind.

Transition by Dorothy Parker

Too long and quickly have I lived to vow
The woe that stretches me shall never wane,
Too often seen the end of endless pain
To swear that peace no more shall cool my brow.
I know, I know- again the shriveled bough
Will burgeon sweetly in the gentle rain,
And these hard lands be quivering with grain-
I tell you only: it is Winter now.

What if I know, before the Summer goes
Where dwelt this bitter frenzy shall be rest?
What is it now, that June shall surely bring
New promise, with the swallow and the rose?
My heart is water, that I first must breast
The terrible, slow loveliness of Spring.